Black Genders and Sexualities

Cutting across the humanities and social sciences, and situated in sites across the black diaspora, the work in this book collectively challenges notions that we are living in a post-racial age and instead argue for the specificity of black cultural experiences as shaped by gender and sex.

'This is a major contribution to a growing body of work by an amazing coterie of scholar activists, who, with skill, eloquence and passion are not only challenging the myth of post-racialism, but complicating and deepening our understanding of the intimacies of race, sex, gender, class, geography and power. McGlotten and Davis offer a compelling and engaging set of essays: a must read for anyone concerned with the complexities of the twenty-first century Black experience and what a more hopeful future might look like.'-Barbara Ransby, professor and director of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago and author of the award-winning biography, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement

'Black Genders and Sexualities is an important book that demonstrates the vitality of scholarship exploring sex and gender in the African diaspora. The authors in this volume come from a range of disciplines and they cross disciplinary boundaries to produce insightful interrogations of the construction, embodiment, enjoyment and disruption of black genders and sexualities. Moving from Detroit to Rio de Janeiro to Havana and beyond, the global analysis provided here never seems abstract nor anchored in a static framework of race and racism, but instead highlights the consistencies and tensions through which black gender and sexuality is realized in numerous local and transnational settings. Deploying a range of empirical and theoretical approaches, this textcontinues to build both the queer of color critique and black queer studies by providing the reader with new and insightful work on black sexualities and genders. This volume will be important for years to come and an inspiration to both emerging and established scholars.'-Cathy Cohen, David and Mary Winton Green Professor in Political Science and the College, The University of Chicago

'Black Genders and Sexualities unmoors the conversations and debates around race, sexuality, gender, and class from static frames and parsed terms. Troubling the terrain of Black gendered and sexualized identities, practices and institutions through the works of eminent Black Studies scholars, the essays illustrate the inter-play and productively messy configurations of sex and gender in relation to historical and social structures of inequality in sites as diverse as Detroit and Havana. By crafting an exciting and pathbreaking collection, McGlotten and Davis offer readers multiple itineraries and forays into capacious landscapes of critical insights and hopeful political possibilities.'-Martin F. Manalansan IV, associate professor of Anthropology and Asian American Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

'Black Genders and Sexualities is as successful as it is ambitious. This carefully crafted and thoughtfully theorized volume demonstrates why gender and sexuality should not simply be significant themes but core foci for scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. By including nuanced meditations on the way gender and sexuality tie in with race, diaspora, and other modes of social belonging - in specific contexts and in conceptual models - McGlotten and Davis offer a model of innovative and yet accessible scholarly inquiry for which students and professors alike will no doubt be grateful.'-Michael Ralph, New York University

DÁNA-AIN DAVIS is an Associate Professor at Queens College, USA. Davis' areas of specialization include black studies, family and sexual violence, reproductive rights, poverty and welfare policy, and women's studies. She is the author of Battered Black Women and Welfare Reform (2006), as well as a number of articles on women and welfare policy. She has served as President of the Association of Black Anthropologists, Executive Director of the ADCO Foundation, Board Chair of the New York Foundation, and serves as a consultant to a number of foundations that fund projects involving women's issues. She is currently co-editor of Transforming Anthropology.
SHAKA MCGLOTTEN is an Assistant Professor of Media, Society, and the Arts in the School of Film and Media Studies at Purchase College, USA. Trained as an artist and anthropologist, his interdisciplinary work focuses on sex, queerness, and media cultures. He has published essays about public sex, gay chatrooms, zombies, online games, and racial violence in anthologies and peer-reviewed journals.