The goal of this panel is to conceptualize a Black feminist context of excess across African-American literature and popular culture. The scholars of this panel bring to the fore Black feminist thought from the margins of literary analysis and unlikely media sites to expand and trouble current Black feminist theoretical paradigms that consider rest as resistance, indulgence as reclamation, and hypergamy as survival.

In engaging the 2025 presidential theme ‘Visibility,’ this panel aims to contest the limits of vision and disrupt notions of normative perception by looking at Black feminist forms that are theoretically, materially or aesthetically ‘excessive’ in efforts to counteract cultural and social erasure and deficit, assert one’s humanity and push back against what Patricia Hill Collins’ calls “controlling imagery.” Taking up the question of the 2025 conference, “what work can we do to examine the politics of visibility in ways that are fully inclusive?,” this panel will encourage invigorated discussion and new thought-lines on Black feminist, queer and trans relationality, as well as promote literary and cultural analysis in the field of Black women’s studies from fringe or seemingly insignificant sites to push and reconfigure the boundaries of looking.

This panel builds from Black feminist thinking on desire to illuminate the contemporary culture where increasingly, Black women are choosing to live outside of the United States to mitigate experiences of what Moya Bailey calls “misogynoir,” are turning to more conservative practices of femininity and domesticity to contest masculinization, and are deploying aesthetics and aspirational media that cultivates a conceptual space for imagining flourishing, futurity and life beyond anti-Black and colonial society. Audre Lorde’s theory of the erotic sets the critical foundation for which this panel stands upon, as the erotic is seen as the “measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.” Lorde’s treatment of the erotic in this vein–and by extension herl treatment of self-care–echos in recent scholarship that the panel intervenes in, and that more pointedly responds to formations of resistance in through pleasure. Marquis Bey’s Black Trans Feminism (2022), Bettina Judd’s Feelin’: Creative Practice, Pleasure and Black Feminist Thought (2023), and amber jamilla musser’s Between Shadow and Noise: Sensation, Situatedness and the Undisciplined (2024) are scholarly conversations that take up the erotic and undergird the theoretical concept of excess that the panel enters into.

The panelists’ presentations emphasize the vallances of the excessive across time, medium and genre. Courtney Murray’s “Hold/ing as Black Feminist Excessive Thought” considers the invisibility of the Black female body in 19th century masculinist African-American literature. Murray’s work offsets the conversation by arguing for the inherent excessiveness of Black femaleness in relation to enclosure and radical spatiality, laying the ground for Robert Mendoza’s presentation “Revisiting "In the Mecca": Excessive Labor and the Diminishment of Black Life.” With the material turn from the nineteenth century to the twentieth, Mendoza argues how Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem “In the Mecca” represents Black women’s labor in relation to the diminishment of Black life by the mid-century. Both Murray and Mendoza’s presentations present theoretical underpinnings to the discussion of Black feminist excess and emphasize it’s cultivation through literature. Paige Chung’s “Black Feminine Aesthetics and Excess: Beauty and Brains, Grills and Bling” continues Mendoza’s contemplation of the material aspects to excess and forwards the discussion into the twenty-first century by looking to the aesthetics of women’s rap and hip hop cultures as asserting Black women’s visibility through the accessory of the grill.

And lastly, Jennifer Samuels ““Sprinkle Sprinkle”: SheraSeven and the New Transactionality of Sexual Relationships” is the most recent consideration of Black feminist excess that surmises the presentations by looking at the entanglements of excess in Black women’s digital cultures.