Oct 29, 2017 | 1:45 PM - 3:15 PM | Main Loft

Sonia Mae Brown, PhD

Black Women, Black Female Sexuality, Social Justice, and Respectability Politics

Erotic Revolutionaries navigate the uncharted spaces where social constructionism, third-wave feminism, and black popular culture collide to locate a new site for sexuality studies that is theoretically innovative and politically subversive. Amber Rose, Karrine Stephans, and Rihanna are popular culture vixens, social justice activists, or in other words, erotic revolutionaries. Each woman, in her respective right, has used aspects of her sexuality to propel herself into the spotlight. These women as erotic revolutionaries dissolve typical constructions of public and private; for them, the private aspects of their lives influence their public persona. Rihanna, Rose, and Stephans are sex positive feminists who proclaim their need for desire, love, intimacy, and primal urgency. In his book, Erotic Revolutionaries; Black Women, Sexuality, and Popular Culture, Shayne Lee describes an erotic revolutionary as “a woman in pop culture who exhibits a strong proactive sexuality to challenge the politics of representation, sexual agency, and sexual autonomy.”  Erotic revolutionaries seek the ways that women enjoy the same erotic space as men without the labels. There are a range of pathological discourses that deny black woman access to or control over their sexualities. According to Lee, black women face pressure because of the hyper-sexualization of black female bodies, which derives from the legacy of slavery and segregation, and television’s horrible record with black female bodies. An erotic revolutionary fights for Black Female sexual agency. Amber Rose, Karrine Stephans, and Rihanna are sex positive pioneers who question black respectability politics in contemporary America. In their role as revolutionaries, they renegotiate their sexual identity, celebrate sexual agency and empowerment, and suggest new sexual scripts that challenge gendered double standards and societal standards. This paper aims to make a case for these women as social justice warriors. As erotic revolutionaries, these women redefine contemporary notions of black female sexuality.

Miriam Novick, PhD

Fake it Til You Make it: Boyden, Dolezal, and the Implications of Imposture for Social Justice

The recent public controversies surrounding ancestry and cultural identity claims made by Joseph Boyden and Rachel Dolezal have garnered a range of responses from defense to disgust. Reading both figures into a longer history, including an archive of literary deceptions pertaining to identity, I ask why particular groups (in this case Black and Indigenous communities) seem more appealing targets for imposters than others. For example, I contrast the transhistorical presence of “pretendians” (such as Grey Owl or Asa “Forrest” Carter) to more historically and locally specific cases of imposture such as Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Holocaust survival claims. Ultimately, I argue, imposture points to a confusion of (limited, contextual) discursive or public prominence with social and systemic power. It is neither accident nor coincidence that Dolezal was revealed as the Black Lives Matter movement refocused global attention on civil rights and racial injustice, or that the Boyden affair played out against the currents of Indigenous resurgence and the aftermath of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report and the impending inquiry into murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls; I suggest that imposters become public scandals at moments of particular tension between dominant groups and those who seek to challenge them. Similarly, I emphasize that imposters typically rely on intragroup conventions against questioning claims to belonging, conventions that emerge as a direct response to complex and violent histories. Rather than focusing on imposture as a product of identity’s social construction and permeable boundaries, I take its moments of public scandal as an opportunity to refocus on the stakes of social justice as a practice of deep structural transformation that requires engaging with difference rather than appropriating it wholesale.

Mirella Aparecida dos Santos Maria, MA

For other learning visuals: the representation of black women in Brazilian modernism art

The presentation of this abstract is a process to analyze and reflect how the representation of black women in the Brazilian visual arts and the detail process of learning images, that shows the presence of stereotypes about the black women body and our actions, even today. The moment is a being studied and post-abolition of slavery when Brazil undergoes a political change in its structure, starting to look for possibilities to take the image of former colony and raise the projection of a nation, breaking with a previous colonial and conservative structure. However, this idea of change still maintains a strong political / cultural structure of coloniality. Especially in the field of visual arts, the modernist movement uses the visibility of the black women to the meaning of nationality, trying to compilate in the body of the black women the representation of the Brazilian people. This line of thought creates for the black women the symbol of “mulata,” which became a reference in the Brazilian modernist art. Even though the figure of mulata to the Brazilian politic suggests a representation of our nation, this reinforces stereotypes about the black women’s body, and as described by the Brazilian sociologist Lélia Gozalez, is embedded with a natural sensuality, putting in a specific space of racialization, excluding other forms of relation and understanding of these women with the world. One research object will be analyzed the artwork of the one of the most recognized artists in this movement, Di Cavacanti, with the painting “Mulatas”, finished in 1927, which will be observed parallel works from the same period of Di Cavalcanti and contemporaries. Even with the initial proposal of valorization and positive transmission of Brazilian women, this others learnings of image propose observe the permanence of stereotypes in relation to gender and race.