Black pussy power: Performing acts of black eroticism in Pam Grier’s Blaxploitation films

Abstract

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.

An Ode to Black British Girls

“…Black feminist scholars, like Shoniqua Roach and Jennifer Nash, reimagine and ascribe new meanings to Black women's genitalia and eroticism by moving beyond discourse on Black women's bodies and pleasure being inextricably linked to sexual deviance, in turn foregrounding new frameworks to read Black women's harnessing and performance of the erotic as a tool for liberation, and resistance to "racialized gendered sexual subjection." 16 As Francesca Sobande uncovers in her work, Black feminism has shaped millennial depictions of Black women in television, specifically through projects like Issa Rae's Insecure (2016-) and Coel's Chewing Gum. Sobande's analysis of the two shows doesn't merely ascribe to the notion that an exploration of Black womanhood equates "Black feminist media."…”