Emancipating Proverbs 31: Liberating Rough, Nasty, and Aggressive Black Girls to Women Available to Purchase

This chapter shifts from girlhood to womanhood and rereads the Proverbs 31 woman through a womanist and black feminist lens, turning the respectable trope thrust on Black women and girls upside down. A consequential property of the Black Church’s heteronormative black gender theology is its expectation of Black women and girls to be Proverbs 31 ideals, or else face branding as bad or immoral. Black women and girls who perform the Proverbs ideal are seen as “real” women, reducible to wombs, chastity, stereotypical femininity, wifehood, and motherhood. This subdues autonomy, identity, power, mutuality, critical consciousness, differences, and sexual subjectivity and allows for transantagonism, forced femininity, and the silencing, violence against, and oppression of Black cisgender, transgender, nonbinary, heterosexual, questioning, bisexual, and queer women and girls. The chapter concludes with the idea that virtue isn’t found in the rejection of power but rather in the unruly and aggressive embrace of it.