Black Sexual Economies

Abstract

This book is a compilation of contemporary and previously unpublished scholarship on Black sexualities. The sixteen essays work to untangle the complex mechanisms of dominance and subordination as they are attached to political and socioeconomic forces, cultural productions, and academic lenses that assess sexuality as it intersects with race. Some of the essays trace the historical and contemporary markets for sexual labor and systems of erotic capital. Other essays illuminate how forces of commodification, exploitation, and appropriation, which render black sexualities both desirable and deviant, also provide the spaces, networks, and relationships that have allowed black people to revise, recuperate, and re-articulate their sexual identities, erotic capital, and gender and sexual expressions and relations. The collection focuses on three themes linked by the major theory of black sexual economy: sex labor and race play; drag and hypersexual performance; and the erotics of life and death.