Black Feminist Scholars Speak: Pleasurable Musings on Race, Sexuality, and Gender

The Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies program at UNC Greensboro will be hosting a Black Feminist Scholars Symposium. Students, community members, and scholars are invited to join!

Dr. Tracy Sharpley-Whiting  9:30 AM    Registration for Zoom link: https://go.uncg.edu/black-feminist-scholars-930

Historically and culturally, black women in the United States have been either dubiously represented in mainstream popular and political culture or erased. In black popular culture, particularly in the male-dominated culture of hip hop and its music, which crossed over into the American mainstream and marked its rise as a global phenomenon in the 1990s, black women have had the dubious distinction of being both misrepresented and overrepresented.  While debates about hip hop’s gender politics have raged since the 1970s, the 1990s onwards mark a disquieting turn in the cultural politics of representation of black women. But no discussion of the present, or future, is complete without engaging history. Unpacking the racialized sexism and sexualized racism directed towards black women requires a backward look—to the eighteenth century, the nation’s founding—in order to look forward into the twenty-first. 

Dr. Sharon Holland and Dr. Jennifer Nash 12:30 PM    Registration for Zoom link: https://go.uncg.edu/black-feminist-scholars-1230

This talk is about the process of writing The Erotic Life of Racism and what it means, some years after its publication to think about writing with black women in mind. It is a meditation on the “how” in the question that is my title. 

AND

“Desiring Black Feminism” analyzes black feminist theory’s state as desirable commodity, as an increasingly densely trafficked space in the academy.  Rather than seeking to defend this territory, this talk tracks the long history of black feminism’s desirability, and tracks the possibilities of a critical black feminist ambivalence in the face of our status as both desirable and disavowed.

Moderated and Organized by: 

Dr. Tara T. Green is Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies and the Linda Arnold Carlisle Excellence Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies.