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Authors: Friedman,Jaclyn Friedman,Jessica Valenti

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Where, frankly, is the outrage? Are we so overwhelmed by centuries of being told that we are overly sexed that we refuse to acknowledge insults anymore? Clearly, if we simply ignore the problem, it will not go away. In an age when marketing language has become standard, our sexuality will continually be rebranded depending on the needs of the marketplace. In women’s magazines, on e-bulletin boards, in conversations, and in fiction, we hear that black women are tired of being mistreated, but what is the prescription or call to action?
 
In 1982 at Barnard College, a controversial conference, “Towards a Politics of Sexuality,” exposed the tensions and anxieties inherent in wrestling with sexuality. Coming out of the conference was a key book,
Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality,
edited by Carol Vance. Vance asks questions in her introduction that remain, for me, unanswered: “Can women be sexual actors? Can we act on our own behalf? Or are we purely victims?” When applied to women of color, these questions become even more pressing, given that our sexuality is what is used as the dark specter to keep white women in line. Can black women be sexual actors in a drama of our own construction? Will black women act on our own behalf . . . even if doing so includes fantasies that incorporate racist or sexist scenarios? Or are black women destined to always be victims of a racial and sexual history that overwhelms hope for transformation and liberation?
 
As it stands now, many of feminism’s concerns (mainstream, white, black, and so on) restrict our discussions of black female sexuality to the consequences of having sex. Teen pregnancy, unwanted pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, HIV, sexual assault, incest, and exploitation are the topics that come up when we talk about sex education.
We need new visions and new ways of talking about black female sexuality.
 
Historically, white women parlayed their experiences working with blacks for the abolition of slavery into the drive for women’s voting rights. In the early 1970s, many social-change groups adopted the language of the Black Power movement. Why? Because the notion of power was potent and, dare I say,
virile
language. The notion of pride and refusing to be ashamed had a confrontational edge to it that Chicanos, women’s libbers, Asians, American Indians, and gays recognized as a new direction: Rather than ask for integration into a corrupt system, why not demand the resources to build a new world according to one’s own agenda?
 
In developing that vision, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender (LGBT) activists not only declared a form of gay pride, but also later would even co-opt the language of civil rights. We see it today in demands for same-sex marriage as a right. And while LGBT uses of civil rights language might rub some African Americans the wrong way, I would say it is time for blacks—specifically, black women—to take something back. Isn’t it time for heterosexual black women to adopt the language of queerness to free us from Mammy’s apron strings? Wouldn’t the idea of coming out of the closet as enjoying sex on our own terms make Jezebel stop in her tracks to think about getting
herself
off, rather than being focused on getting her man off? It is time to queer black female
heterosexuality.
As it stands, black women acquiesce to certain representations as if taking crumbs from the table of sexual oppression. Our butts are in vogue, we’re nastier than white women in the bedroom, we’re wilder than Asian women—all stereotypes derived in a male fantasy land of “jungle” porn and no-strings-attached personal ads. A queer black female heterosexuality isn’t about being a freak in the bedroom; it’s about being a sexual person whose wants and needs are self-defined. Easier said than done in a culture that makes us believe that someone else’s wants are our needs.
 
Black female sexuality is not pathology. Until 1973, homosexuality was listed in the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual as a disease. Both political agitation and studies within the field resulted in its removal. Black female sexuality is not listed, of course, in psychiatric manuals as a disease, but the way it is represented in American popular culture is sick and twisted. It is easy enough to say what we do not like, but rarely does anyone hear what we
do
like.
 
Queerness, then, is not an identity, but a position or stance. We can use “queer” as a verb instead of a noun. Queer is not someone or something to be treated. Queer is something that we can
do.
The black woman is the original Other, the figure against which white women’s sexuality is defined. Aren’t we already queer? To queer black female sexuality means to do what would be contrary, eccentric, strange, or unexpected. To be silent is, yes, unexpected in a world whose stereotype is of black women as loud and hypersexual. However, silence merely stifles
us.
Silence does not change the status quo.
 
Queering black female sexuality would mean straight black women need to:
1. Come out as black women who enjoy sex and find it pleasurable.
2. Protest the stereotypes of black female sexuality that do not reflect our experience.
3. Allow all black women—across class, sexual orientation, and physical ability—to express what we enjoy.
4. Know the difference between making love and fucking—and be willing to express our desires for both despite what the news, music videos, social mores, or any other source says we should want.
5. Know what it is to play with sexuality. What turns us on? Is it something taboo? Does our playfulness come from within?
6. Know that our bodies are our own—our bodies do not belong to the church, the state, our parents, our lovers, our husbands, and certainly not Black Entertainment Television (BET).
 
 
Queering black female heterosexuality goes beyond language. Black communities go ’round and ’round about the use of “nigger” with one another. Is it a revolutionary act of reclaiming an oppressive word? Or does it make us merely minstrels performing in the white man’s show? Older and younger feminists debate the merits of embracing the labels of “bitch” and “dyke” as a bid for taking the malice out of the words. There are some black women who say, “Yes, I am a black bitch” or, “Yes, I am a ho.” These claims do little to shift attitudes. If nothing else, we merely give our enemies artillery to continue to shoot us down or plaster our asses across cars in rap videos. How does the saying go? You act like a trick, you get played like a trick. Claiming queerness is linguistic, but ultimately about action that does not reinforce the stereotypes.
 
I am not suggesting a form of political lesbianism, which was a popular stance for some feminists who struggled against male domination in the 1970s. In addition to adopting a political position, queering black female sexuality means listening to transformative things that have already been said about black sexuality. Black lesbians and gay men have something to tell straight black women about sexuality if we care to listen. Poets such as Audre Lorde, writer/ activists such as Keith Boykin, and cultural theorists such as Cathy Cohen and Dwight McBride offer insights about African American sexuality that move beyond boundaries of sexual orientation and that we would do well to heed. Cohen, for example, challenges queer politics for lacking an intersectional analysis. That is, queer theory largely ignores questions of race and class when those categories in particular are the straw men against which marginalization is defined, constructed, and maintained.
 
Queer theory isn’t just for queers anymore, but calling on the wisdom of my black, gay sisters and brothers runs the risk of reducing them solely to their sexuality. Thus, the challenge for me in bringing an intersectional perspective to queering black female heterosexuality is to remain mindful of my own heterosexual privilege and the pitfalls of appropriating queerness as identity and not as a political position.
 
What I must also claim and declare are all the freaky tendencies that I consider sexy and sexual. Sexual encounters mined from Craigslist’s Casual Encounters, where I both defy and play with stereotypes about black women’s sexuality. Speaking frankly about sex with friends—gay, straight, bisexual, trans, male, and female. Enjoying the music and words of black women, such as Jill Scott, who are unabashed about their sexual desire and the complexity of defining nontraditional relationships—monogamous and otherwise. All of these sexual interventions/adventures in daily existence play against my own conditioning to be a respectable, middle-class young lady destined to become an asexual black lady. That biology is
not
my destiny.
 
There is no guarantee that straight black women adopting queerness will change how the dominant culture perceives black female sexuality. I do not think black women embracing our sexuality and being vocal about that will change how politicians attempt to use our sexuality as a scapegoat for society’s ills, as they did with the “welfare queen” in the 1980s and 1990s. However, I do believe that queering black female sexuality, if enough of us participate in the project, will move us collectively toward a more enlightened way of being sexual beings unconstrained by racialized sexism. Instead of trying to enact a developmental approach (we were asexual mammies or hot-to-trot jezebels, but now we are ladies), claiming queerness will give us the latitude we need to explore who we want to be on a continuum. It is a choice that both black women as a group and black women as individuals must make.
 
Some black women have taken risks in expressing themselves about black women’s sexuality. When, in 1999, performance poet Sarah Jones faced Federal Communications Commission (FCC) censorship for her work
Your Revolution (Will Not Happen Between These Thighs)
, she battled three years for her right to determine her sexual fate through her art. Incorporating lyrics from male rappers’ top 40 radio-play hits into a paraphrasing of Gil Scot Heron’s
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,
Jones moved us a step closer to black women saying yes to sex by denying male demands for compliant freaks and hoochies. That the FCC refused to recognize the feminist content of her song and sought to penalize a community-based, volunteer-run radio station in the process speaks to mainstream refusal to accept that black women are something other than sexually deviant. More so than Janet Jackson’s misguided attempt to express black female sexuality in 2004 via her infamous “wardrobe malfunction”—and before she was unceremoniously left out to dry by her coperformer, Justin Timberlake—Jones’s willingness to challenge censorship demonstrated that black women are interested in sex, but on our own terms.
 
Similarly, in February 2001, African American photographer Renee Cox stood up to censorship of black female sexuality. Only this time, the censorship came from the local level: Then-mayor Rudolph Giuliani attempted to close down the Brooklyn Museum of Art and establish a citywide “decency commission” over the display of Cox’s self-portrait/homage
Yo Mama’s Last Supper.
Jones stands in the center of the tableau as a nude and unashamed Jesus Christ before his disciples. The disciples are all cast as men of color, except for Judas, who is white. Giuliani and New York City’s Catholic patriarchs denounced Cox’s display of her nude body as “anti-Catholic” and “disgusting.” Cox, rather than retiring, stepped up to the plate to defend her artistic vision, her black female body as beautiful, and her critique of Catholicism for its racism and sexism.
 
These black women’s sexual expressions in American popular culture are dangerous because they are not what we’re used to. It may not seem like much, but overcoming centuries of historical silence will create different perceptions about black women and sex that will reshape our culture, society, and public policies. In calling for heterosexual black women to queer their sexuality, I am expressing the fierce belief that, if we follow the example of women such as Sarah Jones and Renee Cox, we can dramatically change how black female sexuality is viewed in America. More important, though, I believe we can change how black girls and women
live
and
experience
their sexuality: on their own terms and free from a past of exploitation. Historians often refer to the “long shadow” that slavery has cast over African Americans. While it is important to acknowledge the reverberations of this human atrocity in black family structure, economic disadvantage, and especially black sexuality, it is just as critical that we push along a dialogue that reinvents black sex in ways that do not merely reinstate the sexual exploitation that was inflicted and that some of us now freely adopt.
 
Can black women achieve a truly liberated black female sexuality? Yes. If we continue to say no to negative imagery—but that alone has not been effective. In addition, we must create and maintain black female sexuality queerly. Only then can we say, and only then will society hear, both yes and no freely and on our own terms.
 
 
If you want to read more about HERE AND QUEER, try:
• Shame Is the First Betrayer BY TONI AMATO
• Why Nice Guys Finish Last BY JULIA SERANO
 
 
If you want to read more about MUCH TABOO ABOUT NOTHING, try:
• A Love Letter from an Anti-Rape Activist to Her Feminist Sex-Toy Store BY LEE JACOBS RIGGS
• Who’re You Calling a Whore?: A Conversation with Three Sex Workers on Sexuality, Empowerment, and the Industry BY SUSAN LOPEZ, MARIKO PASSION, SAUNDRA
BOOK: Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape
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