Black female sexualities /edited by Trimiko Melancon, Joanne M. Braxton ; foreword by Melissa Harris-Perry.

Includes bibliographies and index.

"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 -- Sexual Embod(y)ment: Framing the Body -- Entering Through the Body's Frame: Precious and the Subjective Delineations of the Movie Poster / Kimberly Juanita Brown; -- Is It Just Baby F(Ph)at?: Black Female Teenagers, Body Size, and Sexuality / Courtney J. Patterson; -- Corporeal Presence: Engaging the Black Lesbian Pedagogical Body in Feminist Classrooms and College Communities / Mel Michelle Lewis; -- Untangling Pathology: Sex, Social Responsibility, and the Black Female Youth in Octavia Butler's Fledgling / Esther L. Jones -- Disengaging the Gaze -- Mis(Playing) Blackness: Rendering Black Female Sexuality in The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl / Ariane Cruz; -- Why Don't We Love These Hoes?: Black Women, Popular Culture, and the Contemporary Hoe Archetype / Mahaliah Ayana Little; -- What Kind of Woman?: Alberta Hunter and Expressions of Black Female Sexuality in the Twentieth Century / K.T. Ewing; -- The P-Word Exchange: Representing Black Female Sexuality in Contemporary Urban Fiction / Cherise A. Pollard -- Resisting Erasure -- "Ou libéré?": Sexual Abuse and Resistance in Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory / Sandra C. Duvivier; -- Rape Fantasies and Other Assaults: Black Women's Sexuality and Racial Redemption on Film / Erin D. Chapman; -- "Embrace the Narrative of the Whole": Complicating Black Female Sexuality in Contemporary Fiction / Johanna X.K. Garvey; -- Saving Me through Erasure?: Black Women, HIV/AIDS and Respectability / Ayana K. Weekley -- Afterword: Being Present, Facing Forward / Joanne M. Braxton.

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