1. Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods, “No One Knows the Mysteries …,” in Black Geographies and The Politics of Place, ed. Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods (Cambridge, MA: South End, 2007), 4.
2. Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (1988): 524.
3. See, Leith Mullings, “African American Women Making Themselves,” Souls 2, no. 4 (2000): 18–29.
4. For more on the historical context that frames contemporary codes of respectability in black women’s lives see Victoria W. Wolcott, Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001)
5. and E. Frances White, Dark Continent of Our Bodies: Black Feminism and the Politics of Respectability (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001).