Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Celestial Bodies
- Part I Extraction and Abstraction
- Part II Black Optics
- Part III Quare Bodies
- 13 Body of Knowledge
- 14 The Black Body, Violence, and Religion
- 15 Black Cripistemologies
- 16 Black Erotic Bodies
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To …
16 - Black Erotic Bodies
from Part III - Quare Bodies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 May 2024
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Celestial Bodies
- Part I Extraction and Abstraction
- Part II Black Optics
- Part III Quare Bodies
- 13 Body of Knowledge
- 14 The Black Body, Violence, and Religion
- 15 Black Cripistemologies
- 16 Black Erotic Bodies
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To …
Summary
This chapter meditates on how Black erotic bodies manifest in a white supremacist world. It contends that said bodies congeal through an amalgamation of fungible gender and material/discursive dispossession. These inheritances afford Black people the opportunity to conjure fugitive freedom practices, such as multiplicity, which enable Black people to harness erotic power in the pursuit of self-determined notions of pleasure and intimacy with themselves and within Black communities. To buttress my argument, I draw on the work of Akwaeke Emezi – namely, their debut novel Freshwater and an essay about their gender transition surgeries – and Audre Lorde’s classic essay, “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” to illustrate how multiplicity is a freedom practiced undergirded by erotic power such that practitioners need not minimize or eliminate contradictory or complex aspects of themselves in order to access pleasure and intimacy along personal and interpersonal registers.
Keywords
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to the Black Body in American Literature , pp. 233 - 244Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024