front cover of Black Female Sexualities
Black Female Sexualities
Melancon, Trimiko
Rutgers University Press, 2015
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.  
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front cover of Wild Women in the Whirlwind
Wild Women in the Whirlwind
Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance
Edited by Joanne M. Braxton and Andree Nicola McLaughlin
Rutgers University Press, 1989
"Pays an impressive tribute to the new renaissance in African-American literature."
--New York Times Book Review

"The cultural and literary achievements of black American women are examined and celebrated in some 20 enjoyable, erudite essays by prominent scholars, critics, and activists."
--Publishers Weekly

This book is the first comprehensive collection of critical and theoretical essays to explore the literary and multi-cultural traditions of Black American women in many genres over a broad span of time. The essays explore cultural and literary experience in a wide context and offer a variety of critical theoretical constructs in which to view that experience. The editors have written excellent introductions providing both historical and comparative discussions of the contemporary literary renaissance. The book also includes a valuable bibliography of selected English-language works by Black women in the Americas from the 1970s to the present.
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