Private Lives, Proper Relations: Regulating Black Intimacy by Candice M. Jenkins

Private Lives, Proper Relations addresses the question of why contemporary African American literature—particularly that produced by black women—is continually concerned with issues of respectability and propriety. Candice M. Jenkins argues that this preoccupation has its origins in ideologies about African American sexuality and expresses an often unarticulated link between the intimate and the political in black culture.