Nikki Lane, "The Black Queer Work of Ratchet: Race, Gender, Sexuality, and the (Anti)Politics of Respectability" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019)

New Books in African American Studies · Apr 29, 2021 · 1h 13m

Nikki Lane's The Black Queer Work of Ratchet: Race, Gender, Sexuality, and the (Anti)Politics of Respectability (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019) enters as a corrective to the tendency to trivialize and (mis)appropriate African American language practices. The word ratchet has entered into a wider (whiter) American discourse the same way that many words in African American English have--through hip-hop and social media. Generally, ratchet refers to behaviors and cultural expressions of Black people that sit outside of normative, middle-class respectable codes of conduct. Ratchet can function both as…