In Unseen Flesh Nessette Falu explores how Black lesbians in Brazil define and sustain their well-being and self-worth against persistent racial, sexual, class, and gender-based prejudice. Focusing on the trauma caused by interactions with gynecologists, Falu draws on in-depth ethnographic work among the Black lesbian community to reveal their profoundly negative affective experiences within Brazil’s deeply biased medical system. In the face of such entrenched, intersectional intimate violence, Falu’s informants actively pursue well-being in ways that channel their struggle for self-worth toward broader goals of social change, self care, and communal action. Demonstrating how the racist and heteronormative underpinnings of gynecology erase Black lesbian subjecthood through mental, emotional, and physical traumas, Falu explores the daily resistance and abolitionist practices of worth-making that claim and sustain Black queer identity and living. Falu rethinks the medicalization of race, sex, and gender in Brazil and elsewhere while offering a new perspective on Black queer life through well-being grounded in relationships, socioeconomic struggles, the erotic, and freedom strivings.

Nessette Falu is Assistant Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

-- Jafari S. Allen, author of There’s a Disco Ball between Us: A Theory of Black Gay Life

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction. Bearing Witness to Unseen Flesh  1
1. The Virgin Who Lives within Her Erotic Worth  21
2. Unseen Flesh: Gynecological Trauma, Emotional Power, and Intimate Sociomedical Violence  51
Interlude One: Angela  77
3. The Social Clinic: Mapping the Social and Colonial World of Gynecology  79
Interlude Two: It Doesn’t Matter  111
4. Are We Ethical Subjects? Seeing Ourselves in Shapeshifting Ethics  113
5. Bem-Estar Negra: Lésbicas Negras’ Beautiful Experiments of Worth  141
Notes  169
References  179
Index  195