Pecola’s People: Microhistories,the Politics of Respectability,and Interrogations of the Power of the Outside Gaze

Abstract

Through an examination of the microhistories of three select communities (African American women, twentieth-century gay and lesbian activists in the U.S., and the presumed audience that heard 1 Timothy), the article interrogates the hyper-normative standards or “outside gaze” that marginalized communities often internalize in their quests for respectability or acceptance from more dominant social powers. The article argues that such standards (whether in the form of middle-class decorum, cisgendered heteronormativity, or ancient Rome’s notions of piety) must be challenged by counternarratives because such standards are discursive frames and restrictive binaries rooted in histories of power and domination. Such frames police thought, presuppose a deficit of one kind or another in the marginalized communities, and inevitably lead such marginalized groups down a path of psychic scarring and self-loathing.