Militant Flesh: Black Women, Sexuality, and Embodied Performances of Gender and Sexual Freedom in 1970s Visual Culture

As part of a larger project tracing contemporary popular black women performers’ embodied critiques of neoliberal governmentality, my paper employs black feminism, queer critique, and performance theory to examine images of militant black women in popular news media, black feminist album and fine art, and Blaxploitation films, exploring the ways in which black women performers and visual artists challenged neoliberal narratives of black freedom that positioned the acquisition of black freedom as contingent on the institution of black heteropatriarchal formations and the state-sanctioned harnessing of non-normative black female sex and sexuality. Analyzing various visual tropes of political and sexual militancy, from images of black power fists to BDSM iconography, this paper contends that popular black women performers leveraged critiques of neoliberal governmentality by visualizing militant black female flesh as the condition of possibility for rather than impediment to black freedom. This paper adds to a bourgeoning body of black feminist and queer of color criticism that investigates and exposes the intersections between and among black gender and sexuality, popular culture, and neoliberalism.

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