Editor's Notes

This special issue of Black Camera, "Beyond Normative: Sexuality and Eroticism in Black Film, Cinema, and Video," provides a collection of essays that documents the way some black filmmakers have used the camera to disrupt, but more appropriately for this issue, fuck with, representations of normative sexualities. It would be erroneous to assume that all black filmmakers produce a cinematic language necessary for reading the plethora of black sexualities. In various films especially concerned with gender and sexuality that were produced, directed, or written by many contemporary filmmakers, both independent and mainstream, the re-inscription of white supremacist and patriarchal gazes occurs over and over again. Jacquie Jones, in "The Construction of Black Sexuality: Towards Normalizing the Black Cinematic Experience," argues that black independent filmmaking has often been expected to do better, but more importantly provides compelling reasoning as to why this special issue of Black Camera is relevant, stating,

I do not suggest the reconstruction of Black sexuality as a prescription of mainstream film, but rather as an imperative for a revision in the critical evaluation of power relationships in film culture to fully include sexuality. The hysterization of Black sexuality has historically been fundamental to the hegemony in popular film. The failure of criticism to address the denormalization of Black characterization through the manipulation of sexuality leaves open not only the danger of recycling the same dysfunction in Black film…but also the likelihood of critics to define based on these relationships.¹

As readers will note, many of the essays in this issue support Jones's thesis about the reconstruction of black sexuality as a way to reevaluate power relationships. However, rather than doing so to project or create some ideal model of black normativity, the films under consideration in these essays are the antithesis to Jones's idea of normalcy. Even as Jones later praises the work of gay filmmakers such as Marlon Riggs, she underwrites the ways in which Riggs's queerness displaces normalcy. Certainly, all of the writers within this special issue of Black Camera diverge from traditional scholarship on black film and challenge what film genres are worthy of study, as well as redefine what is sexual, sensual, and erotic on film. Future collections on black filmmakers' expressions of sexuality, eroticism, and nudity on film might include scholarship on sexuality in black European films, black Caribbean film, and the no longer young and invisible Nollywood films coming out of Nigeria. Moreover, work on black transgender and transsexuality on film would fill a void. Despite these unintended and acknowledged absences, from essays and interviews to book and film reviews, there is a great deal of the African diaspora, the queer and the freak, in this collection.

Greg Thomas's "Hyenas in the Enchanted Brothel: 'The Naked Truth' in Djibril Diop Mambéty" produces one of the most radical readings of Mambéty's films, Touki-Bouki (1973) and Hyènes / Hyenas (1989), to date and in the process offers new theories about African eroticism. Marlon Moore provides an interview with lesbian filmmaker Tina Mabry, writer and director of films such as Mississippi Damned (2009), Itty Bitty Titty Committee (screenplay 2007), and Brooklyn's Bridge to Jordan (2005). Next, Marlo David's "'Let It Go Black': Desire and the Erotic Subject in the Films of Bill Gunn," does a brilliant job of reorienting Gunn's independent cinematic legacy around his courageous representation of sexuality and eroticism with her comparative assessment of Bill Gunn's better-known work Ganja and Hess (1973) with his lesser-known and certainly little seen tour de force STOP (1970). Turning from Gunn to his collaborator and friend, Kathleen Collins, L.H. Stallings's "'Redemptive Softness': Interiority, Intellect, and Black Women's Ecstasy in Kathleen Collins's Losing Ground" (1982) examines the ways in which Collins creates an aesthetic of ecstasy around intelligence and consciousness that challenges traditional eroticized imagery and sexual depictions of black women on screen.

Samuel Park's "All the Sad Young Men" addresses the taboo of representing and critiquing interracial desire and relationships within black queer film and subjectivity with his appraisal of Rodney Evans's accessible...