An anti-racist critique of gender studies as a field. In Gender and the Abjection of Blackness, Sabine Broeck argues that gender studies as a mostly white field has taken insufficient account of Black contributions, and that more than being an ethnocentric limitation or blind spot, this has represented a structural anti-Blackness in the field. Engaging with the work of Black feminist authors Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, and Saidiya Hartman, Broeck critiques a selection of canonical white gender studies texts to make this case. The book discusses this problem at the core of gender theory as a practice which Broeck terms enslavism—the ongoing abjection of Black life which Hartman has called the afterlife of slavery. This has become manifest in the repetitive employment of the “woman as slave” metaphor so central to gender theory, as well as in recent theoretical mutations of these anti-Black politics of analogy. It is the structural separation of Blackness from gender that has functioned over and again as the scaffold enabling white women’s struggles for successful recognition of equality and subjectivity in the human world as we know it. This book challenges white readers to rethink their own untroubled identification with gender theory, and it provides all readers with a white feminist theorist’s sophisticated theoretical and self-critical scholarly account of her own reckoning with and learning in dialogue from Black feminism’s critique. “Broeck draws on a wide range of experience to provide a frame for rethinking gender as category that can work towards something like Black freedom. Most importantly, Black theoretical insights in this work move beyond intervention to offer a whole new way of being, and the author grapples with the new conceptual terrain she is now occupying.” — Rinaldo Walcott, author of Queer Returns: Essays on Multiculturalism, Diaspora, and Black Studies

Summary: Challenging the conception of empowerment associated with the Black Power Movement and its political and intellectual legacies, this title contends that power can be found not only in martial resistance, but, surprisingly, where the black body has been inflicted with harm or humiliation.

Winner, 2021 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize, given by the National Women's Studies Association Winner, 2021 Harry Levin Prize, given by the American Comparative Literature Association Winner, 2021 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Studies Argues that Blackness disrupts our essential ideas of race, gender, and, ultimately, the human Rewriting the pernicious, enduring relationship between Blackness and animality in the history of Western science and philosophy, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World breaks open the rancorous debate between Black critical theory and posthumanism. Through the cultural terrain of literature by Toni Morrison, Nalo Hopkinson, Audre Lorde, and Octavia Butler, the art of Wangechi Mutu and Ezrom Legae, and the oratory of Frederick Douglass, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson both critiques and displaces the racial logic that has dominated scientific thought since the Enlightenment. In so doing, Becoming Human demonstrates that the history of racialized gender and maternity, specifically anti-Blackness, is indispensable to future thought on matter, materiality, animality, and posthumanism. Jackson argues that African diasporic cultural production alters the meaning of being human and engages in imaginative practices of world-building against a history of the bestialization and thingification of Blackness—the process of imagining the Black person as an empty vessel, a non-being, an ontological zero—and the violent imposition of colonial myths of racial hierarchy. She creatively responds to the animalization of Blackness by generating alternative frameworks of thought and relationality that not only disrupt the racialization of the human/animal distinction found in Western science and philosophy but also challenge the epistemic and material terms under which the specter of animal life acquires its authority. What emerges is a radically unruly sense of a being, knowing, feeling existence: one that necessarily ruptures the foundations of "the human."

Winner of the MLA's 2016 Alan Bray Prize for Best Book in GLBTQ Studies How BDSM can be used as a metaphor for black female sexuality. The Color of Kink explores black women's representations and performances within American pornography and BDSM (bondage and discipline, domination and submission, and sadism and masochism) from the 1930s to the present, revealing the ways in which they illustrate a complex and contradictory negotiation of pain, pleasure, and power for black women. Based on personal interviews conducted with pornography performers, producers, and professional dominatrices, visual and textual analysis, and extensive archival research, Ariane Cruz reveals BDSM and pornography as critical sites from which to rethink the formative links between Black female sexuality and violence. She explores how violence becomes not just a vehicle of pleasure but also a mode of accessing and contesting power. Drawing on feminist and queer theory, critical race theory, and media studies, Cruz argues that BDSM is a productive space from which to consider the complexity and diverseness of black women's sexual practice and the mutability of black female sexuality. Illuminating the cross-pollination of black sexuality and BDSM, The Color of Kink makes a unique contribution to the growing scholarship on racialized sexuality.

Black Knowledges/Black Struggles: Essays in Critical Epistemology explores the central, but often critically neglected role of knowledge and epistemic formations within social movements for human emancipation.

In Cast Down: Abjection in America, 1700-1850, Mark J. Miller argues that transatlantic Protestant discourses of abjection engaged with, and furthered the development of, concepts of race and sexuality in the creation of public subjects and public spheres.

Felipe Smith is an associate professor of English at Tulane University and the author of American Body Politics: Race, Gender, and Black Literary Renaissance. "--Book jacket.