Negotiating Respect: Patterns of Presentation among Black Women

traditions of black women in particular. However, a fairly large body of information about such sex-specific expressive capacities can be found in the autobiographical writings of black women themselves and in social scientific descriptions, a literature that tells us something about the content, if not always the devices and techniques, of black female presentations. To get at this material from a folkloristic perspective, it is necessary to analyze more conversational traditions than folklorists are generally committed to studying. Presentational devices are not unique to black women or characteristic of them but are common to all segments of the black community and as such they need to be studied to gain a fuller knowledge of what is unique to the female repertoire of presentational strategies and styles. This essay will attempt to unite the concerns of role theory and commonsense social structure as pursued by symbolic interactionists with the more usual perspectives of a performance-centered theory of folkloristics.