Gender + Sexuality
This page features a small selection of UConn library and external resources to support learning and research pertaining to Gender & Sexuality Studies. This list is meant to be exploratory and is not a comprehensive representation or list of the library's holdings.
For additional assistance, please contact Stephanie Birch, Research Services Librarian for Africana Studies at stephanie.birch@uconn.edu.
Notes on Terms
Gender Identity vs. Sex vs. Sexual Orientation
Gender identity, sex, and sexual orientation are separate identity experiences that are frequently conflated with one another.
Gender identity is a person’s internal sense and expression of self. A person may identify their gender as woman, man, genderqueer, agender, or something else. A person's gender identity may or may not be in accord with their physical anatomy or expected societal roles.
Sex refers to the physiological or biological characteristics used to medically classify an individual as female, male, or intersex.
Photo: Gladys Bentley (1907-1960) by an unidentified photographer, circa 1930. Bentley was a prominent blues pianist, singer, performer, and drag king pioneer of the Harlem Renaissance. Courtesy of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Link
Black Gender & Sexuality
"1814-1819: Queer sexuality" by Raquel Willis in Four Hundred Souls: a community history of African America, 1619-2019 by
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * A chorus of extraordinary voices tells the epic story of the four-hundred-year journey of African Americans from 1619 to the present--edited by Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist, and Keisha N. Blain, author of Set the World on Fire. FINALIST FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL * NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post, Town & Country, Ms. magazine, BookPage, She Reads, BookRiot, Booklist * "A vital addition to [the] curriculum on race in America . . . a gateway to the solo works of all the voices in Kendi and Blain's impressive choir."--The Washington Post "From journalist Hannah P. Jones on Jamestown's first slaves to historian Annette Gordon-Reed's portrait of Sally Hemings to the seductive cadences of poets Jericho Brown and Patricia Smith, Four Hundred Souls weaves a tapestry of unspeakable suffering and unexpected transcendence."--O: The Oprah Magazine The story begins in 1619--a year before the Mayflower--when the White Lion disgorges "some 20-and-odd Negroes" onto the shores of Virginia, inaugurating the African presence in what would become the United States. It takes us to the present, when African Americans, descendants of those on the White Lion and a thousand other routes to this country, continue a journey defined by inhuman oppression, visionary struggles, stunning achievements, and millions of ordinary lives passing through extraordinary history. Four Hundred Souls is a unique one-volume "community" history of African Americans. The editors, Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain, have assembled ninety brilliant writers, each of whom takes on a five-year period of that four-hundred-year span. The writers explore their periods through a variety of techniques: historical essays, short stories, personal vignettes, and fiery polemics. They approach history from various perspectives: through the eyes of towering historical icons or the untold stories of ordinary people; through places, laws, and objects. While themes of resistance and struggle, of hope and reinvention, course through the book, this collection of diverse pieces from ninety different minds, reflecting ninety different perspectives, fundamentally deconstructs the idea that Africans in America are a monolith--instead it unlocks the startling range of experiences and ideas that have always existed within the community of Blackness. This is a history that illuminates our past and gives us new ways of thinking about our future, written by the most vital and essential voices of our present.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9780593134054Publication Date: 2021-02-02
Black Genders and Sexualities: by
Cutting across the humanities and social sciences, and situated in sites across the black diaspora, the work in this book collectively challenges notions that we are living in a post-racial age and instead argue for the specificity of black cultural experiences as shaped by gender and sex.
Call Number: HQ1075 .B544 2012ISBN: 9781403983992Publication Date: 2012-12-06
Black Sexual Politics by
In Black Sexual Politics, one of America's most influential writers on race and gender explores how images of Black sexuality have been used to maintain the color line and how they threaten to spread a new brand of racism around the world today.
Call Number: E185.86 .C58167 2005ISBN: 9780415951500Publication Date: 2005-07-14
Ensuring Inequality: the structural transformation of the African-American family by
There is a crisis today in the American family, and this crisis has been particularly severe in the African American community. Black women are more likely than ever to bear children as teenagers, to remain single, and to raise their children in poverty. As a result, a staggering number of African-American children are growing up without fathers and living in destitution. In this insightful new book, Donna L. Franklin offers an in depth account of the history and development of the African American family, revealing why the marriage and family experiences of African-Americans differs from those of white America, and highlighting the cultural and governmental forces that have combined to create this divide and to push the black family to the edge of catastrophe. In Ensuring Inequality, Franklin traces the evolution of the black family from slavery to the present, showing the cumulative effects of centuries of historical change. She begins with a richly researched account of the impact of slavery on the black family, finding that slavery not only caused extreme instability and suffering for families, but established a lasting pattern of poverty which made the economic advantages of marriage unattainable. She provides a sharp critique of the policies of the Freedmen's Bureau during Reconstruction, and demonstrates the mixed impact of the new pattern of sharecropping. On one hand, tenant farming allowed greater autonomy than the older gang labor system, and tended to consolidate two parent families; on the other hand, it reinforced male authority, and bound African Americans in debt peonage. The twentieth century brought a host of changes for black families, and Franklin incisively examines their effects. First, black women began to move to cities in search of jobs as domestic servants, while men stayed behind to work the fields, dividing the families. Then, two world wars sparked the great migration north, as African Americans pursued employment in booming factories. When the white soldiers returned home, however, many blacks found themselves out of work, shunted to the least desirable, lowest paying jobs. Roosevelt's New Deal offered limited help: in the North, it tolerated the red lining of urban neighborhoods, making it difficult for blacks to obtain home mortgages; in the South, blacks found that, as agricultural laborers, they were exempted from most labor laws, while agricultural subsidies were administered in favor of white farmers. And the distinction made between programs paid for by beneficiaries (such as social security) and those based on need (such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children) stigmatized the poor. Most blacks found themselves living an ever more tenuous, socially isolated existence. Franklin brings her comprehensive, nuanced study right up to the present, showing the impact on the urban poor of changes in the economy and society, from the dramatically shrinking pool of good jobs to the rise of the new right. "The increasing reliance on welfare by young black mothers," she writes, "corresponded to the erosion of opportunities for young black males." More important, she offers new approaches to solving the crisis. Not only does she recommend federal intervention to create new economic opportunity in urban ghettos, but she also stresses the importance of black self-help and proposes a plan of action. In addition, she outlines social interventions that can stabilize and strengthen poor, mother-only families living in ghetto neighborhoods. Exhaustively researched and insightfully written, Ensuring Inequality makes an important contribution to the central debate in American politics today.
Call Number: Print & eBookISBN: 0199374872Publication Date: 2015-09-09
Sister Outsider: essays and speeches by
The leader of contemporary feminist theory discusses such issues as racism, self-acceptance, and mother- and woman-hood.
Call Number: Print & eBookISBN: 0895941414Publication Date: 1984-06-01
Films
- Color Purple (1982) on DVD at the UConn Library
- How a former slave became the world's first drag queen by Dan John. BBC Reel, October 8, 2020.
- Moonlight (2016) on steaming video at UConn Library
- Paris is Burning (1990) on DVD at UConn Library and via Apple TV
- Watermelon Woman (1996) on streaming video at UConn Library
Black Feminist & Womanist Thought
Ain't I a Woman by
An examination of the politics of racism and sexism from a feminist perspective, looking at the impact of sexism on African-American women during slavery, the devaluation of African-American womanhood, African-American male sexism, racism within the modern feminist movement, and the African-American woman's involvement in feminism and its experience and relationship to society.
Call Number: E185.86 .H73 1981ISBN: 0896081303Publication Date: 1999-07-01
Africana Womanism: reclaiming ourselves by
AFRICANA WOMANISM: RECLAIMING OURSELVES poses new challenges for the feminist movement. In fact, in the words of Delores P. Aldridge it is "unquestionably a pioneering effort whose time has come. It provides an exciting & fresh approach to understanding the tensions existing among the mainstream feminist, the Black feminist, the African feminist & the Africana womanist." Hudson-Weems examines the perceptions women in the African diaspora have of their historical & contemporary roles. It is within this comparative framework that the work advances the state of knowledge on the lives of women in color. Since the initial appeal of feminism was & continues to be largely for educated, middle-class white women & not black working class women, the onus of responsibility for the destiny of the Africana woman rests on her. The growing need to be self-named & self-defined, the desire for reclamation of her historical past, the search for a stronger sense of belongingness & the greater call for cultural rootedness provide the rationale & justify the urgency for a new direction. AFRICANA WOMANISM is timely, theoretically fitting & intrinsically advantageous to the Africana woman. In the triple marginality of black women, race rises above class & gender. Distributors: Baker & Taylor; Midwest Library Service.
Call Number: HQ1190 .H8 1993ISBN: 0911557059Publication Date: 1993-09-01
Are all the women still white? : rethinking race, expanding feminisms by
"Provides a contemporary response to such landmark volumes as All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave and This Bridge Called My Back. More than thirty years have passed since the publication of All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave. Given the growth of women's and gender studies in the last thirty-plus years, this updated and responsive collection expands upon this transformation of consciousness through multiracial feminist perspectives. The contributors here reflect on transnational issues as diverse as intimate partner violence, the prison industrial complex, social media, inclusive pedagogies, transgender identities, and (post) digital futures. This volume provides scholars, activists, and students with critical tools that can help them decenter whiteness and other power structures while repositioning marginalized groups at the center of analysis."--Publisher's description.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 1438460619Publication Date: 2016
Beyoncé in Formation: remixing Black feminism by
Making headlines when it was launched in 2015, Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley's undergraduate course Beyoncé Feminism, Rihanna Womanism has inspired students from all walks of life. In Finding Beyoncé, Tinsley now takes her rich observations beyond the classroom, using the blockbuster album and video Lemonade as a soundtrack for vital next-millennium narratives. Woven with candid observations about her life as a feminist scholar of African studies and a cisgender femme married to a trans spouse, Tinsley's Femme-onade mixtape explores myriad facets of black women's sexuality and gender. Turning to Beyoncé's Don't Hurt Yourself, Tinsley assesses black feminist critiques of marriage and then considers the models of motherhood offered in Daddy Lessons, interspersing these passages with memories from Tinsley's multiracial family history. Her chapters on nontraditional bonds culminate in a discussion of contemporary LGBT politics through the lens of the internet-breaking video Formation, underscoring why Beyoncé's black femme-inism isn't only for ciswomen. From pleasure politics and the struggle for black women's reproductive justice to the subtext of blues and country music traditions, the landscape in this tour is populated by activists and artists (including Loretta Lynn) and infused with vibrant interpretations of Queen Bey's provocative, peerless imagery and lyrics. In the tradition of Roxanne Gay's Bad Feminist and Jill Lepore's bestselling cultural histories, Finding Beyoncé is the work of a daring intellectual who is poised to spark a new conversation about freedom and identity in America.
Call Number: ML420.K675 T56 2018ISBN: 9781477317709Publication Date: 2018-11-06
Black Feminist Thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment by
In spite of the double burden of racial and gender discrimination, African-American women have developed a rich intellectual tradition that is not widely known. In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins explores the words and ideas of Black feminist intellectuals as well as those African-American women outside academe. She provides an interpretive framework for the work of such prominent Black feminist thinkers as Angela Davis, bell hooks, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde. The result is a superbly crafted book that provides the first synthetic overview of Black feminist thought.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 1135960135Publication Date: 2002-06-01
Black Womanist Leadership: tracing the motherline by
Collection of Black women's stories that show how leadership values are transmitted from mothers to daughters
Call Number: HQ1197 .B56 2011ISBN: 9781438436012Publication Date: 2011-06-01
Check It While I Wreck It: Black womanhood, hip-hop culture, and the public sphere by
Hip-hop culture began in the early 1970s as the creative and activist expressions - graffiti writing, dee-jaying, break dancing, and rap music - of black and Latino youth in the depressed South Bronx, and the movement has since grown into a worldwide cultural phenomenon that permeates almost every aspect of society, from speech to dress. While hip-hop has been assimilated and exploited in the mainstream, young black women who came of age during the hip-hop era are grappling with the gender politics of a predominately masculine space. In this provocative study, Gwendolyn D. Pough explores the complex relationship between black women, hip-hop, and feminism. Examining a wide range of genres, including rap music, novels, spoken word poetry, hip-hop cinema, and hip-hop soul music, she traces the rhetoric of black women bringing wreck. Elliot, and Lil' Kim are building on the legacy of earlier generations of women - from Sojourner Truth to sisters of the black power and civil rights movements - to disrupt and break into the dominant patriarchal public sphere. She discusses the ways in which today's young black women struggle against the stereotypical language of the past (castrating black mother, mammy, sapphire) and the present (bitch, ho, chickenhead), and shows how rap provides an avenue to tell their own life stories, to construct their identities, and to dismantle historical and contemporary negative representations of black womanhood. Pough also looks at the on-going public dialogue between male and female rappers about love and relationships, explaining how the denigrating rhetoric used by men has been appropriated by black women rappers as a means to empowerment in their own lyrics. music as well as of third wave and black feminism. This fresh and thought-provoking perspective on the complexities of hip-hop urges young black women to harness the energy, vitality, and activist roots of hip-hop culture and rap music to claim a public voice for themselves and to bring wreck on sexism and misogyny in mainstream society.
Call Number: E185.86 .P666 2004ISBN: 1555536085Publication Date: 2004-05-27
The Crunk Feminist Collection by
Essays on hip-hop feminism featuring relevant, real conversations about how race and gender politics intersect with pop culture and current events. For the Crunk Feminist Collective, their academic day jobs were lacking in conversations they actually wanted. To address this void, they started a blog that turned into a widespread movement. The Collective's writings foster dialogue about activist methods, intersectionality, and sisterhood. And the writers' personal identities--as black women; as sisters, daughters, and lovers; and as television watchers, sports fans, and music lovers--are never far from the discussion at hand. These essays explore "Sex and Power in the Black Church," discuss how "Clair Huxtable is Dead," list "Five Ways Talib Kweli Can Become a Better Ally to Women in Hip Hop," and dwell on "Dating with a Doctorate (She Got a Big Ego?)." Self-described as "critical homegirls," the authors tackle life stuck between loving hip hop and ratchet culture while hating patriarchy, misogyny, and sexism. "Refreshing and timely." --Bitch Magazine "Our favorite sister bloggers." --Elle "By centering a Black Feminist lens, The Collection provides readers with a more nuanced perspective on everything from gender to race to sexuality to class to movement-building, packaged neatly in easy-to-read pieces that take on weighty and thorny ideas willingly and enthusiastically in pursuit of a more just world." --Autostraddle "Much like a good mix-tape, the book has an intro, outro, and different layers of based sound in the activist, scholar, feminist, women of color, media representation, sisterhood, trans, queer and questioning landscape." --Lambda Literary Review
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781558619487Publication Date: 2016-12-19
Wicked Flesh: black women, intimacy, and freedom in the Atlantic world by
The story of freedom pivots on the choices black women made to retain control over their bodies and selves, their loved ones, and their futures. The story of freedom and all of its ambiguities begins with intimate acts steeped in power. It is shaped by the peculiar oppressions faced by African women and women of African descent. And it pivots on the self-conscious choices black women made to retain control over their bodies and selves, their loved ones, and their futures. Slavery's rise in the Americas was institutional, carnal, and reproductive. The intimacy of bondage whet the appetites of slaveowners, traders, and colonial officials with fantasies of domination that trickled into every social relationship--husband and wife, sovereign and subject, master and laborer. Intimacy--corporeal, carnal, quotidian--tied slaves to slaveowners, women of African descent and their children to European and African men. In Wicked Flesh, Jessica Marie Johnson explores the nature of these complicated intimate and kinship ties and how they were used by black women to construct freedom in the Atlantic world. Johnson draws on archival documents scattered in institutions across three continents, written in multiple languages and largely from the perspective of colonial officials and slave-owning men, to recreate black women's experiences from coastal Senegal to French Saint-Domingue to Spanish Cuba to the swampy outposts of the Gulf Coast. Centering New Orleans as the quintessential site for investigating black women's practices of freedom in the Atlantic world, Wicked Flesh argues that African women and women of African descent endowed free status with meaning through active, aggressive, and sometimes unsuccessful intimate and kinship practices. Their stories, in both their successes and their failures, outline a practice of freedom that laid the groundwork for the emancipation struggles of the nineteenth century and reshaped the New World.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9780812297249Publication Date: 2020-08-28
The Womanist Reader by
Comprehensive in its coverage, The Womanist Reader is the first volume to anthologize the major works of womanist scholarship. Charting the course of womanist theory from its genesis as Alice Walker's African-American feminism, through Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi's African womanism and Clenora Hudson-Weems' Africana womanism, to its present-day expression as a global, anti-oppressionist perspective rooted in the praxis of everyday women of color, this interdisciplinary reader traces the rich and diverse history of a quarter century of womanist thought. Featuring selections from over a dozen disciplines by top womanist scholars from around the world, plus several critiques of womanism, an extensive bibliography of womanist sources, and the first ever systematic treatment of womanist thought on its own terms, Layli Phillips has assembled a unique and groundbreaking compilation.
Call Number: HQ1197 .W66 2006ISBN: 9780415954105Publication Date: 2006-09-20
Films
- Daughters of the Dust (1991) on DVD at UConn Library
- Hidden Figures (2016) on DVD at UConn Library
- In Our Mothers' Gardens (2021) on Netflix
- Set it Off (1996) on Amazon Prime Video
- Their Eyes Were Watching God (2005) on DVD at UConn Library
- Waiting to Exhale (1995) on HBO Max
Black Masculinity
Deconstructing Tyrone: a new look at black masculinity in the hip-hop generation by
Two smart Black women break the Tyrone code -- with affection, with respect, but with no illusions. Black men as fathers, sons, teachers, lovers, rap stars, professionals, fantasy objects, and cultural constructs -- a multifaceted picture of American Black men today. You know Tyrone. Smooth-talking, irresistible Tyrone -- the swagger in his step, the sexy drawl, the poetry and rhythm in his essence -- the militant revolutionary of the 1960s evolved into the pimp/thug of the hip-hop era. Tyrone is the Black man seen through the media lens, through stereotype, through the eyes of Black women. He's "Talk Show Tyrone," all muscle and defiance, "an archetype converted to a hit single." In Deconstructing Tyrone, the authors, journalists Natalie Y. Moore and Natalie Hopkinson, examine Black masculinity from a variety of perspectives, looking not for consensus but for insight. With chapters on Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, on the complicated relationship between women and hip-hop, on babydaddies, on gay Black men on and off the down low, on strippers and their fathers, on Black men in the office, at school, and in jail, Deconstructing Tyrone presents a multifaceted picture of American Black men now.
Call Number: E185.86 .H748 2006ISBN: 1573442577Publication Date: 2006-09-25
Fathers, Preachers, Rebels, Men: black masculinity in U.S. history and literature, 1820-1945 by
Fathers, Preachers, Rebels, Men: Black Masculinity in U.S. History and Literature, 1820-1945,edited by Timothy R. Buckner and Peter Caster, brings together scholars of history and literature focused on the lives and writing of black men during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the United States. The interdisciplinary study demonstrates the masculine character of cultural practices developed from slavery through segregation. Black masculinity embodies a set of contradictions, including an often mistaken threat of violence, the belief in its legitimacy, and the rhetorical union of truth and fiction surrounding slavery, segregation, resistance, and self-determination. The attention to history and literature is necessary because so many historical depictions of black men are rooted in fiction. The essays of this collection balance historical and literary accounts, and they join new descriptions of familiar figures such as Charles W. Chesnutt and W. E. B. Du Bois with the less familiar but critically important William Johnson and Nat Love. The 2008 election of Barack Obama is a tremendously significant event in the vexed matter of race in the United States. However, the racial subtext of recent radical political movements and the 2009 arrest of scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., demonstrate that the perceived threat posed by black masculinity to the nation's unity and vitality remains an alarming one in the cultural imagination.
Call Number: PS374.M37 F38 2011ISBN: 9780814211564Publication Date: 2011-05-25
From Jim Crow to Jay-Z race, rap, and the performance of masculinity by
This multilayered study of the representation of black masculinity in musical and cultural performance takes aim at the reduction of African American male culture to stereotypes of deviance, misogyny, and excess. Broadening the significance of hip-hop culture by linking it to other expressive forms within popular culture, Miles White examines how these representations have both encouraged the demonization of young black males in the United States and abroad and contributed to the construction of their identities._x000B_From Jim Crow to Jay-Z traces black male representations to chattel slavery and American minstrelsy as early examples of fetishization and commodification of black male subjectivity. Continuing with diverse discussions including black action films, heavyweight prizefighting, Elvis Presley's performance of blackness, and white rappers such as Vanilla Ice and Eminem, White establishes a framework for interpreting and critiquing black masculinity in music and culture.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 1283432005Publication Date: 2012-02-01
Looking for Leroy: illegible black masculinities by
Mark Anthony Neal's Looking for Leroy is an engaging and provocative analysis of the complex ways in which black masculinity has been read and misread through contemporary American popular culture. Neal argues that black men and boys are bound, in profound ways, to and by their legibility. The most "legible" black male bodies are often rendered as criminal, bodies in need of policing and containment. Ironically, Neal argues, this sort of legibility brings welcome relief to white America, providing easily identifiable images of black men in an era defined by shifts in racial, sexual, and gendered identities. Neal highlights the radical potential of rendering legible black male bodies--those bodies that are all too real for us--as illegible, while simultaneously rendering illegible black male bodies--those versions of black masculinity that we can't believe are real--as legible. In examining figures such as hip-hop entrepreneur and artist Jay-Z, R&B Svengali R. Kelly, the late vocalist Luther Vandross, and characters from the hit HBO series The Wire, among others, Neal demonstrates how distinct representations of black masculinity can break the links in the public imagination that create antagonism toward black men. Looking for Leroy features close readings of contemporary black masculinity and popular culture, highlighting both the complexity and accessibility of black men and boys through visual and sonic cues within American culture, media, and public policy. By rendering legible the illegible, Neal maps the range of identifications and anxieties that have marked the performance and reception of post-Civil Rights era African American masculinity.
Call Number: E185.86 .N394 2013ISBN: 9780814789407Publication Date: 2014-07-07
Performing Black Masculinity: race, culture, and queer identity by
Alexander's linked essays on the African American male experience.
Call Number: E185.86 .A3794 2006ISBN: 0759109281Publication Date: 2006-07-24
Sexual Discretion:: black masculinity and the politics of passing by
African American men who have sex with men while maintaining a heterosexual lifestyle in public are attracting increasing interest from both the general media and scholars. Commonly referred to as "down-low" or "DL" men, many continue to have relationships with girlfriends and wives who remain unaware of their same-sex desires, and in much of the media, DL men have been portrayed as carriers of HIV who spread the virus to black women.nbsp;Sexual Discretionnbsp;explores the DL phenomenon, offering refreshingly innovative analysis of the significance of media, space, and ideals of black masculinity in understanding down low communities. Innbsp;Sexual Discretion, Jeffrey Q. McCune Jr. provides the first in-depth examination of how the social expectations of black masculinity intersect and complicate expressions of same-sex affection and desire. Within these underground DL communities, men aren't as highly policed--and thus are able to maintain their public roles as "properly masculine." McCune draws from sources that range from R&B singer R. Kelly's epic hip-hopera series Trapped in the Closet to Oprah's high-profile exposé on DL subculture; and from E. Lynn Harris's contemporary sexual passing novels to McCune's own interviews and ethnography in nightclubs and online chat rooms.nbsp;Sexual Discretionnbsp;details the causes, pressures, and negotiations driving men who rarely disclose their intimate secrets.
Call Number: HQ76.27.A37 M33 2014ISBN: 9780226096360Publication Date: 2014-03-07
We Real Cool: Black men and masculinity by
"When women get together and talk about men, the news is almost always bad news," writes bell hooks. "If the topic gets specific and the focus is on black men, the news is even worse." In this powerful new book, bell hooks arrests our attention from the first page. Her title--We Real Cool; her subject--the way in which both white society and weak black leaders are failing black men and youth. Her subject is taboo: "this is a culture that does not love black males:" "they are not loved by white men, white women, black women, girls or boys. And especially, black men do not love themselves. How could they? How could they be expected to love, surrounded by so much envy, desire, and hate?"
Call Number: E185.86 .H7417 2004ISBN: 9780203642207Publication Date: 2004-08-02
The Will to Change: men, masculinity, and love by
Everyone needs to love and be loved--even men. But to know love, men must be able to look at the ways that patriarchal culture keeps them from knowing themselves, from being in touch with their feelings, from loving. In The Will to Change, bell hooks gets to the heart of the matter and shows men how to express the emotions that are a fundamental part of who they are--whatever their age, marital status, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. But toxic masculinity punishes those fundamental emotions, and it's so deeply ingrained in our society that it's hard for men to not comply--but hooks wants to help change that. With trademark candor and fierce intelligence, hooks addresses the most common concerns of men, such as fear of intimacy and loss of their patriarchal place in society, in new and challenging ways. She believes men can find the way to spiritual unity by getting back in touch with the emotionally open part of themselves--and lay claim to the rich and rewarding inner lives that have historically been the exclusive province of women. A brave and astonishing work, The Will to Change is designed to help men reclaim the best part of themselves.
Call Number: HQ1090 .H65 2004bISBN: 9780743456081Publication Date: 2004-12-21
Films
- Boyz in the Hood (1991) on HBO Max
- Do the Right Thing (1989) on streaming video at UConn Library
- Glory (1989) on DVD at UConn Library and via Amazon Prime Video
- Native Son (2019) HBO Max
- Purple Rain (1984) on HBO Max
Black Queer & LGBTQ+ Studies
Black on Both Sides: a racial history of trans identity by
Winner of the John Boswell Prize from the American Historical Association 2018 Winner of the William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the Modern Language Association 2018 Winner of an American Library Association Stonewall Honor 2018 Winner of Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction 2018 Winner of the Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies The story of Christine Jorgensen, America's first prominent transsexual, famously narrated trans embodiment in the postwar era. Her celebrity, however, has obscured other mid-century trans narratives--ones lived by African Americans such as Lucy Hicks Anderson and James McHarris. Their erasure from trans history masks the profound ways race has figured prominently in the construction and representation of transgender subjects. In Black on Both Sides, C. Riley Snorton identifies multiple intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-nineteenth century to present-day anti-black and anti-trans legislation and violence. Drawing on a deep and varied archive of materials--early sexological texts, fugitive slave narratives, Afro-modernist literature, sensationalist journalism, Hollywood films--Snorton attends to how slavery and the production of racialized gender provided the foundations for an understanding of gender as mutable. In tracing the twinned genealogies of blackness and transness, Snorton follows multiple trajectories, from the medical experiments conducted on enslaved black women by J. Marion Sims, the "father of American gynecology," to the negation of blackness that makes transnormativity possible. Revealing instances of personal sovereignty among blacks living in the antebellum North that were mapped in terms of "cross dressing" and canonical black literary works that express black men's access to the "female within," Black on Both Sides concludes with a reading of the fate of Phillip DeVine, who was murdered alongside Brandon Teena in 1993, a fact omitted from the film Boys Don't Cry out of narrative convenience. Reconstructing these theoretical and historical trajectories furthers our imaginative capacities to conceive more livable black and trans worlds.
Call Number: Print & eBookISBN: 9781517901738Publication Date: 2017-12-05- Black Queer Feminist Thought: Theory and Praxis in a Community-Based Movement Organization by Call Number: Online DissertationPublication Date: 2016
Black Queer Studies: a critical anthology by
While over the past decade a number of scholars have done significant work on questions of black lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered identities, this volume is the first to collect this groundbreaking work and make black queer studies visible as a developing field of study in the United States. Bringing together essays by established and emergent scholars, this collection assesses the strengths and weaknesses of prior work on race and sexuality and highlights the theoretical and political issues at stake in the nascent field of black queer studies. Including work by scholars based in English, film studies, black studies, sociology, history, political science, legal studies, cultural studies, and performance studies, the volume showcases the broadly interdisciplinary nature of the black queer studies project. The contributors consider representations of the black queer body, black queer literature, the pedagogical implications of black queer studies, and the ways that gender and sexuality have been glossed over in black studies and race and class marginalized in queer studies. Whether exploring the closet as a racially loaded metaphor, arguing for the inclusion of diaspora studies in black queer studies, considering how the black lesbian voice that was so expressive in the 1970s and 1980s is all but inaudible today, or investigating how the social sciences have solidified racial and sexual exclusionary practices, these insightful essays signal an important and necessary expansion of queer studies. Contributors. Bryant K. Alexander, Devon Carbado, Faedra Chatard Carpenter, Keith Clark, Cathy Cohen, Roderick A. Ferguson, Jewelle Gomez, Phillip Brian Harper, Mae G. Henderson, Sharon P. Holland, E. Patrick Johnson, Kara Keeling, Dwight A. McBride, Charles I. Nero, Marlon B. Ross, Rinaldo Walcott, Maurice O. Wallace
Call Number: Print & eBookISBN: 0822336294Publication Date: 2005-11-01Black Trans Feminism by Marquis Bey offers a meditation on blackness and gender nonnormativity in ways that recalibrate traditional understandings of each, conceiving of black trans feminism as a politics grounded in fugitivity and the subversion of power.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781478022428Publication Date: 2021-11-08- Does your mama know? : an anthology of Black lesbian coming out stories by Call Number: Print & eBookPublication Date: 1987
Mouths of Rain: an anthology of Black lesbian thought by
Winner, Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Anthology Winner, Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction, Publishing Triangle Awards A Ms. magazine, Refinery29, and Lambda Literary Most Anticipated Read of 2021 A groundbreaking collection tracing the history of intellectual thought by Black Lesbian writers, in the tradition of The New Press's perennial seller Words of Fire African American lesbian writers and theorists have made extraordinary contributions to feminist theory, activism, and writing. Mouths of Rain, the companion anthology to Beverly Guy-Sheftall's classic Words of Fire, traces the long history of intellectual thought produced by Black Lesbian writers, spanning the nineteenth century through the twenty-first century. Using "Black Lesbian" as a capacious signifier, Mouths of Rain includes writing by Black women who have shared intimate and loving relationships with other women, as well as Black women who see bonding as mutual, Black women who have self-identified as lesbian, Black women who have written about Black Lesbians, and Black women who theorize about and see the word lesbian as a political descriptor that disrupts and critiques capitalism, heterosexism, and heteropatriarchy. Taking its title from a poem by Audre Lorde, Mouths of Rain addresses pervasive issues such as misogynoir and anti-blackness while also attending to love, romance, "coming out," and the erotic. Contributors include: Barbara Smith Beverly Smith Bettina Love Dionne Brand Cheryl Clarke Cathy J. Cohen Angelina Weld Grimke Alexis Pauline Gumbs Audre Lorde Dawn Lundy Martin Pauli Murray Michelle Parkerson Mecca Jamilah Sullivan Alice Walker Jewelle Gomez
Call Number: Print & eBookISBN: 9781620975763Publication Date: 2021-02-23
No Tea, No Shade: new writings in Black queer studies by
The follow-up to the groundbreaking Black Queer Studies, the edited collection No Tea, No Shade brings together nineteen essays from the next generation of scholars, activists, and community leaders doing work on black gender and sexuality. Building on the foundations laid by the earlier volume, this collection's contributors speak new truths about the black queer experience while exemplifying the codification of black queer studies as a rigorous and important field of study. Topics include "raw" sex, pornography, the carceral state, gentrification, gender nonconformity, social media, the relationship between black feminist studies and black trans studies, the black queer experience throughout the black diaspora, and queer music, film, dance, and theater. The contributors both disprove naysayers who believed black queer studies to be a passing trend and respond to critiques of the field's early U.S. bias. Deferring to the past while pointing to the future, No Tea, No Shade pushes black queer studies in new and exciting directions. Contributors. Jafari S. Allen, Marlon M. Bailey, Zachary Shane Kalish Blair, La Marr Jurelle Bruce, Cathy J. Cohen, Jennifer DeClue, Treva Ellison, Lyndon K. Gill, Kai M. Green, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Kwame Holmes, E. Patrick Johnson, Shaka McGlotten, Amber Jamilla Musser, Alison Reed, Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, Tanya Saunders, C. Riley Snorton, Kaila Story, Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley, Julia Roxanne Wallace, Kortney Ziegler
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9780822373711Publication Date: 2016-10-13
There's a Disco Ball Between Us: by
In There's a Disco Ball Between Us, Jafari S. Allen offers a sweeping and lively ethnographic and intellectual history of what he calls "Black gay habits of mind." In conversational and lyrical language, Allen locates this sensibility as it emerged from radical Black lesbian activism and writing during the long 1980s. He traverses multiple temporalities and locations, drawing on research and fieldwork conducted across the globe, from Nairobi, London, and Paris to Toronto, Miami, and Trinidad and Tobago. In these locations and archives, Allen traces the genealogies of Black gay politics and cultures in the visual art, poetry, film, Black feminist theory, historiography, and activism of thinkers and artists such as Audre Lorde, Marsha P. Johnson, Essex Hemphill, Colin Robinson, Marlon Riggs, Pat Parker, and Joseph Beam. Throughout, Allen renarrates Black queer history while cultivating a Black gay method of thinking and writing. In so doing, he speaks to the urgent contemporary struggles for social justice while calling on Black studies to pursue scholarship, art, and policy derived from the lived experience and fantasies of Black people throughout the world.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 1478021896Publication Date: 2021-11-15
Film
- Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson (2017) on streaming video via Netflix
- Gun Hill Road (2011) on streaming video via TubiTV
- Kiki (2016) on streaming video at UConn Library
- Pariah (2007) on DVD at UConn Library
- Rafiki (2018) on streaming video via Amazon Prime
- Tangerine (2015) on streaming video via Amazon Prime
