SPECIAL ISSUE: INTIMACY

Winter 1998
Volume 24, Number 2

Jody is always on the job, even if he is not gainfully employed. As many older people in black communities across the United States know, Jody is both a person and non-person. He does not exist, but then again he is everywhere. Jody's principal characteristic is his ability to exist at the margins of other's love relationships, rather than at the center of a relationship of his own. He appears in the emotional and libidinal fissures that often exist between lovers, with promises to sate unfulfilled, unquenchable desires.

[...]

I first met Jody in the summer of 1979, though I did not recognize him at first. As a day laborer for a black contracting company that had been assigned to replace apartment walls in a housing project on Gates Avenue in Brooklyn, N.Y., I obtained glimpses of the lives in those apartments when I brought sheet rock to the carpenters. One morning, after hauling yet another piece of sheet rock that would be transformed by the tapers into a new wall in an apartment on an upper floor, I rode the elevator with two middle-aged men. They were acquaintances clearly, though not necessarily good friends. One man rushed out to work, headed for the subway train. The other man lagged behind, looked me in the eye conspiratorially and said "You see that guy." I acknowledged that I did. "Have you seen his woman?" I acknowledged that I had, the day before. The woman in question was an attractive brown-skinned sister who looked to be in her late thirties or early forties. He then leaned closer to me in the elevator and said "He thinks he's raising hell when he's sleeping with her, but he ain't shit." He paused for effect and then said, "I know, because she told me so, and I'm with her sometimes when he leaves."

[...]

What interests me about Jody are his representations and multiple incarnations in black popular culture, and the manner in which his presence reveals much more than a triangular relationship of trust, fidelity and betrayal involving black women and men. Though neither Jody nor any of the aforementioned human expressions of feeling in love relationships are peculiar to African-Americans in the United States, their specific resonance in black popular culture allows for the possibility of his critical examination in relation to black cultural production. Among other things, Jody's presence as a cultural icon represents an opportunity to consider the intersections of black gender and sexual politics with the material conditions of labor and racial inequality. Beyond my theoretical pretensions, this essay is a call for more historicized discussion of contemporary black popular culture, and recognition of its simultaneous distinction from and interdependence with mass culture.

Michael Hanchard is associate professor of political science and African American studies at Northwestern Univesity. He is the author of Orpheus and Power: The Movimento Negro of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Brazil, 1945-1988 and editor of the forthcoming Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil.