Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class, and: "Baad Bitches" and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films, and: Mutha' Is Half a Word: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture (review)

Some of the most astute, moving, and well-known work in the Black feminist tradition revolves around the "problems" of Black women's sexuality—namely, the problem that others use it to play out battles over race, class, gender, nation, and sexuality and the subsequent lack of attention to their actual sexual experiences, desires, and subjectivities. Their scholarship demands that we recognize this displacement and the machinations it hides, but that we also create spaces for the enunciation and appreciation of the diversity of Black women's sexualities. Audre Lorde, Hortense Spillers, Tricia Rose, Cheryl Clarke, E. Francis White, Barbara Christian, Angela Davis, Cathy Cohen, Patricia Hill Collins, Ann DuCille, Evelyn Hammonds, Darlene Clark Hine, bell hooks, … their names recall incisive intellect, beautiful words, and powerful stories. Drawing upon these rich sources, three new books by emerging scholars give a sense of the depth and breadth of a field that has grown into its own. In their work, Black feminist thought is anything but provincial—instead, their attention to the lives and work of Black women revises widely held ideas about race, gender, and sexuality and their relationship to our shared social context.

Rather than revise theories that do not account for race and/or gender, these books begin with a sophisticated intersectional approach as developed with Black feminist thought. Through an analysis of representation and lived experience, each author dispels hegemonic conceptions of Black women and their sexualities. They employ nuanced argumentation, historical contextualization, interdisciplinary sources, and commitment to multiple politics in order to portray sexuality as a dynamic social and psychological force. Furthermore, they refuse to privilege theory, representation, or experience, opting instead to integrate these methods. In doing so, each author makes insightful claims without erasing the contradictions within the cultural representations and lived experiences of Black women.

These texts present a needed opportunity to engage with popular cultural studies from politicized perspectives without denying the pleasure they provide. In these analyses, sexuality emerges as a transfer point between different axes of power and demonstrates the inextricability of the material and the discursive. As teaching texts, these books provide challenging yet accessible intersectional analyses in interdisciplinary contexts that can be incorporated into courses as diverse as visual literacy, hip-hop, social movements, performance studies, historical studies, folklore, literature, action films, and queer theory. For readers within these fields, the books reinvigorate longstanding debates with new questions and fresh ideas.

In Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class, Lisa Thompson explores the powerful role that sexuality plays in contemporary African American middle-class women's lives. Thompson situates the Black lady in an environment of impossible and disempowering demands that demonstrate "how her sexuality stands in for a host of other concerns, anxieties, and fantasies in the minds of others" (7). Against this backdrop, Beyond the Black Lady presents an affirmative account of contemporary African American women's cultural texts that present new narratives of sexual agency.

As Thompson explains in the introduction, several forces align so as to elide or diminish our attention to middle-class Black women's sexuality (6–11). Yet, Beyond the Black Lady is more than straightforward restoration of their voices, for it also aims to reconceptualize how race, class, and gender are represented, performed, and lived. The book shows that, stereotypes and social pressures notwithstanding, Black middle-class women's cultural production...