UI Press | Edited by Adrienne D. Davis and the BSE Collective | Black Sexual Economies: Race and Sex in a Culture of Capital

Black Sexual Economies

Race and Sex in a Culture of Capital

New thinking about taboo, outlaw, deviant, and subversive black sexuality

A daring collaboration among scholars, Black Sexual Economies challenges thinking that sees black sexualities as a threat to normative ideas about sexuality, the family, and the nation. The essays highlight alternative and deviant gender and sexual identities, performances, and communities, and spotlights the sexual labor, sexual economy, and sexual agency to black social life. Throughout, the writers reveal the lives, everyday negotiations, and cultural or aesthetic interventions of black gender and sexual minorities while analyzing the systems and beliefs that structure the possibilities that exist for all black sexualities. They also confront the mechanisms of domination and subordination attached to the political and socioeconomic forces, cultural productions, and academic work that interact with the energies at the nexus of sexuality and race.

Contributors: Marlon M. Bailey, Lia T. Bascomb, Felice Blake, Darius Bost, Ariane Cruz, Adrienne D. Davis, Pierre Dominguez, David B. Green Jr., Jillian Hernandez, Cheryl D. Hicks, Xavier Livermon, Jeffrey McCune, Mireille Miller-Young, Angelique Nixon, Shana L. Redmond, Matt Richardson, L. H. Stallings, Anya M. Wallace, and Erica Lorraine Williams

"Black Sexual Economies is the first collection of its kind to mine the deeply rooted vestiges of late capitalism as they relate to black sexuality. Through analyses of slavery, pornography, popular culture, and music, among other topics, each essay in this carefully curated volume enlivens anew our attention to the stakes of theorizing black sexuality—the fact that we can never think about black sexuality without always thinking about the political economic conditions of its making. Indeed, Black Sexual Economies is a welcomed breath of fresh air to the now well-established field of black sexuality studies."--E. Patrick Johnson, editor of No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies

"To represent, to affirm, to understand, and to live black sexualities can be immeasurably difficult. The very foundations of politics, social life—and, as this volume argues, capitalist economies—in the modern world often hinge on pathologizing black people’s sexuality in order to exploit and to destroy black bodies and black lives. Black feminist innovator Adrienne Davis and the BSE Collective curate here essays that batter down and deftly navigate the thicket of lies that try to render 'black sexuality' unspeakable and unknowable, and point the way forward."--Darieck Scott, author of Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination

Adrienne D. Davis is William M. Van Cleve Professor of Law and Vice Provost at Washington University in St. Louis. The Black Sexual Economies (BSE) Collective is a working group of scholars that includes Marlon M. Bailey, Felice Blake, Adrienne D. Davis, Xavier Livermon, Jeffrey McCune Jr., Mireille Miller-Young, Matt Richardson, and L. H. Stallings.

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