Introduction: Special Issue on Black and Latina Sexuality and Identities

Black feminist theorists such as Kimberle Crenshaw (1989, 1991) and Patricia Hill Collins (1990) have challenged researchers to expand their thinking when examining issues of sexism, racism, and classism. Their main focus of untying the interlocking systems of oppression has been groundbreaking, liberating, and not without controversy. In short, defining, documenting, and destroying human suffering is much easier said than done.

Subsequent contributors to Crenshaw's and Collins's work have added sexuality (among other variables) to this timely and all-too-important inves-tigatory agenda (for examples, see Brewer 1993 and McCall 2005). Further, some have drawn on various bodies of scholarship—historical, social scientific, and literary—to reveal the multiple and intersecting social forces that have shaped the "place" for sexual minorities (for a review, see Battle and Bennett 2005).

In addition to exploring the pioneering work of Crenshaw and Collins, other scholars have actually expanded it. Consider, for example, the intersectional imagination (Pastrana 2006), a term used to describe the analytic process that occurs when examining individual- and group-level oppressions based on identity. Starting with an understanding that individuals and groups are more than the sum of their parts, that each individual characteristic or constituent has the capacity to affect different outcomes, the intersectional imagination attempts to describe the ways that identities come together and are pulled apart.

The articles in this collection address not only individual-level issues but also macro-level ones. Across the articles, researchers wrestle with how race, class, gender, sexuality, and a myriad of other variables work to oppress as well as liberate. Acknowledging these systems of oppression, these articles push the envelopes of oppression and force the readers to think more critically. Mari J. Matsuda, puts it this way:

The way I try to understand the interconnection of all forms of subordination is through a method I call "ask the other question." When I see something that looks racist, I ask, "Where is the patriarchy in this?" When I see something that looks sexist, I ask, "Where is the heterosexism in this?" When I see something that looks homophobic, I ask, "Where are the class interests in this?" Working in coalition forces us to look for both the obvious and non-obvious relationships of domination, helping us to realize that no form of subordination ever stands alone.

(1991, 1189)

Taken together, with feminist theoretical approaches as a lens, intersectional research has contributed much to better understanding how oppression is conceived, birthed, nurtured, and reproduced.

In this special issue, we the editors want to "ask the other question." By doing so, we highlight the importance and necessity of incorporating sexuality into our understanding of the complexity and richness of black and Latina experiences. While this journal centers on and complicates the study of black women (and women of color) by promoting interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersections of Africana/black studies and women's studies, there are many other intersections in the lives of women of color. Sexuality, as well as other social markers, interweaves with one's self-identity and societal structure. Sexuality also provides an analytic lens for understanding black and Latina women's experiences as well as for highlighting the multiple levels of oppression and resistance found in these women's lives.

Sexuality can be defined broadly as attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, and identities associated with sex, pleasure, and desire. Yet, issues related to sexuality are not simply maintained within bodies; they are shaped by and serve a wider social and political terrain. As noted earlier, Collins (2009) makes a compelling case for not viewing sexuality and racism as two separate realms of oppression. She notes how each of these depend on the other for meaning. Sexuality has been used by those in power to support racism. Joann Nagel, for example, points out that "the demonization of black sexuality remained a convenient excuse to implement and defend continued discrimination, segregation, exploitation (including sexual experimentation) and the vilification of African Americans" (2003, 126). Slavery and other colonial projects, both inside and outside the United States, have used the sexuality (both real and imagined) of...