Black Female Sexualities

Description

Western culture has long regarded black female sexuality with a strange mix of fascination and condemnation, associating it with everything from desirability, hypersexuality, and liberation to vulgarity, recklessness, and disease. Yet even as their bodies and sexualities have been the subject of countless public discourses, black women’s voices have been largely marginalized in these discussions. In this groundbreaking collection, feminist scholars from across the academy come together to correct this omission—illuminating black female sexual desires marked by agency and empowerment, as well as pleasure and pain, to reveal the ways black women regulate their sexual lives. The twelve original essays in Black Female Sexualities reveal the diverse ways black women perceive, experience, and represent sexuality. The contributors highlight the range of tactics that black women use to express their sexual desires and identities. Yet they do not shy away from exploring the complex ways in which black women negotiate the more traumatic aspects of sexuality and grapple with the legacy of negative stereotypes. Black Female Sexualities takes not only an interdisciplinary approach—drawing from critical race theory, sociology, and performance studies—but also an intergenerational one, in conversation with the foremothers of black feminist studies. In addition, it explores a diverse archive of representations, covering everything from blues to hip-hop, from Crash to Precious, from Sister Souljah to Edwidge Danticat. Revealing that black female sexuality is anything but a black-and-white issue, this collection demonstrates how to appreciate a whole spectrum of subjectivities, experiences, and desires. Foreword Melissa Harris-Perry Introduction “somebody almost walked off wid alla my stuff”: Black Female Sexualities and Black Feminist Intervention-Trimiko Melancon Part I Sexual Embod(y)ment: Framing the Body Chapter 1 Entering Through the Body’s Frame: Precious and the Subjective Delineations of the Movie Poster Kimberly Juanita Brown Chapter 2 Is It Just Baby F(Ph)at?: Black Female Teenagers, Body Size, and Sexuality Courtney J. Patterson Chapter 3 Corporeal Presence: Engaging the Black Lesbian Pedagogical Body in Feminist Classrooms and College Communities Mel Michelle Lewis Chapter 4 Untangling Pathology: Sex, Social Responsibility, and the Black Female Youth in Octavia Butler’s Fledgling Esther L. Jones Part II Disengaging the Gaze Chapter 5 Mis(Playing) Blackness: Rendering Black Female Sexuality in The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl Ariane Cruz Chapter 6 Why Don’t We Love These Hoes?: Black Women, Popular Culture, and the Contemporary Hoe Archetype Mahaliah Ayana Little Chapter 7 What Kind of Woman?: Alberta Hunter and Expressions of Black Female Sexuality in the Twentieth Century K. T. Ewing Chapter 8 The “P-Word” Exchange: Representing Black Female Sexuality in Contemporary Urban Fiction Cherise A. Pollard Part III Resisting Erasure Chapter 9 “Ou libéré?”: Sexual Abuse and Resistance in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory Sandra C. Duvivier Chapter 10 Rape Fantasies and Other Assaults: Black Women’s Sexuality and Racial Redemption on Film Erin D. Chapman Chapter 11 “Embrace the Narrative of the Whole”: Complicating Black Female Sexuality in Contemporary Fiction Johanna X. K. Garvey Chapter 12 Saving Me through Erasure?: Black Women, HIV/AIDS and Respectability Ayana K. Weekley Afterword: Being Present, Facing Forward Joanne M. Braxton Bibliography Notes on Contributors