Whose Body Is This? On the Cultural Possibilities of a Radical Black Sexual Praxis (original) (raw)

Bringing Flesh to Theory: Ethnography, Black Queer Theory, and Studying Black Sexualities

As Dorothy hoDgson tells us, the most common features of an ethnographic project involve "talking to, participating with, and observing the people who produce . . . texts, exploring the contexts of their ideas and actions, and often studying how their situations, ideas, and actions change over time." 1 Practically, this often involves spending months, and more often years, in a particular field site, where one develops relationships with members of the group, community, or institution being studied. Ethnographers are positioned in a place to observe, but also place their bodies on the line -participating, when possible, in the quotidian practices of the group. This observation and participation is captured in the form of "field notes" that may relay in the form of "thick description," what the ethnographer sees as she observes and participates in various cultural and social practices. 2 As such, ethnography requires reflexivity because the ethnographer must constantly consider how her body is affecting and is effected by the communities and institutions in which she is embedded. The benefit of this reflexive ethnographic approach is that, as Faye Ginsburg notes, it "has the capacity to reveal the fault lines in 633 communities, social movements, and institutions, which frequently run along class, race, and generational lines, and that might easily be missed by more deductive and quantitative methodologies." 3 Marlon M. Bailey's Butch Queens Up in Pumps, Jafari S. Allen's ¡Venceremos?, Mignon Moore's Invisible Families, and Mireille Miller-Young's A Taste for Brown Sugar represent an exciting trend within an interdisciplinary body of research that I am referring to as Black sexuality studies. What links these projects is their use of ethnographic methodologies to understand how Blackness informs racialized gender and sexuality in the everyday experiences of their interlocutors. In relying on ethnography, to varying degrees, they are in conversation with and expand upon methodological trends within Black feminist studies and Black queer studies. Further, the Black sexuality studies projects reviewed here question the (hetero)normative bent within the field of African American studies, the normatively white subject position that exists within queer theory, and the lack of attention to issues of sexual pleasure within Black feminist theory. They also challenge theorists of race and sexuality to move 3. Faye Ginsburg, "Ethnography and American Studies,"

No brokeback for black men: Pathologizing black male (homo)sexuality through downlow discourse

In recent years, the down low phenomenon has received unprecedented attention in both the popular and academic press. However, much of this work has focused on exploring whether men on the down low present a unique threat for HIV infection to black women. Currently, there exist very few scholarly or popular works exploring the meaning attached to the down low, not only by those who promote the label for academic studies or for media dispersal. In this essay, I shed new light on the meanings attached to the down low by the popular press, critically evaluating how it is used to create a category that is marked by an undesirable categorization of black men, and provide an argument as to why black men who have sex with men may adopt the label for themselves.

AIDS, Black Feminisms, and the Institutionalization of Queer Politics

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 2019

This essay considers the institutionalization of feminist and queer studies while women of color and queer and trans people of color continue to face structural barriers and systemic violence in U.S. higher education. Meanwhile, people of color face erasure from recent mainstream historical narratives about queer and AIDS activisms. The essay was originally presented at the 2017 annual meeting of the American Studies Association as part of a panel, and then published forum, organized by Nic John Ramos, to celebrate the twentieth-anniversary of Cathy J. Cohen's foundational scholarship in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?" It argues that Cohen's "Punks" essay remains a Black feminist pedagogical tool--in classroom settings and social movements, including Black Lives Matter--that demands that queer and AIDS politics keep at its center the enduring interventions that women of color feminisms, namely Black feminisms, continue to make into white supremacist heteropatriarchal violence and the AIDS pandemic. A forthcoming version of this essay, which draws more connections to globalization and ongoing social movements, will appear in the volume AIDS and the Distribution of Crises (Duke UP, 2020), co-edited by Jih-Fei Cheng, Alexandra Juhasz, and Nishant Shahani.

Abject Sexuality: Understanding Black Womanhood as a Site of Deviant Gender and Sexual Performance

Black women across the nation were recently galvanized in outrage and protest around and against arguably problematic representations of Black women, and at times more generally, racialized representations of women, in the media. The dialogue that arose in the aftermath of Miley Cyrus's 2013 VMA performance, Lily Allen's 2013 "Hard Out Here" music video or most recently, PAPER magazine's "Kim Kardashian Break the Internet" cover reveals, among other things, ignorance in American culture regarding the meanings surrounding gender, sexuality, and race, and the intersections between the three. This literature review will explore the social impact of gender, sexuality, and race, and the intersecting meanings attached to them. Further it will address ongoing conversations in the literature concerning the potential for a cultural shift toward social freedom from gender, sexual, and racial restrictions. The literature indicates that, while personal autonomy may expand the potential for sexual expression, such an expansion remains limited by anti-black racial ideology, which must be deconstructed as a prerequisite to disrupting sexual regulation.