Obscure Pleasures: Ritual, Pain, and the Black Feminist Imagination
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Date
2024-08-07
Authors
Stephens, Jiesha
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
My dissertation, Obscure Pleasures: Ritual, Pain, and the Black Feminist Imagination, traces how twentieth- and twenty-first-century black women’s literature and performance generate ways of feeling, inhabiting, and embodying the world through the black feminist imagination. Obscure Pleasures explores black women's creative production that conjures intersecting erotic and spiritual forms of embodied agency. This work draws on a rich array of literary and cultural sources, including Ana Maurine Lara's poetry narrative Kohnjehr Woman, Queenie's performance in the series American Horror Story: Coven, and Erna Brodber's novel Louisiana. My dissertation demonstrates how black women engage the sensory and the metaphysical to intervene in anti-black visual, ideological, and auditory regimes. Using obscure pleasure as a framework, I refer to 'obscure' as a way to name the elusive or uncertain ways black women embody pleasure in spaces saturated in anti-blackness.
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Keywords
African American, Afro-Latinx Studies, Black Sexuality, Black Studies, Black Visual Culture, Literature