ABSTRACT
This chapter examines selected Black women’s love relationships that tap deep feelings, whether or not they find sexual expression. Equally important is how Black women hold fast to this source of individual empowerment and use it in crafting fully human love relationships. Refusing to reduce Black men’s abuse to individualistic, psychological flaws, Black feminist analyses are characterized by careful attention to how intersecting oppressions of race, gender, class, and sexuality provide the backdrop for Black heterosexual love relationships. Tensions characterizing Black women’s necessary self-reliance joined with our bona fide need for protection, as well as those characterizing Black men’s desire to protect Black women juxtaposed to their admiration and resentment of Black women’s assertiveness and independence, result in a complicated love and trouble tradition. A component of developing African-American women’s erotic autonomy requires finding ways to stress that African-American women learn to see expressing love for one another as fundamental to resisting oppression.
