Editors' Note

Recent public health, political, cultural, economic, and environmental changes have refocused public attention on women's intimacy, sexuality, family, and relationship experiences. While academic research in these areas increased in recent years, our understanding of Black women's experiences remains limited. Research and public discourse have often framed Black women's lives through a "problem and pathology" prism. In popular culture, a functional classroom to the masses, essentialist tropes of Black womanhood persist offering contemporary spins on historical notions of our sub-humanity reflected in exaggerations of our power, understatements of our vulnerability and denied evidence of our joy and pain. The storied history of academic research about Black women reflects patterns seen in the public sphere. Across disciplines Black women have been understudied and frequently misrepresented. The dearth of research about our organic needs and desires reflect the priorities of the gatekeeping power structures that define and govern the parameters of knowledge deemed scientific and worthy.

We recognize that the opportunity to focus on Black women's experience- in the academy and in general social discourse- in ways that is celebratory and uninhibited is a rarely granted privilege. All too often definitions about what is worthy and valid knowledge reflects the same unequal power structures that question Black women's value outside of the academy. It has often been the case that "worthy science" reflects "outsider" imaginations at the exclusion of Black women's insider knowledge.

Black and African Diasporic women continue to experience dramatic and rapid shifts in family/intimacy patterns worldwide. With global changes in Black and African Diasporic women's family and relationship formation patterns, discourse in sociology, psychology, Black Studies and Women Studies suggest a need for additional theoretical and methodological perspectives. The need to engage these issues is of particular concern as crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, climate instability, and persistent anti–Black racism pose obvious threats to Black women's lives health and sense of wellbeing in the global context.

This special issue attempts to respond to this need by exploring the nuanced experiences of Black women's sexuality, intimacy, and leadership from Black scholars from a range of fields including psychology, sociology, Black studies and women's studies.

We are grateful for the courage and determination of academic pioneers, past and present, who have broken through erected institutional boundaries to share the insider stories of Black women's experiences. This volume is a collection of such pioneers, who offer new and renewed perspectives, illuminate social patterns that have been obscured and celebrate a range of Black women's humanity. The authors in this collection explore diverse meanings and constructions of intimacy, sexuality, relationships and satisfaction and contemplate Black women's vulnerability in ways that resist narratives of pathology and make visible offer powerful re-conceptualizations of Black women's humanity.