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theses

In "The Flesh is Weak: African American Women's Sexuality and the Utility of Trauma," I argue for a reconsideration of the ways in which trauma and sexuality are often conceptualized as mutually exclusive states of being in black feminist theory. By tracing a brief history of the sexualized violence exacted against black women throughout slavery and onward into the present, I illustrate how black women's erotic pleasure has always been embodied and experienced in tension with a contradictory assortment of emotions and physical states: pain, obedience, trauma and unequal power relations, for example. I analyze black women's sexual representations in television shows and I utilize some of my own personal experiences with sexual violence via autoethnographic methods. Expanding a view of trauma in black women's sexual lives and not assuming that it precludes the possibility or potential for sexual pleasure is theoretically useful in the quest to excavate black women's sexual histories, and practical in that it can offer assistance to black women and girls that have experienced forms of sexualized violence, sexual assault, and/or rape. Taking special care to not assume that experiences with generational, literal, or figurative trauma necessarily foreclose potential for erotic enjoyment allows black feminist theorists to explore representations of black women's sexual lives unencumbered by the binary of entirely liberated sexual agents and abjectly subjugated victims.

ETD_7721

M.A.

Includes bibliographical references

by Mahaliah Ayana Little

doi:10.7282/T38S4S67

ETD graduate

The author owns the copyright to this work.