Call for Papers: Black Sexual Economies: Transforming Black Sexualities Research

Black sexualities have been constructed as a site of sexual panic and pathology in U.S. culture. Viewed as a threat to normative ideas about sexuality, the family, and the nation, Black sexualities are intimately linked to and regulated by political and socioeconomic discourses and institutions. Slavery rendered Black sexuality irrevocably deviant, and at the same time produced economies of desire and flesh that made Black sexual deviance desirable,
accessible, and even profitable. In light of the historical and continuing forces of commodification, exploitation, and appropriation of Black sexuality and Black bodies, Black people have struggled to represent, recuperate, and re-imagine their own sexualities.

Despite the dynamic ways that Black people attempt to define and negotiate their own gender and sexual identities, practices, and communities, there has been a paucity of scholarship examining Black sexual economies. While research on Black sexuality has interrogated the powerful traumas, silences, and invisibilities that influence sexuality within the Black community, Black Sexualities scholarship still has work to do to untangle the complex mechanisms of dominance and subordination as they are attached to political and socioeconomic forces, cultural productions, and our own academic lenses.

The Black Sexual Economies Project and The Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Work and Social Capital at Washington University invites papers that advance cutting edge scholarship in the field for its international conference Black Sexual Economies:
Transforming Black Sexualities Research, September 27-28, 2013 at Washington University School of Law in Saint Louis, Missouri.

Topics and Themes may include:

• Queer of Color critique
• Black Feminisms and Black Sexualities
• Critical Race studies and Black sexuality
• Critical Legal studies and Black sexuality
• Gender Theory and Sexuality
• Black Sexuality and Performance
• Black Sexual Historiography
• Black Sexual Genealogies
• Black Sexuality and Eroticism in film, art, literature, music,
• television, gaming, or digital/online technologies
• Black Sexuality in Popular Culture
• Black Sexual Icons
• Black Bodies and Aesthetics
• Black Sexual Revolution
• Black/White/Latino/Asian Inter(sex)zones
• Black Love and Intimacy
• Black Sexual Labors and Sex Work
• Black Sexual Undergrounds
• Pornography, Erotica, or Obscenity
• African Diasporic/Transnational frameworks
• Neoliberalism and Black Sexuality
• Black Sexual Cartographies and Space
• Black Sexuality and Class
• Black Sexual Social Movements
• Black Sexuality and the Environment
• Sexuality and the Black church or Religion
• Black Sexuality and the Prison Industrial Complex

Submit individual paper abstracts (350 words max), bio (150 words max), and 1-2 page CV to blacksexualeconomies@gmail.com