Jillian Hernandez | University of Florida (original) (raw)
Papers by Jillian Hernandez
Black Sexual Economies, 2019
The Book of Joy is an exhibition for which we have compiled an eclectic collection of images, poe... more The Book of Joy is an exhibition for which we have compiled an eclectic collection of images, poems, and interview transcripts culled from our research on queer young black women’s sexualities and arts-based community work. Taking our cue from the practice and passion of Zanele Muholi, a black queer South African artist and activist based in Johannesburg who generates portraits of queer communities, we purposefully stray from our scholarly essay writing practice here in order to situate an evocative and more direct accounting of black queer young women’s erotics within the larger framework of this anthology. Although the work of our participants is nevertheless mediated through our process of collection, selection, framing, and ordering, we, like Zanele, believe that the creative expression and documentation of queer black lives is a significant politic. This project stems from the desire to witness and consume representations of Black female sexuality that are diverse, full, and co...
NWSA Journal, 2009
Often described by Latinas/os in South Florida as a low-class, slutty, tough, and crass young wom... more Often described by Latinas/os in South Florida as a low-class, slutty, tough, and crass young woman, the hypervisible figure known as the "chonga" is practically invisible in feminist scholarship. This paper examines the meanings associated with the chonga identity and the emergence of visual representations of chongas in order to understand how these bodies produce and reflect discourses about Latina girls' sexuality, ethnicity, and class. I argue that the sexual-aesthetic excess of chonga bodies complicates dichotomies of "good" versus "bad" girls and signifies non-normative politics that trouble the disciplining of behavior and dress for girls of color. I offer sexual-aesthetic excess as a concept in order to theorize modes of dress and comportment that are often considered "too much": too ethnic, too sexy, too young, too cheap, too loud.My arguments are based on a questionnaire regarding chongas that I administered to South Florida res...
Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, 2021
This essay engages the activism of Oluwatoyin “Toyin” Salau, along with Black feminist cultural p... more This essay engages the activism of Oluwatoyin “Toyin” Salau, along with Black feminist cultural productions such as the 2019 song “Almeda” by Solange and Melina Matsoukas’s 2019 film Queen and Slim, to offer a cimarrona approach for practicing Florida study. The cimarrona is a rebellious being who can lead us to apply a radical lens for understanding life, freedom struggles, and death in Florida—one that underscores the refusal of Blackness, which we can understand as a form of fugitivity. I argue that these Black feminist works evoke Florida as a Black Atlantic site and freedom route.
Building on the methodology of critical fabulation that she developed in “Venus in Two Acts,” Har... more Building on the methodology of critical fabulation that she developed in “Venus in Two Acts,” Hartman eschews the voice of the knowing analyst and embraces instead an inspired prose that emerges from an intoxication with and love for the misfits who appear in the diary entries of white women researchers and landlords, newspaper accounts, and the studies of figures like the sociologist W E B Du Bois as problems to be solved 1 Rather than attempt to fill in the gaps to theorize the absence of Black women and queers, or to “correct” these framings, she instead conjures the fullness of their lives through evocative storytelling and artistic, conceptual use of newspaper clippings and photographs The book lovingly follows the movements of nameless women and girls whose traces emerge in sociological graphs and voyeuristic photos, and engages the lives of public figures and entertainers such as Bentley and Edna Thomas The rhinestones that bedazzle Thomas’s splayed vulva, positioned centrall...
Abstract:This article analyzes two projects by Sadie Barnette, "Dear 1968 . . ." (2017)... more Abstract:This article analyzes two projects by Sadie Barnette, "Dear 1968 . . ." (2017) and Black Sky (2018), that draw from the 500+-page surveillance file the Federal Bureau of Investigation collected on her father Rodney Barnette, who was a member of the Black Panther Party's chapter in Los Angeles. Barnette modifies the surveillance file with glitter paper and pink markings and situates them in immersive installations that include bedazzled family photographs and icons, such as Hello Kitty, that reference her girlhood in the 1980s. I discuss how the feminine semiotics in these projects simultaneously redact information in the FBI file to thwart the spectacularization of Black suffering, while annotating it with her decorative gestures as a form of intimate recognition for her father and Black people, as well as a Black feminist critique of white oppression and hetero-patriarchal ethno-nationalisms. I pay particular attention to how the feminine aesthetics in these ...
Aesthetics of Excess
I am writing these acknowledgments as the covid-19 crisis unfolds here in the U.S. I am reminded ... more I am writing these acknowledgments as the covid-19 crisis unfolds here in the U.S. I am reminded of our bodily interconnectedness and vulnerability, and I am thinking of those I care for, and those who have cared for me. I first want to thank the girls and young women who shared space with me in Women on the Rise! This book is in loving dialogue with their artistry, knowledge, and spirit. I send special thanks to
Visual Arts Research, 2021
This article analyzes two projects by Sadie Barnette, “Dear 1968 . . .” (2017) and Black Sky (201... more This article analyzes two projects by Sadie Barnette, “Dear 1968 . . .” (2017) and Black
Sky (2018), that draw from the 500+-page surveillance file the Federal Bureau of Investigation collected on her father Rodney Barnette, who was a member of the Black
Panther Party’s chapter in Los Angeles. Barnette modifies the surveillance file with glitter
paper and pink markings and situates them in immersive installations that include
bedazzled family photographs and icons, such as Hello Kitty, that reference her girlhood
in the 1980s. I discuss how the feminine semiotics in these projects simultaneously redact information in the FBI file to thwart the spectacularization of Black suffering, while
annotating it with her decorative gestures as a form of intimate recognition for her
father and Black people, as well as a Black feminist critique of white oppression and
hetero-patriarchal ethno-nationalisms. I pay particular attention to how the feminine
aesthetics in these works articulate Black girlhood as a site of visionary potential.
Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, 2021
This essay engages the activism of Oluwatoyin "Toyin" Salau, along with Black feminist cultural p... more This essay engages the activism of Oluwatoyin "Toyin" Salau, along with Black feminist cultural productions such as the 2019 song "Almeda" by Solange and Melina Matsoukas's 2019 film Queen and Slim, to offer a cimarrona approach for practicing Florida study. The cimarrona is a rebellious being who can lead us to apply a radical lens for understanding life, freedom struggles, and death in Florida-one that underscores the refusal of Blackness, which we can understand as a form of fugitivity. I argue that these Black feminist works evoke Florida as a Black Atlantic site and freedom route.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, 2020
Racialized sexuality is a term that describes the linking of racial attributes to sexual comportm... more Racialized sexuality is a term that describes the linking of racial attributes to sexual comportment. Racialized sexualities have been produced through colonial conquest in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. European discourses framed colonized subjects as racial and thus sexual others-as different kinds of human beings with deviant erotic practices. The colonial and racist underpinnings of religion, law, and science have produced pervasive tropes of, for example, the sexual excess of Native and African peoples and the sexual submissiveness of Asian peoples. These stereotypes have had an enduring impact on the representations of racialized people's sexual subjectivities in art and media, in addition to academic knowledge production. Representations of the insatiable lust and spitfire of Black and Latina women, the sexual submissiveness of Asian women, the lack of Asian men and the predatory sexualities of Black men, stem from centuries of discursive circulation in fields ranging from biology to anthropology, which in turned shaped how such tropes have been taken up and reproduced in cultural production.
There are few conceptual frameworks for tarrying with racialized gendered Latinx surface beyond a... more There are few conceptual frameworks for tarrying with racialized gendered Latinx surface beyond analyses of representation. One entry point could be the beauty mark, the made-up face, and objects/materials such as glitter, nails, and rolos (hair rollers) – those surfaces and things that bind me in memory to my grandmother, and, by extension, to other women in my family as well. This text enacts a performative and theoretical exploration of the ontological contours of femme Latinx beauty practice to craft a poetics about the relationalities, recognitions, and femme generations that these surfaces engender. It juxtaposes
authoethnographic prose that conjures the body work of the author’s
grandmother with analyses of cultural production by Latinx artists Patricia Zambrano, Mujerista Market (Salina Zazueta-Beltrán), @anythingforselenaaas, Zahira Kelly, and others to evoke how making beauty marks haunts us, makes us possible, and brings us together in becoming, love, and loss.
Journal of Popular Music Studies , 2016
What do the politics of representation present in the realm of knowledge production? This roundta... more What do the politics of representation present in the realm of knowledge production? This roundtable of scholars of gender, sexuality, Black, and Latino studies circle the discussion around this question by positioning politics of representation and respectability within the realm of popular culture, pornography studies, and other highly consumed forms of media. The discussion also points toward themes of intramural policing, and other forms of oppression performed within Black and Brown communities as ways to understand how respectability politics are martialed in the public sphere.
Internationally renowned contemporary artist Wangechi Mutu is known for her collages that craft s... more Internationally renowned contemporary artist Wangechi Mutu is known for her collages that craft sexual and grotesque women's bodies by combining images of models from high fashion magazines, racialized pornography, and ethnographic photographs of African villagers. The discussion of gender in relation to Mutu's practice has been overwhelmingly framed through issues of sexual violence, exploitation, and trauma suffered by black women. Mutu's description of black pornography as obscene and aesthetically debased in contrast to more professionally styled mainstream porn featuring white women is the particular point of departure for this article. The artist appears to reference her own work in terms of the politics of class disgust and engages tropes of racialized pornography in order to demonstrate both the harm they pose to black women and her distance from them. However, another reading is possible, one in which Mutu unintentionally reclaims these tropes and exposes their potential erotic and political power for women of color. I explore how the grotesque aesthetics Mutu employs may conjure ambivalent responses to the erotic presentation of black women's bodies, and employ a multiperspectival approach that reckons with my own conflicting responses to her practice and the various stances on sexual representations of blackness articulated by the artist herself and by concerned scholars in gender, race, sexuality, art historical, and visual studies. Beyond expanding the standard interpretations of racialized gender in Mutu's work, tarrying with ambivalence may offer more complex pathways for theorizing sexual freedom, difference, and feminism with the nuance demanded of women of color’s varying erotic subjectivities and embodiments.
This essay puts forward a notion of "raunch aesthetics," theorizing raunch as an aesthetic, perfo... more This essay puts forward a notion of "raunch aesthetics," theorizing raunch as an aesthetic, performative, and vernacular practice: an explicit mode of sexual expression that transgresses norms of privacy and respectability. Raunch aesthetics describe creative practices that often blend humor and sexual explicitness to launch cultural critiques, generate pleasure for minority audiences, and affirm queer lives. The author activates her formulation of raunch in analyzing Yo! Majesty, a hip hop group comprised of black female emcees who openly describe their sexual desire for women, and explores how the queer youth of color she works with have responded to their music. Working beyond the unexamined moralisms that give critiques of raunch culture their legitimacy, the author argues that Yo! Majesty's raunch aesthetics transmit queer and feminist teachings. While celebrating carnal pleasures, these artists critique heterosexism, subvert narratives about the incompatibility of belief in Christ and queer sexualities, and trouble notions concerning the emancipation of coming out of the closet and declaring a stable homosexual identity. In demonstrating how raunch aesthetics generate consciousness raising, the author discusses how her youth participants critically read and consume hip hop while negotiating unwieldy meanings of sexuality and gender presentation.
Black Sexual Economies, 2019
The Book of Joy is an exhibition for which we have compiled an eclectic collection of images, poe... more The Book of Joy is an exhibition for which we have compiled an eclectic collection of images, poems, and interview transcripts culled from our research on queer young black women’s sexualities and arts-based community work. Taking our cue from the practice and passion of Zanele Muholi, a black queer South African artist and activist based in Johannesburg who generates portraits of queer communities, we purposefully stray from our scholarly essay writing practice here in order to situate an evocative and more direct accounting of black queer young women’s erotics within the larger framework of this anthology. Although the work of our participants is nevertheless mediated through our process of collection, selection, framing, and ordering, we, like Zanele, believe that the creative expression and documentation of queer black lives is a significant politic. This project stems from the desire to witness and consume representations of Black female sexuality that are diverse, full, and co...
NWSA Journal, 2009
Often described by Latinas/os in South Florida as a low-class, slutty, tough, and crass young wom... more Often described by Latinas/os in South Florida as a low-class, slutty, tough, and crass young woman, the hypervisible figure known as the "chonga" is practically invisible in feminist scholarship. This paper examines the meanings associated with the chonga identity and the emergence of visual representations of chongas in order to understand how these bodies produce and reflect discourses about Latina girls' sexuality, ethnicity, and class. I argue that the sexual-aesthetic excess of chonga bodies complicates dichotomies of "good" versus "bad" girls and signifies non-normative politics that trouble the disciplining of behavior and dress for girls of color. I offer sexual-aesthetic excess as a concept in order to theorize modes of dress and comportment that are often considered "too much": too ethnic, too sexy, too young, too cheap, too loud.My arguments are based on a questionnaire regarding chongas that I administered to South Florida res...
Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, 2021
This essay engages the activism of Oluwatoyin “Toyin” Salau, along with Black feminist cultural p... more This essay engages the activism of Oluwatoyin “Toyin” Salau, along with Black feminist cultural productions such as the 2019 song “Almeda” by Solange and Melina Matsoukas’s 2019 film Queen and Slim, to offer a cimarrona approach for practicing Florida study. The cimarrona is a rebellious being who can lead us to apply a radical lens for understanding life, freedom struggles, and death in Florida—one that underscores the refusal of Blackness, which we can understand as a form of fugitivity. I argue that these Black feminist works evoke Florida as a Black Atlantic site and freedom route.
Building on the methodology of critical fabulation that she developed in “Venus in Two Acts,” Har... more Building on the methodology of critical fabulation that she developed in “Venus in Two Acts,” Hartman eschews the voice of the knowing analyst and embraces instead an inspired prose that emerges from an intoxication with and love for the misfits who appear in the diary entries of white women researchers and landlords, newspaper accounts, and the studies of figures like the sociologist W E B Du Bois as problems to be solved 1 Rather than attempt to fill in the gaps to theorize the absence of Black women and queers, or to “correct” these framings, she instead conjures the fullness of their lives through evocative storytelling and artistic, conceptual use of newspaper clippings and photographs The book lovingly follows the movements of nameless women and girls whose traces emerge in sociological graphs and voyeuristic photos, and engages the lives of public figures and entertainers such as Bentley and Edna Thomas The rhinestones that bedazzle Thomas’s splayed vulva, positioned centrall...
Abstract:This article analyzes two projects by Sadie Barnette, "Dear 1968 . . ." (2017)... more Abstract:This article analyzes two projects by Sadie Barnette, "Dear 1968 . . ." (2017) and Black Sky (2018), that draw from the 500+-page surveillance file the Federal Bureau of Investigation collected on her father Rodney Barnette, who was a member of the Black Panther Party's chapter in Los Angeles. Barnette modifies the surveillance file with glitter paper and pink markings and situates them in immersive installations that include bedazzled family photographs and icons, such as Hello Kitty, that reference her girlhood in the 1980s. I discuss how the feminine semiotics in these projects simultaneously redact information in the FBI file to thwart the spectacularization of Black suffering, while annotating it with her decorative gestures as a form of intimate recognition for her father and Black people, as well as a Black feminist critique of white oppression and hetero-patriarchal ethno-nationalisms. I pay particular attention to how the feminine aesthetics in these ...
Aesthetics of Excess
I am writing these acknowledgments as the covid-19 crisis unfolds here in the U.S. I am reminded ... more I am writing these acknowledgments as the covid-19 crisis unfolds here in the U.S. I am reminded of our bodily interconnectedness and vulnerability, and I am thinking of those I care for, and those who have cared for me. I first want to thank the girls and young women who shared space with me in Women on the Rise! This book is in loving dialogue with their artistry, knowledge, and spirit. I send special thanks to
Visual Arts Research, 2021
This article analyzes two projects by Sadie Barnette, “Dear 1968 . . .” (2017) and Black Sky (201... more This article analyzes two projects by Sadie Barnette, “Dear 1968 . . .” (2017) and Black
Sky (2018), that draw from the 500+-page surveillance file the Federal Bureau of Investigation collected on her father Rodney Barnette, who was a member of the Black
Panther Party’s chapter in Los Angeles. Barnette modifies the surveillance file with glitter
paper and pink markings and situates them in immersive installations that include
bedazzled family photographs and icons, such as Hello Kitty, that reference her girlhood
in the 1980s. I discuss how the feminine semiotics in these projects simultaneously redact information in the FBI file to thwart the spectacularization of Black suffering, while
annotating it with her decorative gestures as a form of intimate recognition for her
father and Black people, as well as a Black feminist critique of white oppression and
hetero-patriarchal ethno-nationalisms. I pay particular attention to how the feminine
aesthetics in these works articulate Black girlhood as a site of visionary potential.
Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, 2021
This essay engages the activism of Oluwatoyin "Toyin" Salau, along with Black feminist cultural p... more This essay engages the activism of Oluwatoyin "Toyin" Salau, along with Black feminist cultural productions such as the 2019 song "Almeda" by Solange and Melina Matsoukas's 2019 film Queen and Slim, to offer a cimarrona approach for practicing Florida study. The cimarrona is a rebellious being who can lead us to apply a radical lens for understanding life, freedom struggles, and death in Florida-one that underscores the refusal of Blackness, which we can understand as a form of fugitivity. I argue that these Black feminist works evoke Florida as a Black Atlantic site and freedom route.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, 2020
Racialized sexuality is a term that describes the linking of racial attributes to sexual comportm... more Racialized sexuality is a term that describes the linking of racial attributes to sexual comportment. Racialized sexualities have been produced through colonial conquest in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. European discourses framed colonized subjects as racial and thus sexual others-as different kinds of human beings with deviant erotic practices. The colonial and racist underpinnings of religion, law, and science have produced pervasive tropes of, for example, the sexual excess of Native and African peoples and the sexual submissiveness of Asian peoples. These stereotypes have had an enduring impact on the representations of racialized people's sexual subjectivities in art and media, in addition to academic knowledge production. Representations of the insatiable lust and spitfire of Black and Latina women, the sexual submissiveness of Asian women, the lack of Asian men and the predatory sexualities of Black men, stem from centuries of discursive circulation in fields ranging from biology to anthropology, which in turned shaped how such tropes have been taken up and reproduced in cultural production.
There are few conceptual frameworks for tarrying with racialized gendered Latinx surface beyond a... more There are few conceptual frameworks for tarrying with racialized gendered Latinx surface beyond analyses of representation. One entry point could be the beauty mark, the made-up face, and objects/materials such as glitter, nails, and rolos (hair rollers) – those surfaces and things that bind me in memory to my grandmother, and, by extension, to other women in my family as well. This text enacts a performative and theoretical exploration of the ontological contours of femme Latinx beauty practice to craft a poetics about the relationalities, recognitions, and femme generations that these surfaces engender. It juxtaposes
authoethnographic prose that conjures the body work of the author’s
grandmother with analyses of cultural production by Latinx artists Patricia Zambrano, Mujerista Market (Salina Zazueta-Beltrán), @anythingforselenaaas, Zahira Kelly, and others to evoke how making beauty marks haunts us, makes us possible, and brings us together in becoming, love, and loss.
Journal of Popular Music Studies , 2016
What do the politics of representation present in the realm of knowledge production? This roundta... more What do the politics of representation present in the realm of knowledge production? This roundtable of scholars of gender, sexuality, Black, and Latino studies circle the discussion around this question by positioning politics of representation and respectability within the realm of popular culture, pornography studies, and other highly consumed forms of media. The discussion also points toward themes of intramural policing, and other forms of oppression performed within Black and Brown communities as ways to understand how respectability politics are martialed in the public sphere.
Internationally renowned contemporary artist Wangechi Mutu is known for her collages that craft s... more Internationally renowned contemporary artist Wangechi Mutu is known for her collages that craft sexual and grotesque women's bodies by combining images of models from high fashion magazines, racialized pornography, and ethnographic photographs of African villagers. The discussion of gender in relation to Mutu's practice has been overwhelmingly framed through issues of sexual violence, exploitation, and trauma suffered by black women. Mutu's description of black pornography as obscene and aesthetically debased in contrast to more professionally styled mainstream porn featuring white women is the particular point of departure for this article. The artist appears to reference her own work in terms of the politics of class disgust and engages tropes of racialized pornography in order to demonstrate both the harm they pose to black women and her distance from them. However, another reading is possible, one in which Mutu unintentionally reclaims these tropes and exposes their potential erotic and political power for women of color. I explore how the grotesque aesthetics Mutu employs may conjure ambivalent responses to the erotic presentation of black women's bodies, and employ a multiperspectival approach that reckons with my own conflicting responses to her practice and the various stances on sexual representations of blackness articulated by the artist herself and by concerned scholars in gender, race, sexuality, art historical, and visual studies. Beyond expanding the standard interpretations of racialized gender in Mutu's work, tarrying with ambivalence may offer more complex pathways for theorizing sexual freedom, difference, and feminism with the nuance demanded of women of color’s varying erotic subjectivities and embodiments.
This essay puts forward a notion of "raunch aesthetics," theorizing raunch as an aesthetic, perfo... more This essay puts forward a notion of "raunch aesthetics," theorizing raunch as an aesthetic, performative, and vernacular practice: an explicit mode of sexual expression that transgresses norms of privacy and respectability. Raunch aesthetics describe creative practices that often blend humor and sexual explicitness to launch cultural critiques, generate pleasure for minority audiences, and affirm queer lives. The author activates her formulation of raunch in analyzing Yo! Majesty, a hip hop group comprised of black female emcees who openly describe their sexual desire for women, and explores how the queer youth of color she works with have responded to their music. Working beyond the unexamined moralisms that give critiques of raunch culture their legitimacy, the author argues that Yo! Majesty's raunch aesthetics transmit queer and feminist teachings. While celebrating carnal pleasures, these artists critique heterosexism, subvert narratives about the incompatibility of belief in Christ and queer sexualities, and trouble notions concerning the emancipation of coming out of the closet and declaring a stable homosexual identity. In demonstrating how raunch aesthetics generate consciousness raising, the author discusses how her youth participants critically read and consume hip hop while negotiating unwieldy meanings of sexuality and gender presentation.
Duke University Press, 2020
Aesthetics of Excess examines how the bodies of women and girls of color are racialized through c... more Aesthetics of Excess examines how the bodies of women and girls of color are racialized through cultural discourses of aesthetic value that mark them as excessively sexual “others,” and how in turn, aesthetic value is generated through the presentation of their bodies. Finding that the sexualized styles of working class Black and Latina women and girls generate cultural capital when appropriated in contemporary art, while drawing mockery and denigration in everyday contexts, the book argues that aesthetics of excess are targeted for regulation when embodied by women and girls of color because they signify forms of class, gender, sexual, and racial difference that agitate norms of respectability and social mobility. Conversely, when classified as “art,” these aesthetics generate value in galleries and museums as ironic, streetwise, and edgy. The book employs participatory research with young women of color, critical readings of art and popular culture, and autoethnography to provide new frameworks for understanding the relationships between cultural production and racialized bodies that can be variously exploitative and socially transformative. The book is grounded in Hernandez’s community arts work with Black and Latina girls through Women on the Rise!, an outreach project she established at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, Florida.