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Release Date:26 Jan 2015

ISBN:9780813571737

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Black Female Sexualities

Edited by Trimiko Melancon and Joanne M. Braxton; Foreword by Melissa Harris-Perry

Rutgers University Press

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.

This is a rich, multifaceted volume that leaves few if any stones unturned in exploring the themes of sex, sexuality, and feminism in relation to Black women. Noliwe Rooks, Cornell University

This volume provides an illuminating discourse about the meaning, metaphors, and magnitude of black female sexuality as an agent of both oppression and transformation. Paula J. Giddings, author of IDA: A Sword Among Lions

TRIMIKO MELANCON is an assistant professor of English, African American studies, and women’s studies at Loyola University New Orleans. She is the author of Unbought and Unbossed: Transgressive Black Women, Sexuality, and Representation.

JOANNE M. BRAXTON is the Frances L. and Edwin L. Cummings Professor of English and the Humanities at the College of William and Mary. She is the author of Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition Within a Tradition.

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

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