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Topics in African-American Studies (380-0-22)

Topic

Who's Afraid of Black Sexuality?

Instructors

Mark Ray Lockwood

Meeting Info

Harris Hall L04: Tues, Thurs 11:00AM - 12:20PM

Overview of class

This course invites students into an interdisciplinary, intersectional exploration of how Black sex and sexualities are imagined, governed, and experienced in the U.S. and beyond. Through an array of critical lenses, we will investigate the ways colonial, slavocratic, antiblack, capitalist, patriarchal, and heterosexist systems have shaped dominant discourses and practices surrounding Black sexuality. In undertaking this work, we will center Black voices, bodies, and desires, exploring how Black people have navigated, resisted, and redefined these constraints to articulate their own erotic lives.

Drawing from a rich array of sources—including music, film, visual art, and performance art, as well as texts in Black feminist theory, queer of color critique, histories of sexualities, critical ethnography, and porn studies—students will engage with Black sexuality as a charged site where power, pleasure, vulnerability, and freedom intersect. By the end of the course, students will have developed tools to critically analyze representations of Black sexuality, while also considering the radical potential of Black eroticism as a space of self-expression, joy, and resistance.