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 Pedagogies of Interconnectedness
Pedagogies of Interconnectedness
Feminist-Queer Collaborative Transformation
Edited by Isis Nusair and Barbara Shaw
University of Illinois Press, 2025
A generation of scholar-teacher-activists have moved beyond collaborating in theory to embodying, engaging in, and sharing how they practice their pedagogy. Isis Nusair and Barbara L. Shaw edit essays that link feminist, queer, anti-racist, decolonial, and disability theory and practice while using intersectional, transnational, and interdisciplinary approaches to explore how the personal remains political.

The contributors describe ways of building communities within and beyond academic programs and examine what it means to engage in community-building work and action across institutional boundaries. In Part One, the essayists focus on the centrality of community building and reinterpreting bodies of knowledge with students, staff, faculty, and community members. Part Two looks at bringing transnational approaches to feminist collaborations in ways that challenge the classroom’s central place in knowledge production. Part Three explores organic collaborations in and beyond the classroom.

A practical and much-needed resource, Pedagogies of Interconnectedness offers cutting-edge ideas for collaboration in pedagogy, education justice, community-based activities, and liberatory worldmaking.

Contributors: Jordyn Alderman, Leen Al-Fatafta, Meryl Altman, María Claudia André, Andrea N. Baldwin, Carolyn Beer, Luisa Bieri, Rebecca Dawson, Misty De Berry, Danielle M. DeMuth, Emily Fairchild, Sara Youngblood Gregory, Letizia Guglielmo, Jeremy Hall, K. Melchor Hall, Linh U. Hua, Christine Keating, Charlotte Meehan, Brayden Milam, Isis Nusair, Montserrat Pérez-Toribio, Andrea Putala, Ariella Rotramel, Ann Russo, Kimberly Sanchez, Barbara L. Shaw, M. Gabriela Torres, Ayana K. Weekley, and Sharon R. Wesoky

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