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.