Black Femmescapes

Released in 2018, Leilah Weinraub’s documentary film Shakedown chronicles the existence of a peripatetic Black queer lesbian strip club in Los Angeles’s Inglewood neighborhood in the early 2000’s. The film offers an intimate portrayal of Black lesbian desire—often rendered invisible within most forms of media—and features a range of individuals who express themselves with a kind of unfettered lucidity, joy and eroticism despite the ever-present institutional dangers presented by police or the prevalence of homophobia, transphobia and misogynoir. Instead of presenting a unified notion of what it means to be a Black lesbian stripper, the film highlights myriad manifestations of Black femme. Shakedown offers a capacious vision of erotic possibilities at the intersections of Blackness, gender fungibility, Black femme poetics, aesthetics and spatial politics in the lives of Black queer lesbian women which, taken together, conjure unruly potentialities which support and undergird everyday Black freedom practices.

Over the past few years, the politics, erotics, aesthetics and poetics of “femme” have resurfaced as an urgent site to consider possibilities for Black freedom. Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley describes Black femme as a method of “accumulating meaning beyond the normative.” For Tinsley, the Black femme signals a practice of freedom, as the Black femme knows “that the dismantling of misogynoir, femme phobia, and transmisogyny are necessary for Black freedom,” urging us to recognize “that creativity is not a luxury for those of us who are Black, queer, feminine, and never meant to thrive.” (1)

Black femme offers iridescent brilliance – a guiding light to an exciting and unruly elsewhere – even or perhaps because it is simultaneously devalued, threatened, not taken seriously, and positioned as uncritical, as when Kaila Adia Story writes that her “false eyelashes, lipstick, perfume and, at times, racy form of dress all signify to students, particularly my White and queer identified students, that I am there to entertain, party, and/or be their friend.” (2)

Scholarly writing about “femme” embodiment privileges aesthetics as one of the primary manifestations of femme politics given its relationship to visibility. Consider, for example, Jillian Hernandez’s emphasis on femme aesthetics with specific attention to how certain performances of femininity — often working class — engage what she calls “sexual aesthetic excess." (3) Examples of sexual aesthetic excess within popular culture are vibrant and plentiful, and illustrate how femme aesthetics manifests as both a form of adornment and armor. Those who harness the power of femme aesthetics do so for their own pleasure, at their own risk, and do so under the illusion of safety.

Building on critical interventions made by scholars, artists and activists writing about the Black femme – and following Christina Sharpe’s reminder that “beauty is a method” (4) – we, the guest editors of this special issue, propose the BLACK FEMMESCAPE as an urgent vantage point through which to articulate strategies Black femmes use to pursue paths to erotic freedom. The BLACK FEMMESCAPE offers a rupture, set of methodological practices of self-definition, transformation and refusal that registers femmehood as a politics of love and desire, community and care, abundance and joy, and pleasure and vibrancy in and through the five-alarm fire of Black queer life.

As the co-editors discussed and prepared this CFP, we realized that the term “femme” is much more unstable than originally understood. That is to say, there is little that reliably distinguishes P- Valley’s Uncle Clifford’s or Big Freedia’s femme embodiments from those of cisgender Black women when we take seriously the capaciousness of the Black body’s gender fungibility — in line with Hortense Spillers’s theorization – under racial capitalism. This further underscores how, for Black bodies, safety remains a carefully curated cultural production which deludes us to believe that there exists some bodily comportment or way of moving through the world which guarantees our safety. In this way, femmescapes open up space for embodied practices of fluidity, opacity, excess and boundlessness. Such practices illuminate what becomes conceivable for those willing to suspend attachment to terms like “woman” and “femme” in order to develop freedom practices characterized by boundless possibility. In so doing, we take seriously what Spillers’s assertion - that Black gender lacks “symbolic integrity” — makes possible for Black bodies. (5)

In this special issue on BLACK FEMMESCAPES, we are concerned with femme embodiment, performances of femmehood, femme politics and notions of excess, opacity, abundance and boundlessness. We also find it critically important to expand our focus to investigate the context in which femme embodiments, politics and expressions emerge and generate their meanings. Following Tinsley, who argues that the Black femme “can be cis or trans, binary or nonbinary, AFAB (assigned female at birth) or AMAB (assigned male at birth),” we understand femme embodiment to be complex, capacious, and sometimes contradictory in its manifestations and seek to honor what can be learned by theorizing in excess of stable, discrete identity categories which stifle complexity in the name of legibility. We prioritize the blending and blurring of aesthetics, embodiments and performances which disrupt the dichotomous categorization of masculinity and femininity. Indeed, we aim to follow Janet Mock —speaking in Blood Orange’s album Negro Swan — and “do too much.”

This special issue asks: How might BLACK FEMMESCAPES create sites of rupture? How might notions of excess, opacity and boundlessness be generative for considering Black futures? In what ways might attention to aesthetics reframe conversations of politics, pleasure, and freedom? In what ways do femmes and femmescapes disrupt the dichotomy between masculinity and femininity? How might terms like “embodiment” more sufficiently address the complexities and contingencies of gender than “identity”? What are the limits of the BLACK FEMMESCAPE?

We aim to bring together scholars in Black Studies, Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, Performance Studies, Fashion Studies, Visual Culture, Popular Music Studies, Media Studies and Contemporary Art to theorize femmehood, excess, embodiment, performance, politics and aesthetics. We invite academics, creative writers, artists, independent scholars, and activists to submit full-length articles as well as interviews, poetry, DJ mixes, wardrobe interviews, mixtapes, manifestos, playlists, lookbooks, and other creative pieces.

Full-length journal articles submissions should be 6000-8000 words, and creative/experimental texts should be 2000-3000 words. We are particularly interested in creative/experimental texts which respond to Christina Sharpe’s theory of “Beauty Is a Method”— a meditation on how people who experience ongoing anti-black violence harness beauty as a way of combating the continued psychic, physical, spiritual and emotional assault of anti-blackness. Taken together, this special issue will spark new dialogues about the aesthetic abundance of femmehood, Black femme as a method of rupture, and Black femme pathways to brighter, more iridescent futures.

All works should adhere to the journal’s submission guidelines. Please send your submissions to blackfemmescapes@gmail.com by February 16th, 2024.

Possible topics of consideration may include:

• Methodologies of Beauty/Beauty as a method
• Throwing shade
• Black femme freedom dreaming
• Black femme-escapes
• Black femmescapes and sexual/sensual embodied performance – for example pole-dancing, stripping, burlesque, drag, and sex siren categories in the ballroom scene
• Trans and nonbinary Black femme politics/poetics
• Black femmehood and pleasure politics
• Diasporic femmehood in the Caribbean and Africa
• Black femmescapes and popular music
• Sissy aesthetics
• Ratchet aesthetics
• Black femme and abjection
• Everyday Black femme style politics
• Black femmescapes and the art of survival
• Black femmescapes in the virtual realm – Tik Tok, Instagram, Onlyfans and other platforms
• Black femmescapes and refusal
• Spaces of Black femmehood
• Black femme art and performance
• Black femmehood and illusions of safety
• Black femme power and its manifestations in everyday life