She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Sass: Black Women's Humor and Humanity, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Sass is about a quarter way through chapter 3, “Butch Lives Matter: Sass, Masculinity, and Failure,” which focuses on Black women stand-ups who have masculine presentations of self. I draw on the Combahee River Collective statement, GerShun Avilez, Marlon M. Bailey and Matt Richardson to put my theory of sass in conversation with Black feminist and queer theory. This language is particularly useful when examining the sartorial and comedic choices of the stand-ups, including the author, who are attuned to the dangers and complications of embracing female masculinity. As I write on page 99, “The Black butch comic is the fantasy-bound subject who calls up that radical futurity because she disturbs Black gender common sense.”Learn more about Sass: Black Women's Humor and Humanity at The University of North Carolina Press website.
I see my book as making (three) primary contributions, 1) thinking of sass as behavior rather than a fixed trait, i.e. sass is something black women do rather than an essentialized way of being; 2) thinking of sass as a response to a structural presence of racism and misogyny, i.e. the exigencies that necessitate sass are connected to systemic structures of oppression, 3) sass is embodied, i.e. although it can be verbal and gestural, the bodies that produce sass are centered in my theory. On page 99 of my book, we can see all these principles in play, but in what might first strike readers as a non-obvious/surprising place to look for “Black women’s sass,” namely, Black butch women. While Black butches (myself included) often do not perform the gestures that typically come to mind with the trope of the “sassy Black woman” (a notion that my book unpacks and seeks to, hopefully, disabuse the readership of), my theory of sass encompasses Black butches too. If you picked up my book and turned to page 99, you would find some conceptual and political framework for thinking about how even the proximity to injury (often faced by Black queer people) holds the potential for resistance and even liberation. While sass exists as a discourse genre because of its origination in the structures of chattel slavery and its afterlives, it has evolved to confront, and tear down, other systems of oppression as well. When a Black butch takes the stage, whether spoken or not, her embodied presence, her unapologetic masculine presentation of self, is a challenge to those who would say “Aw, you just want to be a man,” and that embodiment and the commentary Black butch women make within that context that is often the site of laughter. The lasting takeaway I hope people get is that Black women’s sass is a crucial component of their humor, a critical strategy that draws on both the playful and resistant elements and offers a new lens to understand what redress looks like when Black people, especially Black women, claim it.
--Marshal Zeringue
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