Black Sexual Politics

3 units

Borrowing from Patricia-Hill Collins perspective in Black Sexual Politics, this seminar examines the historic and popular understandings of black sexuality and how they maintain color line, as well as threaten to spread what Hill-Collins refers to as a new brand of racism. Particularly, this course engages questions about sexuality that have only begun to be discussed with African-American Studies and the larger public sphere. Taking the intersections of identities very seriously, this course interrogates the ways in which these constructions have affected black women, while also being attentive to how others are implicated within discourses of black sexuality. Similarly, we will also engage the various distortions of black men - depictions of the black and masculine as almost always violent, sexually and socially irresponsible, brutish, questionable, and unfaithful. Together we will use various critical texts and media to better understand the impact and the importance of visual and material images in the interplay of race, sex, and politics in contemporary America.