Why Can't We Flip the Script: The Politics of Respectability in Pearl Cleage's What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day.

The mid-1990s was an important time period for women, particularly African American women, in the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In 1995, for the first time, the proportion of black Americans reported with AIDS was the same as white Americans. The following year, in 1996, the proportion of black Americans reported with AIDS exceeded white Americans. Additionally, in 1996, women accounted for 20 percent of the total adult AIDS cases, the highest proportion reported in any year to date. These new highs in reported AIDS cases together created a moment of intensification in discourses about African American women and AIDS. This paper examines Pearl Cleage's What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day, arguing that the politics of respectability continue to shape African American discourses of race, gender, sexuality, and, in this example, the ways they intersect with discourses of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. I know as well as anybody that being diagnosed HIV-positive changes everything about your life. but it's still your life, the only one you know for sure you got, so you better figure out how to live it as best you can, which is exactly what I intended to do. I wanted to move someplace where I didn't have to apologize for not disappearing because my presence made people nervous, I wanted a more enlightened pool of folks from which to draw potential lovers. I wanted to be someplace where I could be my black, female, sexual, HIV-positive self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]