Categories and Black Women Poets

I recently read pieces by DH scholars Meg Smith and then Miriam Posner. Their articles and some previous conversations with folks back in June reminded me that I needed to jot down a few notes here about categories. 

In an article about Richard II, yes, Richard II, Smith mentioned a project she's been working on and pointed out when she creates datasets on the materials she necessarily needs to impose categories, and those categories have limits and elide some information. And the challenges of category emerge long before a dataset. 'Even when individuals self-identified with a nationality or ethnicity," Smith wrote, "their self-imposed category in that moment was influenced by timeframe, circumstance, and desired ends."

She cited an article by Posner, which I then read, and among other things, Posner mentioned how "simplified categories become reified in Census data and in scores of maps and visualizations." At another point, Posner asks, "What would maps and data visualizations look like if they were built to show us categories like race as they have been experienced, not as they have been captured and advanced by businesses and governments?"

These thoughts reminded me that I had not done enough here to mention how categories like "Black poet," "Black women poets," "Black men writers," "African American authors," and so forth are never enough or might be more slippery than I sometimes give them credit for.

Over here in African American literature, we have this decades-long focus on Black men writers vs. Black women writers. But what happens when you start focusing on, say, just Black women writers? What differences and categories emerge? 

I thought about some of this some years back when I was research Black poets and awards/prizes. Many people, using a gender, frame wanted to know who won more: Black men or Black women? If it was Black men, then that confirmed their suspicions about sexism. I discovered other things though, even just among Black women.

Like, socioeconomic class matters. Black women poets from middle and upper middle class backgrounds have fared better than Black women poets who did not. What about the prestige of schools? What about writing styles and topics? What about alliances with prominent, well-connected people? What about focus on or avoidance of political topics? 

How do you categorize or account for all of that?