Specialities: African American and African Diaspora Studies; Black Feminism; Black Queer Theory; Black Music Videos; Black Female Sexuality; Visual and Sonic Culture; Taste Culture; Film and Media Studies
“Why can we imagine the ending of the world, yet not the ending of colonialism?” –An ancestor
“Dear colonizer, your future is over” --An ancestor
My work focuses on the liberation of Black people globally with a particular interest in Black women ontologies, bodies, queerness, and sexual liberation. I am an Africana, Visual Culture, and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies scholar who, from these fields, brings an intersectional and liberatory lens to Black women's bodies. I interrogate the discourses on Black women’s genitalia and the under-theorized explicitness of the “Black female throat” as sites of conferred pleasure that are impacted by racial abjection. Black women's sexual liberation has received attention when it comes to the ways it has been conquered, however, I examine the figures and tropes of self-proclaimed freaks and hoes in pornography and popular and sonic culture. Theoretically, I center self-curations of blackness revealing the necessity of pleasure as an aesthetic context of performance to center non-market values such as love, care, joy, kindness, service, solidarity, and transformative and social justice. Self-curated Blackness provides an opportunity to explore paradigm shifts and efforts to create alternative futures of Black subjectivity and the sexual and corporal body. I return to the projects of the erotic and the concept of blackness as it has been reimagined and contested through creativity and the imagination. I explore meaningful revolutions in vision and resistance to anti-blackness to decolonize both the epistemology and popular understandings of Black women's sexual pleasure and present new ways of realizing Black sexual futures and freedoms.
I am a native of South-Central Los Angeles, California. I received a PhD in African American and African Diaspora Studies and Film and Media Studies from Indiana University, Bloomington. I hold a M.A. in Women’s Studies and M.Ed. from Claremont Graduate University. I graduated Summa Cum Laude from UCLA.
Remember, “we were never meant to survive.” - Audre Lorde, A Litany for Survival
I'm a Dangerous Black femme.