Comparative Methodologies in Black Sexuality, Queer, and Transgender Studies

Catalog description

What does it look, sound, smell, taste, feel like to be sexually liberated? Upon what grounds - material, affective, relational - are sexual freedoms cultivated? How might we find pleasures otherwise forestalled by colonialism and white supremacy in the present-future-past of Black life? Black sexualities and relationships are concepts that everyone thinks they know something about. Bom Crioulo: The Black Man and the Cabin Boy (1895), Birth of a Nation (1915), and the Moynihan Report (1965) are examples of social texts that position Black sexual-relational practices as problems needing to be fixed. Though media cultures across the African diaspora offer more capacious portraits of Black love, friendships, and family, Black eroticism continues to be censored in these representations for its impropriety and affront to Black respectability. Through contemporary Black scholarship, literature, visual culture and performing arts, this course engages Black Study as a roadmap towards radical sexual literacy. This knowledge - at once physical, emotional, and spiritual - is cultivated in ecologies that proliferate the pleasurable dimensions of Black sexualities, intimacies, desires, and erotics. We will develop this radical sexual literacy via a close reading practice for erotic materials that play with, satirize, or otherwise disavow the hold that slavery and its afterlives have on Black erotic possibilities. This course turns to Black queer and trans studies, transnational feminisms, porn studies, and visual-cultural anthropology to analyze erotic materials - and the people they (re)present - with care and generosity. Amidst ongoing sex wars that threaten to foreclose physical and digital ecologies of Black gender-sexual expression, it is imperative that we detail the pleasurable and liberatory potential of sex work, content creation, erotic writing, social dance, and other…