Black Sex Research Articles

Upheavals in Black Thought

Upheavals in Black Thought

An open letter to the editors of the Journal of Language and Sexuality

Abstract In this open letter, I ask the editors of the Journal and its readers, to reflect on the Journal’s relationship to studies of language and Black sexuality, and consider new ways to reach scholars of Black life, culture, and language. Studies of Black language practices rarely deal with the ways that Black language practices are often complicated by gender/sexuality. And yet, there are scholars doing this work, but like Queer Linguistics, it often doesn’t “look” that way that typical studies of language are supposed to look. This is because linguistics and linguistic anthropology as disciplines have often failed to capture the imagination and attention of these scholars; it is not because studies of Black sexuality and language do not exist. I encourage the Journal then to seek out these studies and to do so with a sense of urgency.

I Believe you Sis! The Healing Burn of Black Girls Sexualities and their Literate Ways of Becoming

I Believe you Sis! The Healing Burn of Black Girls Sexualities and their Literate Ways of Becoming

‘Rediscovering the Erotic as Ordinary’ in South African Women’s Short Fiction

In this article, I explore the possibilities of rediscovering the erotic as ordinary, as a strategy for writing queer, feminist erotica in a South African context that successfully negotiates heterosexist, patriarchal, racist and colonial discourses. I focus on two short stories from Open: An Erotic Anthology by South African Women Writers (2008), known as the first erotic anthology by women published in South Africa. South Africa does not have a large body of erotic writing, and the work that does exist is not widely written about. Both stories covered here, ‘Inside’ by Makhosazana Xaba and ‘Mrs Habib’s Hypothalamus’ by Suzy Bell, depict erotic tension between women but do not contain graphic sex scenes. They emphasise the ordinary place of sexual desire in the lives of women by detailing the interior life of a female character whose everyday life is limned by the erotic. The focus in these stories is not on the sex act but on the build-up of sexual desire. Furthermore, the erotic is not limited to sexual desire but runs through other aspects of the characters’ lives, including spiritual, intellectual and embodied experiences. It is through these various elements that the two authors imagine the erotic as ordinary. Thus these two stories contest the spectacularisation and abjection of Black female lesbian sexuality and open up interesting possibilities for the representation of the erotic in literature.

How it feels to be BLACK ME: Black Masculinities and Sexualities in Black Visual Culture

In this article, I build on previous scholarship about Black identities, masculinities, and sexualities within Black visual culture and how their content and concepts reverberate within a larger white-dominant culture as viewed phenomenologically through Black lived experiences. This manuscript is a first-person, focused effort toward contextualizing traditionally nondominant, marginalized stories as valid, viable, and valuable contributions to our larger collective sociocultural (his)tories for composing, curating, and contributing to how I view my physical identities in conjunction with my visual identities. I provide a historical review of literature on Black masculinities, focused on the intersections of race, gender, class, and sexualities. The implications of this article reemphasize this scholarship and simultaneously destabilize hegemonic discourses around identities of Black men situated in whiteness as a way to assert ownership and control over our own images, narratives, and lived experiences.

Unbridled Stallions and Mad Bulls: Masculinity, Race, and Sexuality in Hemispheric Perspective

ABSTRACT This article juxtaposes two very different authors from very different locations: George Winston, a largely forgotten Southern college president during the Jim Crow era in the United States, and Gilberto Freyre, arguably Brazil’s most famous social theorist. Both men offered emblematic accounts of uncontrollable masculine sexuality that helped to consolidate particular visions of their respective nations in an uncertain post-emancipation moment. Winston denounced post-Reconstruction black male sexuality as bestial and rapacious and a threat to white women in a characteristic statement of the myth of the black male rapist, while Freyre depicted the Portuguese settlers of Brazil as wildly lascivious and particularly drawn to black and indigenous women. Each depiction of unbridled masculine sexuality serves to justify distinct regimes of racial, gender, and class hierarchy. Ultimately, I show that juxtaposition of thinkers from different hemispheric locations, as recommended by Juliet Hooker, helps to rejuvenate and deparochialize intersectional feminist theory.

Interanimating Black sexualities and the geography classroom

ABSTRACT Why teach Black sexualities? How might Black lived sexualities provide students a more nuanced understanding of geography and place-making practices? The junctions of Blackness, sexuality, and place are understood as active processes that are being shaped and formed by and through power relations. This paper argues for centralizing the mutually constitutive nature of sexualities and Blackness, by troubling the normative notions of sexualities as commonly approached in curriculum and pedagogy. Focusing on Black sexualities is imperative, as Black lives, politics, and locations permeate the social order and can make visible the ways in which colonial legacies imbue global structures of dismissal, displacement, and erasure. Black sexualities are always personal and political, intermediating between systemic axes of oppression grounded in colonialism and imperialism and the agency of Black sex and sexual identities in spite of pathologizing structural components of society and space. As such, this paper considers the opportunities that Black sexualities offer in teaching and learning in the geography classroom. I consider the role of curricular choices, course discussions and assignments, and the pedagogy of embodiment. Embedded in a Black Geographies framework, I argue that centering a Black sense of place is essential to pedagogies of Black sexualities.

Undisciplining the Black Pussy: Pleasure, Black Feminism, and Sexuality in Issa Rae’s insecure

Now is the time for more Black pussy theorizing. Black feminisms and Black sexuality studies are embracing the “nooks and crannies,” both discursive and material, of Black sexual cultures.1 Mireill...

Let’s Really Talk About It: A Lesson Plan for Teaching About Black Women and Sexuality

This lesson plan is designed to help students understand and debunk myths and stereotypes about African American/Black women and their sexual lives. This lesson plan is intended for adult learners.

Editor's Note: Black Sexuality and Relationships Matter!

Editor's Note: Black Sexuality and Relationships Matter!

The Queer Visuality of Slavery and its Afterlives

This manuscript examines the racial-sexual anxieties of slavery and its afterlives as they are articulated in contemporary Black queer visual culture. An engagement with cultural history, visual studies, and Black porn studies, the manuscript traces the (dis)appearance of Black queer sexuality within the colonial archive. Placing this scholarship in conversation with DePaul Vera's My Soul to Keep, it posits that white supremacy is intimately connected to expressions of sexual anti-Blackness in mainstream queer culture. The manuscript offers Black queer pleasure as a corrective to normative conceptualizations of Black sexuality, embracing the liberatory potential of our practices in intimacy and relationality.

The Third Revolution

The Third Revolution

Theorizing Conscious Black Asexuality through Claire Kann’s Let’s Talk about Love

Asexuality is often defined as some degree of being void of sexual attraction, interest, or desire. Black asexual people have been made invisible, silent, or pathologized in most fiction, scholarly literature, and mainstream LGBTQ movements. Claire Kann’s 2018 young adult romance novel, Let’s Talk About Love, explores Black asexuality at the intersection of race and (a)sexuality. Through the story of the Black, bi-romantic, asexual, 19 year-old college student Alice Johnston, this text illuminates the diversity of Black sexuality in the Black Diaspora. Using a Black feminist sociological literary analysis to complete a close reading of the novel, I interrogate what Let’s Talk about Love offers for defining a Black asexual politic. To consider Black asexual politics beyond the controlling images of the asexual Mammy figure, and not merely in juxtaposition to the hypersexual Jezebel, calls us to instead center agency and self-definition. This project seeks to answer what Conscious Black Asexuality is, why it is a necessary concept for asexuality studies and the Diaspora, where we locate Black asexuality in Black history, and how Let’s Talk about Love by Claire Kann presents a depiction of Black agentic queerness that reclaims agency and intimacy within one’s sexual politics.

Man up! Masculinity and (Homo)sexuality in René Depestre’s Transatlantic World

The question of homosexuality in Francophone Caribbean literature is often overlooked. However, the ways in which the Haitian René Depestre’s Le mât de cocagne (The Festival of the Greasy Pole, 1979) and “Blues pour une tasse de thé vert” (“Blues for a Cup of Green Tea”), a short story from the collection Eros dans un train chinois (Eros on a Chinese Train, 1990) portray homoeroticism and homosexuality begs further study. In these texts, the study of the violence that surrounds the representation of sexuality reveals the sociopolitical implications of erotic and racial images in a French transatlantic world. Hence, the proposed essay “Man up!” interrogates a (Black) hegemonic masculinity inherited from colonialism and the homophobia it generates. This masculinity prescribes normative traits that frequently appear toxic as it thrives on hypersexuality and brute force. When these two traits become associated with violence and homoeroticism, however, they threaten this very masculinity. Initially, Depestre valorizes “solar eroticism,” a French Caribbean expression of a Black sexuality, free and joyful, and “geolibertinage,” its transnational and global expression. Namely, his novel and short story sing a hegemonic and polyamorous heterosexuality, respectively, in a postcolonial milieu (Haiti) and a diasporic space (Paris). The misadventures of his male characters suggest that eroticism in transatlantic spaces has more to do with Thanatos (death) than Eros (sex). Though Depestre formally explores the construction of the other and the mechanisms of racism and oppression in essays, he also tackles these themes in his fictional work. Applying Caribbean feminist and gendered lenses to his fiction bring to light the intricate bonds between racism, sexism and homophobia. Such a framework reveals the many facets of patriarchy and its mechanism of control.

About the Contributors

About the Contributors

Campo Belo: narrativa insubmissa e insurgente

Neste artigo desejamos provocar e compartilhar reflexões sobre o conto “Isaltina Campo Belo”, de autoria de Conceição Evaristo, parte integrante do livro: Insubmissas lágrimas de mulheres. A narrativa escolhida explicita o percurso da personagem em busca de compreensão da sua própria existência. Ao longo do caminho, surgem dúvidas, dores, alegrias e (des)cobertas sobre a construção da identidade de gênero, lesboafetiva e lesboerótica da personagem. O texto foi escrito a partir de alguns encaminhamentos que envolvem: problematizar os silêncios impostos historicamente que são construídos repletos de preconceitos e discriminações sobre a sexualidade da mulher negra; propor a insubmissão e a insurgência como categorias existenciais e claves interpretativas para análise do corpus; buscar referenciais teóricos pertinentes para a compreensão do conto analisado dentro da possibilidade de análise interseccional de gênero e sexualidade, principalmente dialogando com a perspectiva da “epistemologia negra sapatão” de Tanya L. Saunders para o lesbotexto apresentado e de autoras(es) que desenvolvem a perspectiva de pensar a literatura negra epistemologicamente; mapear a jornada da personagem do conto refletindo sobre os seus processos de construção identitária.

Protecting young Black female sexuality

In the USA, Black girls and women face significant health disparities and disproportionately experience violence, racism, discrimination, stereotype messaging and elevated STI/HIV rates. Research shows the importance of familial systems and effective communication in decreasing risky behaviours among Black girls. This grounded theory study explored the sociocultural conditions that influence the process of becoming a sexual Black woman. Analytic results of interviews with 20 Black women identified protection as a major category associated with Black female sexual development and related risk behaviour. This paper describes the role of Black women as protectors of young Black female sexuality, the sociocultural protective strategies they used across the life course and the consequences of absent protection. Findings can inform future evidence-based, culturally sensitive interventions to promote the sexual health and development of Black girls and women in the USA.

Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual CulturesThe Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics

Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual CulturesThe Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics

Whose Body Is This? On the Cultural Possibilities of a Radical Black Sexual Praxis

Whose Body Is This?On the Cultural Possibilities of a Radical Black Sexual Praxis Marlon M. Bailey (bio) "Whose body is this?" draws from a legacy of Black feminist and queer scholars posing this rhetorical question; I am thinking of bell hook's 1996 essay (on Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It), "'Whose Pussy Is This? A Feminist Comment."1 In 2007 Herukhuti wrote "Whose Booty Is This? Barebacking, Advocacy, and the Right to Fuck,"2 an essay in response to the targeted policing of bodies and the sex of Black gay men as we confront the HIV/AIDS crisis in the United States. These rhetorical questions have for a long time been, and continue to be, critical questions confronting the Black studies intellectual and political project and the communities we study. These questions bring into focus the ways in which the US anti-Black state has always been invested in, as the feminist scholar Andrea Smith argues, the perpetual "slaveability" of Black people,3 and how gender and sexual oppression within our communities is not separate from but constitutive of anti-Black racism / white supremacy. For, as Alice Walker argues, one who is not free to express same-gender love in public is a slave, and anyone who requires that one should not express same-gender love has a slaveholder's mentality.4 This slaveholder's mentality exists both within Black communities and outside them. I take seriously the centrality of these rhetorical questions about Black sexuality raised by Black feminist and queer scholars. Therefore, this essay contemplates the role that respectability politics (intracultural policing of gender and sexuality) has played in Black studies. And, although there has been an influx of scholars producing cutting-edge scholarship in Black gender and sexuality studies, the field has yet to forge a cogent, intersectional analysis of the relationship between Black sexuality and HIV. Furthermore, Black studies needs to study and highlight the quotidian practices and knowledges of Black gender and sexually marginalized people and how these efforts contribute to fortifying a Black sexual praxis. [End Page 161] I make this argument in three points. First, I briefly review some of the challenges and debates around gender and sexuality within Black studies. I query how the politics of respectability limits and refracts the analytic relevance/potency and the socio/political currency of Black studies. Second, I move to the status of the struggle over gender and sexual knowledge in Black studies today. I highlight what some might call a watershed moment in 2012 at a Black studies conference at Northwestern University during which the training in gender and sexuality studies in Black studies, or the lack there of, was brought into focus and vociferously debated. This moment helped birth a very important article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, written by Stacy Patton, titled "Whose Afraid of Black Sexuality?"5 Finally, I discuss where Black studies is/needs to go from here with regard to gender and sexuality studies, particularly as it relates to the HIV epidemic in the US. With this point, I am in conversation with several scholars who are producing scholarship that advances a Black radical gender and sexual praxis, one that fearlessly confronts respectability. I enter this conversation by sharing some of my current work on Black gay sex and sexual subjectivity. My notion of a radical Black sexual praxis is indebted to the transformative scholarship of the Black lesbian feminist Cathy Cohen and her concept of deviance as resistance and M. Jacqui Alexander's erotic autonomy,6 which I reframe as sexual autonomy. I suggest that the critical sites of critique and resistance for Black studies in the academy and African American public discourse are the Black feminist and queer scholarship and on-the-ground practices that inform our work. I first entered Black studies through Black theatre studies at West Virginia University (WVU) in 1991. Throughout the 1990s, I was a board member of the National Council for Black Studies (those were my angry Black Nationalist days). Before I entered the PhD program in African Diaspora studies at UC Berkeley in 1999, I taught in Africana studies at the University of Michigan–Flint. I...

Erotic Illegibility and Desire in Representations of Black Sexuality

Erotic Illegibility and Desire in Representations of Black Sexuality Freda L. Fair (bio) and Mahaliah Little (bio) This essay engages our shared interest in the capriciousness of sexual expression and desire.1 By analyzing the discontinued WGN television series Underground (2016–17) as an ephemeral site for imagining black women's erotic interiority and theorizing black sexual desire as a scattered effect of the archive in Cheryl Dunye's film The Watermelon Woman (1996), we assert that rather than stifle desire, black sexuality enacts an elasticity as it negotiates white male power and respectability politics. Although black gendered and sexual difference appears illegible, it nonetheless reveals the sociosexual power relations of slavery, and even as it surfaces as erased, it articulates history making as a practice of desire. Erotic Representation in Underground Whether or not the captive female and/or her sexual oppressor derived "pleasure" from their seductions and couplings is not a question we can politely ask. Whether or not "pleasure" is possible at all under the conditions that I would aver as non-freedom for both or either of the parties has not been settled. —Hortense J. Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book" There had to be orgasms during slavery. If there weren't, we simply would not have been able to survive … Why is talking about that seen to be threatening or destabilizing? —Joan Morgan, "The Sweetest Taboo: Theorizing Black Female Pleasure, Agency, and Desire within Black Feminism" With nearly three decades of black feminist intellectual labor separating them, these statements frame the impolite, unresolved, and disruptive nature of theorizing black women's sexuality, eroticism, and pleasure. Freda and I share an investment in representation: in the ways that fiction and critical speculation can accomplish what seems comparably inaccessible, unattainable, or insurmountable to stark empiricism's naked eye. To consider the question of [End Page 151] ephemeral intimacy and erotic encounters among enslaved subjects, speculation rather ironically emerges as the most practical means of analysis. For a two-season run, Misha Green and Joe Polaski's series Underground (2016–17) courageously waded into uncharted territory, destabilizing conventions that have come to characterize depictions and dramatizations of enslavement in film and television with multidimensional enslaved characters, allusions to the psychological toll of enslavement on enslaved people, slave owners, and abolitionists through depictions of substance abuse and, most significantly, representations of enslaved women's erotic interiority. When conducting research for the series, Green, a black woman in her thirties, said she found that "the truth was stronger than fiction."2 Green's belief that the knowable past—what glimpses incomplete archives and short paragraphs throughout history can offer—is stronger than fiction signals to me that she saw and perhaps still sees Underground as something more than pure fiction. She gestures toward the series occupying an "imaginative space," one created for typically overlooked spectators: black women.3 The series is set in 1857 in Macon, Georgia. Described as "shocking, uncomfortable, and … sexy," a scene in the second episode between the plantation master Tom Macon and the enslaved Ernestine blurs the lines of consent, exchange, and pleasure.4 Ernestine meets Tom in the wine cellar of the plantation, and he drizzles alcohol onto her naked body. Tom grunts in appreciation as rivulets of wine cascade down the small of her back and the crack of her behind. When he tries to kiss her, Ernestine snatches her head back, refuses his kiss, and slaps him hard across the face. Pointing a finger at his mild confusion, Ernestine taunts him, exclaiming, "I didn't say you could touch me yet!"5 Although Tom is forbidden from touching Ernestine, as the frame focuses on her facial expressions, it becomes clear that she is touching him. Her tongue dances across her lips as she stares Tom into submission. Mouth agape, Tom's head lolls back on his shoulders as he moans in ecstasy. Ernestine caresses the nape of Tom's neck and, pulling him close, plainly demands that their son, James, not work in the plantation fields. She feeds Tom lines to repeat to his wife and plantation mistress, Suzanna, whose children he has also fathered: "You tell her...