Abstract
Black feminist theory has embraced the ‘funk’ (Stallings, 2015). Scholars including Amber Jamilla Musser, LaMonda Horton Stallings, Mireille Miller-Young, Darieck Scott, Ariane Cruz, Uri MacMillan, Emily Alyssa Owens and Sharon Holland have produced a sensual interdisciplinary body of work rooted in ‘funky’ pleasures, queer (of colour) desires, eroticised black abjection, racialised longings and race-play. This scholarship centres black sexualities in ways that fundamentally upend earlier black feminist preoccupations with injury and violence, and that compel women’s studies and black studies to re-think the centrality of the erotic to both race and racism. This body of work asks: What happens if we imagine black subjects as desiring and desirous? How can we carefully theorise black pleasures and black longings? What happens if we work to unleash black sexual imaginations, to cultivate black erotic longings and to advocate for black sexual freedoms? How do we attend to the ‘funkiness’ of black pleasures, including pleasures in racialised, gendered and sexualised subordination? How do we theorise the erotic charges and circuits that undergird racism? What are the erotic attachments undergirding racism? This work has also rooted its engagement with black sexualities in varied archives – film, dance, BDSM, music – and centred new analytics for grappling with these challenging questions including labour, performance, play, intimacy, the haptic and touch.
In this historical moment, one marked by the various crises that the Trump administration has unleashed, by Black Lives Matter (and anti-black anti-Black Lives Matter backlash), by state-sponsored and state-sanctioned anti-black violence, theorising pleasures can seem frivolous. Yet, as this work reveals, to talk about black sexualities is always to be engaged in a political project. If we live in the long ‘afterlives of slavery’, in the midst of the persistence of entrenched inequality, the black erotic can be a tender space of sanctuary, self-imagination, intimacy and creative play, a vibrant space of collective world-making that takes the violence of the ordinary and turns it on its head, mobilising it to unleash sexual pleasures, erotic longings and disrespectable desires (Hartman, 2006). Indeed, if black feminist theorists have long been invested in the politics and practices of survival, the variety of ways that black subjects live ‘in the wake’, to borrow Christina Sharpe’s phrase, then it is crucial to consider sexuality as survival, eroticism as creative practice (2016). In making this claim, I never seek to treat the sexual as outside of the social, as somehow cornered off from the inequalities, hierarchies and structures of domination that mark daily life. Indeed, black feminist and queer theorists have emphatically argued that black pleasures are not outside of, but embedded within, the violent structures that mark daily life. Racist, sexist and homophobic scripts are often put to work, sometimes in ways that are unnerving, unsettling or politically troubling, to unleash sexual imaginations. Ultimately, this work reminds us again and again that sexual world-making and political world-making go hand in hand, that black political and black sexual freedom are one and the same.
The articles that comprise this special section of Feminist Theory contribute to the now vibrant field of black erotics in myriad ways, drawing on varied archives including film, speculative fiction, television, photography and poetry to consider the intimate relationship between black sexualities and black freedom. In ‘Black Pussy Power: Performing Acts of Black Eroticism in Pam Grier’s Blaxploitation Films’, Shoniqua Roach develops the term ‘black pussy power’ to analyse Blaxploitation actress Pam Grier’s enactments of eroticism in Coffy and Foxy Brown. Roach persuasively argues that Grier’s ‘pussy power’ performances and enactments facilitate her erotic agency, and, more broadly, ‘secure nominal black freedoms in the face of state-sanctioned infringements on black erotic life’. Indeed, Roach aspires to reclaim ‘pussy’ as rich theoretical and political terrain, challenging black feminist critiques of ‘pussy’ as the site of black feminist deviance. In its place, Roach creatively, persuasively and importantly ‘reimagines black pussy not as female genitalia, but as a technology of black feminine survival’.
æryka j. hollis o'neil's ‘Figuring the Angry Itch: Transnormativity, the Black Femme and the Fraudulent Phallus -or- Fleshly Remainders of the “Ungendered” and the “Unthought”’ roots its analysis in Taye Diggs’ performance in the Broadway musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Drawing on Hortense Spillers’ now-canonical notion of ‘ungendering’ and Saidiya Hartman’s work on the black body as the ‘unthought’ of position, hollis o'neil asks ‘what role race, and specifically (anti-)Blackness, plays in the representation, recognition and intelligibility of proper, (non-)normative gendered corporealities within the dominant imaginary and collective unconscious’. hollis o'neil reveals that an understanding of Diggs’ performance, particularly critiques of the performance, require grappling with the ‘precarious relationship that blacks have historically had to gender’.
SaraEllen Strongman’s ‘“Creating Justice Between Us”: Audre Lorde’s Theory of the Erotic as Coalitional Politics in the Women’s Movement’ draws on an archive of 1970s and 1980s black feminist poetry as a site for mapping the ‘politics of embodied eroticism’. Focusing on Lorde’s poetry, Strongman argues that for some black women, intimate relationships with white women were an important part of their feminist and anti-racist work, a ‘productive, enriching and necessary experience for her as she worked to build cross-racial political alliances’.
Finally, Justin Mann’s ‘Pessimistic Futurism: Survival and Reproduction in Octavia Butler’s Dawn’ examines Butler’s novel, and its protagonist Lilith who is ‘tasked with Awakening other humans and teaching them how to survive on Earth’. For Mann, ‘[p]essimistic futurism couches the prospects of tomorrow in the uncertainties conditioned by the past and present’, and the article unfolds as an interrogation of the politics of (black) survival and reproduction.
Indeed, this special section contributes to the interdisciplinary reach of black feminist and black queer studies. This is scholarship that pushes black feminist theory and black queer studies to continue their engagement with archival and methodological variety, and to deepen an investment in ‘funk’, in desire, pleasure, longing, sensuality, taste, touch and intimacy. It is important to note that in a US academic context still marked by hierarchy, this is also a body of work produced by junior faculty and doctoral students, a testament to the fact that the future of black erotics, black sexuality studies, black feminism and black queer studies will be vibrant, rich, exciting and marked by new and exciting questions and provocations.