A daring collaboration among scholars, Black Sexual Economies challenges thinking that sees black sexualities as a threat to normative ideas about sexuality, the family, and the nation. The essays highlight alternative and deviant gender and sexual identities, performances, and communities, and spotlights the sexual labor, sexual economy, and sexual agency to black social life. Throughout, the writers reveal the lives, everyday negotiations, and cultural or aesthetic interventions of black gender and sexual minorities while analyzing the systems and beliefs that structure the possibilities that exist for all black sexualities. They also confront the mechanisms of domination and subordination attached to the political and socioeconomic forces, cultural productions, and academic work that interact with the energies at the nexus of sexuality and race. Contributors: Marlon M. Bailey, Lia T. Bascomb, Felice Blake, Darius Bost, Ariane Cruz, Adrienne D. Davis, Pierre Dominguez, David B. Green Jr., Jillian Hernandez, Cheryl D. Hicks, Xavier Livermon, Jeffrey McCune, Mireille Miller-Young, Angelique Nixon, Shana L. Redmond, Matt Richardson, L. H. Stallings, Anya M. Wallace, and Erica Lorraine Williams

During the early twentieth century, a diverse group of African American women carved out unique niches for themselves within New York City's expansive informal economy. LaShawn Harris illuminates the labor patterns and economic activity of three perennials within this kaleidoscope of underground industry: sex work, numbers running for gambling enterprises, and the supernatural consulting business. Mining police and prison records, newspaper accounts, and period literature, Harris teases out answers to essential questions about these women and their working lives. She also offers a surprising revelation, arguing that the burgeoning underground economy served as a catalyst in working-class black women TMs creation of the employment opportunities, occupational identities, and survival strategies that provided them with financial stability and a sense of labor autonomy and mobility. At the same time, urban black women, all striving for economic and social prospects and pleasures, experienced the conspicuous and hidden dangers associated with newfound labor opportunities.

A Taste for Brown Sugar boldly takes on representations of black women's sexuality in the porn industry. It is based on Mireille Miller-Young's extensive archival research and her interviews with dozens of women who have worked in the adult entertainment industry since the 1980s. The women share their thoughts about desire and eroticism, black women's sexuality and representation, and ambition and the need to make ends meet. Miller-Young documents their interventions into the complicated history of black women's sexuality, looking at individual choices, however small—a costume, a gesture, an improvised line—as small acts of resistance, of what she calls "illicit eroticism." Building on the work of other black feminist theorists, and contributing to the field of sex work studies, she seeks to expand discussion of black women's sexuality to include their eroticism and desires, as well as their participation and representation in the adult entertainment industry. Miller-Young wants the voices of black women sex workers heard, and the decisions they make, albeit often within material and industrial constraints, recognized as their own.

For many years, the interrelated histories of prostitution and cities have perked the ears of urban scholars, but until now the history of urban sex work has dealt only in passing with questions of race. In I’ve Got to Make My Livin’, Cynthia Blair explores African American women’s sex work in Chicago during the decades of some of the city’s most explosive growth, expanding not just our view of prostitution, but also of black women’s labor, the Great Migration, black and white reform movements, and the emergence of modern sexuality. Focusing on the notorious sex districts of the city’s south side, Blair paints a complex portrait of black prostitutes as conscious actors and historical agents; prostitution, she argues here, was both an arena of exploitation and abuse, as well as a means of resisting middle-class sexual and economic norms. Blair ultimately illustrates just how powerful these norms were, offering stories about the struggles that emerged among black and white urbanites in response to black women’s increasing visibility in the city’s sex economy. Through these powerful narratives, I’ve Got to Make My Livin’ reveals the intersecting racial struggles and sexual anxieties that underpinned the celebration of Chicago as the quintessentially modern twentieth-century city.

In The Sexual Economy of War, Andrew Byers argues that in the early twentieth century, concerns about unregulated sexuality affected every aspect of how the US Army conducted military operations. Far from being an exercise marginal to the institution and its scope of operations, governing sexuality was, in fact, integral to the military experience during a time of two global conflicts and numerous other army deployments. In this revealing study, Byers shows that none of the issues related to current debates about gender, sex, and the military—the inclusion of LGBTQ soldiers, sexual harassment and violence, the integration of women—is new at all. Framing the American story within an international context, he looks at case studies from the continental United States, Hawaii, the Philippines, France, and Germany. Drawing on internal army policy documents, soldiers' personal papers, and disciplinary records used in criminal investigations, The Sexual Economy of War illuminates how the US Army used official policy, legal enforcement, indoctrination, and military culture to govern wayward sexual behaviors. Such regulation, and its active opposition, leads Byers to conclude that the tension between organizational control and individual agency has deep and tangled historical roots.

Why does society have difficulty discussing sexualities? Where does fear of Black sexualities emerge and how is it manifested? How can varied experiences of Black females and males who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT), or straight help inform dialogue and academic inquiry? From questioning forces that have constrained sexual choices to examining how Blacks have forged healthy sexual identities in an oppressive environment, Black Sexualities acknowledges the diversity of the Black experience and the shared legacy of racism. Contributors seek resolution to Blacks' understanding of their lives as sexual beings through stories of empowerment, healing, self-awareness, victories, and other historic and contemporary life-course panoramas and provide practical information to foster more culturally relative research, tolerance, and acceptance.