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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 orig...
Unbought and Unbossed critically examines the ways black women writers in the 1970s and early 1980s deploy black female characters that transgress racial, gender, and especially sexual boundaries. Trimiko Melancon analyzes literary and cultural texts, including Toni Morrison’s Sula and Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place, in the socio-cultural and historical moments of their production. She shows how representations of black women in the American literary and cultural imagination diverge from stereotypes and constructions of “whiteness,” as well as constructions of female identity imposed by black nationalism. Drawing from black feminist and critical race theories, historical discourses on gender and sexuality, and literary criticism, Melancon explores the variety and complexity of black female identity. She illuminates how authors including Ann Allen Shockley, Alice Walker, and Gayl Jones engage issues of desire, intimacy, and independence to shed light on a more complex black identity, one ungoverned by rigid politics over-determined by race, gender and sexuality.
From the early 1970s to the mid-1990s, playwrights, novelists, filmmakers, visual artists, and prison writers from Sierra Leone and the United States brought a new attention to the events of the 1839 Amistad shipboard slave rebellion. As a testament of the human will to freedom, the story of the Amistad mutineers also describes the wide arc of the international circuits of capital, commerce, juridical power, and diplomacy that structured and reproduced the Atlantic slave trade for nearly four centuries. In Rebellious Histories, Matthew J. Christensen argues that for creative artists struggling to comprehend—and survive—pernicious manifestations of globalization like Sierra Leone's civil ...
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"Although Chris Claremont did not create the X-Men nor did he revamp them into the All-New, All-Different X-Men, he took over the book soon after its revamp and lifted the mutant team to meteoric success during his unprecedented 16-year run on the comic. Even 30 years later, it is his work on the X-Men that inspires movies, television shows, and other media. A large part of his success on the book was due to the powerful women in his work and the sophisticated gender dynamics that were groundbreaking at the time and helped to change pop culture. J. Andrew Deman, with the help of funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, has analyzed not only the hundreds of ...
"From the outset, women experienced infection and death at the hands of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Yet when the health crisis of AIDS first emerged in the United States in the early 1980s, scientists, doctors, and public health officials overlooked women in the response to a disease first associated with men. As the acknowledgment that women could contract HIV and die from AIDS grew, women became vulnerable to hostile government policies which threatened their health and rights. But they did not passively accept mistreatment; rather, they mobilized to frame the fight against the disease. Emma Day moves the historical understanding of the impact of HIV/AIDS on women beyond their exclusion from the initial medical response and the role they played as the supporters of gay men. Focusing on the activism of women who protested the co-occurring state neglect of their health care needs and state intervention into their lives, In Her Hands opens a timely new avenue to explore the relationship between the state and women's status in modern America"--
A powerful examination of the unsettling history of photography and its fraught relationship to global antiblackness. Since photography’s invention, black life has been presented as fraught, short, agonizingly filled with violence, and indifferent to intervention: living death—mortevivum—in a series of still frames that refuse a complex humanity. In Mortevivum, Kimberly Juanita Brown shows us how the visual logic of documentary photography and the cultural legacy of empire have come together to produce the understanding that blackness and suffering—and death—are inextricable. Brown traces this idea from the earliest images of the enslaved to the latest newspaper photographs of blac...
The Harlem Renaissance was a watershed moment for racial uplift, poetic innovation, sexual liberation, and female empowerment. Aphrodite’s Daughters introduces us to three amazing women who were at the forefront of all these developments, poetic iconoclasts who pioneered new and candidly erotic forms of female self-expression. Maureen Honey paints a vivid portrait of three African American women—Angelina Weld Grimké, Gwendolyn B. Bennett, and Mae V. Cowdery—who came from very different backgrounds but converged in late 1920s Harlem to leave a major mark on the literary landscape. She examines the varied ways these poets articulated female sexual desire, ranging from Grimké’s invoca...
The United States imprisons more of its citizens than any other nation in the world. To be sentenced to prison is to face systematic violence, humiliation, and, perhaps worst of all, separation from family and community. It is, to borrow Orlando Patterson’s term for the utter isolation of slavery, to suffer “social death.” In Prison and Social Death, Joshua Price exposes the unexamined cost that prisoners pay while incarcerated and after release, drawing upon hundreds of often harrowing interviews conducted with people in prison, parolees, and their families. Price argues that the prison separates prisoners from desperately needed communities of support from parents, spouses, and child...
Through an investigation of sexual interactions and relationship forms that include more than two people, from polyamory, to threesomes, to the complexity of the "down-low" Schippers explores the queer, feminist, and anti-racist potential of multipartnered sex and relationships