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Uses an intersectional and intertextual methodology to present a rigorous yet accessible study of Black queer women artists in theater and film.

In A Conditional Embrace, Kristyl D. Tift seeks to understand how Black queer women theater and film artists depict their own survival in heterosexist temporalities and spaces. Using the framework of lovin’ on—a theory inspired by Black feminist thought, performance theory, and queer theory—Tift closely reads the works of a selection of artists to investigate the “conditional embrace” of Black queer art in society. Her intersectional and intertextual methodology considers the text and body as part and parcel of performance work, allowing her to examine the multiple and complex intersections of identity at play in works meant to be read and performed. Tift puts the work of more visible artists such as Dee Rees, Sharon Bridgforth, and Staceyann Chin in direct conversation with lesser-known contributors to Black queer feminist performance such as Shirlene Holmes and Donnetta Lavinia Grays, analyzing not only their plays, installations, and poetry but also interviews, personal essays, performances, and more. Centering the works of artists situated, by birth or migration, in the Southern US and the Caribbean, A Conditional Embrace explores how artists at the margins of art and society represent Black queer women’s survival through processes of self-making, community-building, and homemaking.

A Taste for Brown Sugar boldly takes on representations of black women's sexuality in the porn industry. It is based on Mireille Miller-Young's extensive archival research and her interviews with dozens of women who have worked in the adult entertainment industry since the 1980s. The women share their thoughts about desire and eroticism, black women's sexuality and representation, and ambition and the need to make ends meet. Miller-Young documents their interventions into the complicated history of black women's sexuality, looking at individual choices, however small—a costume, a gesture, an improvised line—as small acts of resistance, of what she calls "illicit eroticism." Building on the work of other black feminist theorists, and contributing to the field of sex work studies, she seeks to expand discussion of black women's sexuality to include their eroticism and desires, as well as their participation and representation in the adult entertainment industry. Miller-Young wants the voices of black women sex workers heard, and the decisions they make, albeit often within material and industrial constraints, recognized as their own.

This insightful study places African American women's stardom in historical and industrial contexts by examining the star personae of five African American women: Dorothy Dandridge, Pam Grier, Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey, and Halle Berry. Interpreting each woman's celebrity as predicated on a brand of charismatic authority, Mia Mask shows how these female stars have ultimately complicated the conventional discursive practices through which blackness and womanhood have been represented in commercial cinema, independent film, and network television.

Mask examines the function of these stars in seminal yet underanalyzed films. She considers Dandridge's status as a sexual commodity in films such as Tamango, revealing the contradictory discourses regarding race and sexuality in segregation-era American culture. Grier's feminist-camp performances in sexploitation pictures Women in Cages and The Big Doll House and her subsequent blaxploitation vehicles Coffy and Foxy Brown highlight a similar tension between representing African American women as both objectified stereotypes and powerful, self-defining icons. Mask reads Goldberg's transforming habits in Sister Act and The Associate as representative of her unruly comedic routines, while Winfrey's daily television performance as self-made, self-help guru echoes Horatio Alger narratives of success. Finally, Mask analyzes Berry's meteoric success by acknowledging the ways in which Dandridge's career made Berry's possible.

In Mama’s Gun: Black Maternal Figures and the Politics of Transgression, Marlo D. David identifies five bold, new archetypes of black motherhood for the post-civil rights generation in order to imagine new ways of thinking about pervasive maternal stereotypes of black women. Rather than avoiding “negative” images of black motherhood, such as welfare queens, teen mothers, and “baby mamas,” Mama’s Gun centralizes these dispossessed figures and renames them as the Young Mother, the Blues Mama, the Surrogate, Big Mama, and the Mothership.
 
Taking inspiration from African American fiction, historical accounts of black life, Afrofuturism, and black popular culture in music and on screen, David turns her attention to Sapphire’s Push, Octavia Butler’s Dawn, and Suzan-Lori Parks’s Getting Mother’s Body as well as the performance art of Erykah Badu and the films of Tyler Perry. She draws out the implications of black maternal figures in these texts who balk at tradition and are far from “ideal.” David’s study shows how representations of blackness are deeply embedded in the neoliberal language of contemporary American politics and how black writers and performers resist such mainstream ideologies with their own transgressive black maternal figures.

The dramatic expansion of Black women into creative positions in television and film production since the 1990s has introduced a previously invisible range of themes in Black women’s lives to wide audiences. In Imani M. Cheers’s richly interdisciplinary Sacred Sisterhoods, contributors offer an overdue analysis and elevation of Black women’s creative authority in popular culture: its history, successes, influence, and future possibilities. Focusing on the theme of Black women’s friendship, star voices from across academia, journalism, the arts, and activism offer critical-cultural commentary and personal reflections on the evolution of Black women directors, writers, producers, and showrunners from the 1930s through 2023.

Creative visionaries from Debbie Allen to Quinta Brunson, along with shows and films from Living Single to Hidden Figures—and many others—receive their due in these rigorous, lively, and accessible essays. Spotlighting the nuances and normalcy of Black women’s sacred sisterhoods, contributors reveal the indelible mark modern Black consciousness and creative control leave on our popular culture every day in an anthology that will be essential to scholars and students of contemporary media, race, and gender, as well as to general readers.

Contributors:
Imani M. Cheers, Monique A. Gamble, Marquita Gammage, Kandace Harris, Crystal L. Holmes, Makeba Lavan, Rondrea Danielle Mathis, Miriam J. Petty-Adams, De Anna Reese, Randi Richardson, Beretta E. Smith-Shomade, Andrene M. Taylor, Kristen Warner, and Shauntae Brown White

In The Black Body in Ecstasy, Jennifer C. Nash rewrites black feminism's theory of representation. Her analysis moves beyond black feminism's preoccupation with injury and recovery to consider how racial fictions can create a space of agency and even pleasure for black female subjects. Nash's innovative readings of hardcore pornographic films from the 1970s and 1980s develop a new method of analyzing racialized pornography that focuses on black women's pleasures in blackness: delights in toying with and subverting blackness, moments of racialized excitement, deliberate enactments of hyperbolic blackness, and humorous performances of blackness that poke fun at the fantastical project of race. Drawing on feminist and queer theory, critical race theory, and media studies, Nash creates a new black feminist interpretative practice, one attentive to the messy contradictions—between delight and discomfort, between desire and degradation—at the heart of black pleasures.

Kara Keeling contends that cinema and cinematic processes had a profound significance for twentieth-century anticapitalist Black Liberation movements based in the United States. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s notion of “the cinematic”—not just as a phenomenon confined to moving-image media such as film and television but as a set of processes involved in the production and reproduction of social reality itself —Keeling describes how the cinematic structures racism, homophobia, and misogyny, and, in the process, denies viewers access to certain images and ways of knowing. She theorizes the black femme as a figure who, even when not explicitly represented within hegemonic cinematic formulations of raced and gendered subjectivities, nonetheless haunts those representations, threatening to disrupt them by making alternative social arrangements visible.

Keeling draws on the thought of Frantz Fanon, Angela Davis, Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, and others in addition to Deleuze. She pursues the elusive figure of the black femme through Haile Gerima’s film Sankofa, images of women in the Black Panther Party, Pam Grier’s roles in the blaxploitation films of the early 1970s, F. Gary Gray’s film Set It Off, and Kasi Lemmons’s Eve’s Bayou.