There’s a growing body of media about Black women and sexual violence. Why do examples tend to laud heteronormative monogamous partnership, celibacy, or abstinence as redemptive?

Why are the taboos, complexities, and contradictions of Black women’s sexual lives after sexual violence seldom discussed in popular media?

Reconfigurations: Race, Sexual violence, and Representation

These questions animate my forthcoming manuscript, Reconfigurations: Race, Sexual Violence, and Representation. Using Black Feminist literary and cultural analysis, the book analyzes the relative dearth of media depicting and describing Black women’s sexual and intimate lives in the aftermath of sexual violence, interrogating the racial and gendered symbols present in examples across genres. Black women’s fraught relationship with concepts of victimhood and survivorship and the intended audience for Black women’s trauma narratives form the book’s core argument that literary representations of Black women’s sexual lives after sexual violence depict a range of sexual choices, expressions, and contradictions. Specific examples like Gayl Jone’s Corregidora (1975), Roxane Gay’s Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017), and excerpts from Charlotte Pierce Baker’s Surviving the Silence: Black Women’s Stories of Rape (2002) divest from linear narratives of trauma recovery, and analyzing them alongside dream hampton’s Surviving R. Kelly series (2019-2022) and Aishah Shadidah Simmons’ NO! The Rape Documentary (2006) brings a vital collection of Black women’s sexual violence media into sharp focus.