This article contends that black feminist conceptions of 'pussy power' have prematurely foreclosed an examination of both pussy and its powers, thereby missing the erotic potential inherent in a 'pussy power' that is distinctly black-what I term black pussy power. Taking Pam Grier's Blaxploitation performances in Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974) as my primary case studies, I use black pussy power as a conceptual framework through which to read Grier's performances of black eroticism, which enable her to resist racialised gendered sexual subjection and tap into modes of erotic agency otherwise denied to her. Moving away from delimited understandings of pussy as female genitalia or an objectified entity of female sexuality, I mobilise black queer feminist theorisations of the 'arbitrary relation between black sex and gender' to theorise the polymorphous potential of black pussy to signify beyond the narrow gender and sexual grammars currently available to us. 1 At the same time, black pussy's discursive connection to black feminine sexuality animates the insurgent potential of black pussy power to secure nominal black freedoms in the face of state-sanctioned infringements on black erotic life.
Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West: A Commemoration (Re)turning to "Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women": A Black Feminist Forum on the Culture of Dissemblance Shoniqua Roach O ne of the most remarked upon but least analyzed themes in Black women's history deals with Black women's sexual vulnerability and powerlessness as victims of rape and domestic violence," declares black feminist historian Darlene Clark Hine in the opening lines of her 1989 Signs article "Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West: Preliminary Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance" (912). Thirty years after the publication of this article, black feminists are still grappling with the import and impact of Hine's conception of "the culture of dissemblance," which she describes as "a cult of secrecy" that twentieth-century black women developed "to protect the sanctity of inner aspects of their lives" in the face of institutionalized rape and the constant threat of it (915). "The culture of dissemblance" disrupts the aforementioned historical void and circumvents violent historical documentation by white public institutions, which are predicated at least in part on the denial of black female privacy. With this analytical framework, Hine demonstrates the importance of not only carefully reclaiming black women's narratives of sexual exploitation and violence, and ethically attending to those intentionally left hidden, but also of developing an array of analytical frameworks that "allow us to understand why Black women behave in certain ways and how they acquired agency" (920). This implicit call to honor black privacy while carefully locating black agency, to apprehend the gendered and sexual specificities of antiblack violence I would like to thank Darlene Clark Hine for her important and brilliant work and the contributors to this symposium for their labor and commitment to exemplifying the continued relevance of Hine's work. And a very special thanks goes to L. H. Stallings for various suggestions on the curation of this symposium.
This essay reflects on the theoretical and pedagogical utility of centering a Black feminist approach in the queer/sexuality studies classroom, an antiracist praxis the author conceptualizes as Black feminism as sexuality study.
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