Abstract
In this essay, I invite all sexualities scholars to apply the Black Feminist Erotic Imagination, a framework for studying and analyzing the complexities of human eroticism and its imbrication with systems of power and pleasure in their work. The Black Feminist Erotic Imagination provides instrumental guidance for sexualities scholars regarding theorizing and foregrounding the interconnectedness of eroticism, embodiment, marginality, power, and pleasure. Black feminist approaches to research and writing, including interdisciplinarity, autoethnography, or experiential knowledge, are also instructive. These intentional Black feminist approaches are rooted in a profound commitment to liberation. Black feminists’ unapologetic commitment to praxis and freedom is not antithetical to empirical research—it deepens researchers’ commitments to applied outcomes and fostering justice through science.
I am a Black feminist sociologist and refuse to squander what I call Black feminist gifts (Jones 2022). Black feminists offer us countless theoretical and methodological innovations, yet far too many sociologists ignore them. These gifts make up what I have termed the Black Feminist Erotic Imagination, a framework for studying and analyzing the complexities of human eroticism and its imbrication with systems of power and pleasure.
The Black Feminist Erotic Imagination provides instrumental guidance for sexualities scholars regarding theorizing and foregrounding the interconnectedness of eroticism, embodiment, marginality, power, and pleasure. Black feminist approaches to research and writing, including interdisciplinarity, autoethnography, or experiential knowledge, are also instructive.
These intentional Black feminist approaches are rooted in a profound commitment to liberation. Black feminists’ unapologetic commitment to praxis and freedom is not antithetical to empirical research—it deepens researchers’ commitments to applied outcomes and fostering justice through science.
In what follows, with all the excitement of a child on Christmas, I unwrap these gifts and ask you, reader, if your work could use a dose of the Black Feminist Erotic Imagination.
Eroticism
Black feminists have reshaped conceptualizations of the erotic for decades, freeing eroticism from a Freudian chokehold and the idea that the erotic realm is driven purely by human libidinous sexual desire. We broaden the understanding of eroticism, defining it as an embodied human desire for connection and intimacy. In “Uses of the Erotic,” Audre Lorde (1978) tells us that the erotic is “a source of power and information.” (p. 54). She asks us to tap into our emotions and corporeal sensations, underscoring how our desires for connection help us form deep, intimate, and joyful relationships.
For sexualities scholars, when we center on eroticism, we can capture a wide range of people and their desires, behaviors and practices, identities, relationships, and communities in our research. Consider BDSM. In The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography, Ariane Cruz (2016) introduces readers to a wide range of kinky practices, from bondage to flogging to specific role-playing scenarios such as race play. She explores how these erotic exchanges of power are spaces for people, Black women, in particular, to cultivate agency, empowerment, and pleasure. These practices are not what many would characterize as sex but are, without question, erotic.
Black feminist understandings of the erotic also challenge compulsory sexuality, or the idea that everyone inherently desires sex, experiences sexual attraction, and that all people should need and want sex as part of living a so-called “normal” erotic life. As Brown (2022) argues in the book Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture, we must interrogate the normalization of allosexual desire as the default and asexuality as abnormal. 1
Put another way, people who do not generally experience sexual attraction or who do not desire sex still have erotic lives and still form intimate human relationships that scholars will fail to capture if we do not challenge sexual hegemony in the understanding of sexuality. People use their bodies in all sorts of ways to connect with other humans, and, as scholars studying sexuality, we must hold space to document all types of human eroticism—the caressing of someone’s face, handholding, binding someone’s hands with rope, fucking with genitals, and everything on the erotic continuum.
Embodiment
Embodiment is central to studying the social life of sexualities. Existing social scripts shape our bodies, and what people do with their bodies shapes the norms that structure our sexual lives. Black feminists have argued that corporeal sensation plays a fundamental role in erotic life and is a fruitful site of knowledge production (Holland, Ochoa, and Tompkins 2014; Musser 2014; Stallings 2015). As Musser (2014) argues in Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism, in erotic practices such as masochism, we can analyze a “space where bodies are embedded in power” (p. 3).
Focusing on embodiment illuminates the political nature of sexuality. In Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia (2019), Sabrina Strings explores how bodies are central to reproducing racial, gender, and class-based inequalities. Thus, centering embodiment is a strategy for capturing how systems of power, such as white supremacy, ableism, heteropatriarchy, and capitalism, shape how people experience, enact, and use their bodies within sexual cultures. It is also a necessary approach for examining how people experience sexual injustice and how they resist it.
Governments around the world pass policies that control the intimate functions of bodies. Black feminists have well-documented how governments have systemically abused Black women’s bodies and how they have targeted Black women’s sexuality (Berry and Gross 2020; Bey 2022; Davis 1983, 2002; McGuire 2010; Roberts 1998; Strings 2019; Tate 2015; Threadcraft 2016). In Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic, Threadcraft (2016) posits that domination and oppression are embodied. Black women have endured endless forms of intimate violence at the hands of the state, such as forced sterilization and reproduction.
It is critical to document and analyze histories of colonial, white supremacist, ableist, and heteropatriarchal harm done to marginalized people’s bodies. However, our bodies are also sites and tools for revolution and working toward liberation from these systems. As Bey (2022) writes in Black Trans Feminism, “It is necessary to find liberation in the aspects of subjectivity that exceed and ooze out of the body” (p. 4). Bey argues that bodies, such as the Black trans woman’s body, are indeed sites of normative social control. Still, they urge us to recognize that if Black trans bodies “are a kind of land that has been territorialized (by the divine) that are now urged to live within revolution, to ‘revolt the land’ [what] we call our bodies is the actualization of bodies living in revolution—our bodies revolt (p. 172).” In the erotic realm, bodies are a site to witness resistance in action.
Marginality
Like other feminist standpoint theories, the Black feminist focus on marginality rests on the premise that people’s overlapping social locations within systems of power shape how they understand the world. Black feminist standpoint theory has emphasized how race, class, gender, and sexuality shape how people’s knowledge and culture are valued in the broader political milieux and whether and how their life experiences are represented in science and other domains of knowledge production.
For centuries, Black feminists have eloquently and poignantly shown us that theory is best built from the loci and standpoint of marginality. Black feminist thought centers on marginalized people’s ideas and experiences as a mechanism to challenge epistemic violence—the systemic exclusion of marginalized people’s ideas and realities from knowledge production and what Dotson (2011) has called practices of silencing.
Privilege is most often invisible to those who have it. However, people who experience systemic disadvantages are uniquely positioned to demystify systems of power and stratification. Collins (1986) termed this unique vantage point an outsider-within perspective. For example, in the context of academia and sociology specifically, she writes that the omission of Black women’s work and societal experiences from the canon, or the gross racist characterizations that do exist, is immediately visible to other Black women, and yet most often remains unacknowledged by white scholars.
The Black Feminist Erotic Imagination asks us to center marginalized groups that are often underrepresented in research. Intentionally centering marginalized people’s voices is not a mere exercise in inclusion. It is a worthwhile methodological practice that opens up opportunities for theory-building regarding the functioning of systems of power.
Power
Intersectional theorizing is the ne plus ultra-Black feminist gift and rooted in Black feminist thought spanning centuries (Cohen 1997; Combahee River Collective 1974; Cooper 1892; Crenshaw 1989, 1991; Davis 1983; Guy-Sheftall 1995; Higginbotham 1992; Hooks 1981, 1984; Hull et al. 1993; Lorde 1984). Crenshaw (1989) coined the term intersectionality. As Nash (2019) has argued, while Crenshaw gave this perspective a name, Black feminists have been thinking, practicing, and advocating for intersectional understandings of oppression and injustice for centuries. For example, Cooper (1892) published A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South, connecting race, gender, and class in her scathing analyses and critiques of systemic inequity in the U.S. South.
Given the pervasiveness of its misguided and flippant usage, let us be clear—Black feminists did not create intersectionality as a buzzword to simply reflect on how identities overlap. They created intersectionality as a tool to interrogate, critique, and challenge systems of power, develop solutions, and reimagine a more just world. People’s location within multiple stratification systems determines their social positions and, thus, access to resources, institutions, and treatment by others in society.
Intersectional theorizing is critical to sexualities research. Specifically, the Black feminist erotic imagination insists that we never separate racialization and sexualities (Khan and Vidal-Ortiz 2025). Black Erotics scholars and feminists often focus on what Cruz (2016) terms racial-sexual-alterity—“the perceived entangled racial and sexual otherness that characterizes the lived experience of Black womanhood.” (p. 33). Sexuality is inherently racialized, and an intersectional framework that accounts for race and caste, in particular, is crucial for demystifying desire and achieving a comprehensive understanding of sexuality.
Pleasure
Pleasure is an embodied social experience and is central to studying various dimensions of sexualities. Black feminists working in the subfield of Black Erotics have been at the forefront of theorizing and writing about eroticism, sexuality, gender, race, and pleasure (Brooks 2010; Brooks et al. 2023; Cruz 2015, 2016; Holland 2012; Jones 2020; Lorde 1978; McMillan 2015; Miller-Young 2014; Morgan 2015; Musser 2014, 2018; Nash 2014, 2017, 2018; Stallings 2015).
Black feminist thought leaders have tended to focus on sexuality as a domain of exploitation and oppression for women, especially for Black and Latina women. Black feminists such as hooks (1992) and Collins (1991, 2004) have focused on how Black women’s bodies are trapped in a historical legacy of racist and sexist hyper-sexualization that we can see play out in controlling images such as “the jezebel” across forms of media. As Joan Morgan (2015) argues, when grappling with sexuality, Black feminist thought had traditionally focused on “the black feminist master narrative,” interrogating the “sordid history of legally and culturally sanctioned rape and gender violence against black women,” and “disputing deeply entrenched and dehumanizing stereotypes. . .in which black women’s damaged sexuality takes center stage” (p. 36).
Taking racialized sexual violence and misogynoir seriously is critical. However, as part of a distinct pleasure turn in Black feminism, we, Black Erotics scholars, have redirected theorizing away from this fixation on woundedness, trauma, and pain only, choosing instead also to make space for discussions of pleasure—what Morgan calls a Black feminist politics of pleasure.
As an example of the pleasure turn, in Nash’s (2014) agenda-setting, The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography, she examines how Black women in pornography flipped the script on racist and sexist discourses surrounding the hypersexualized Black woman, jezebel. Nash examines illicit eroticism and her conceptualization of racial iconography, demonstrating how Black women in pornography reclaim agency. She shows how they manipulate racist and sexist tropes to enhance their material realities, empower themselves and other Black women, and experience pleasure.
Black feminist theorizing recognizes the complex ways that pleasure is entangled with systems of power. We build upon Stallings’ (2015) call to “think about how sexual cultures. . .translate, produce, and reproduce black pleasure, pain, intimacy, relationality, individuality, and commonality in the face of historical and ever-changing sexual terror and violence from white capitalist patriarchy and supremacist institutions” (p. xii). As an example, in The Sex Lives of African Women, Sekyiamah (2022) interviews women from across the continent of Africa and throughout the diaspora and beautifully shows how they find erotic empowerment, pleasure, and joy despite often having to confront exploitation and repressive sexual cultural norms and political governance.
Praxis
Black feminists have continued to demonstrate the value of connecting theory and praxis. For example, Nash (2016) argues that “the work on black erotics now is an attempt to think about the intimate connections between black sexualities and practices of freedom, and an endeavor that imagines freedom as fundamentally linked to erotic variety and transgression” (p. 53). In centering transgressive sexualities, we can chart and document the critical role eroticism plays in social change.
People’s erotic resistance is an engine of social change and propels liberatory movements. In The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies, King (2019) explores connections between Black and native studies and writes, “Within queer Native studies, the erotic is a form of Two Spirit and a queer source of knowledge, one that challenges the biopolitical and colonial discourse of ‘sexuality.’ The erotic becomes a source of power and information that is critical for decolonial resistance” (p. 27).
Black feminists ask us not to shy away from the political orientations of our work. Too often, in academia, we are trained to become “objective” scientists. You’d think sociologists, in particular, would not need convincing that objectivity is an illusion—as if any human can completely divorce themselves from their pedigree. Black feminists not only question allegiances to positivism, but also demand that we own our political commitments. Sociologists often study systems of stratification and inequalities, and our data and empirical findings can promote positive social changes within those systems. Folks, wanting our research to help the communities we write about or having a policy agenda does not make our work less rigorous; it makes us more ethical researchers committed to public scholarship.
Interdisciplinarity
Citational practices matter! In academia, generally, disciplinary fidelity is rewarded, and citational sluttiness is shamed and discouraged. Still, especially in the study of sexualities, the reluctance to read and cite outside of a singular discipline is costly. Our sexualities are deeply embodied, and examining how erotic desires work, for example, requires we examine the complex interplay between physiology and the social. A holistic understanding of desire mandates understanding how social forces program our neurological pleasure reward circuit and the affectual states produced when we fantasize or act on them.
Interdisciplinarity is a hallmark of Black feminisms, and we recognize the pitfalls of writing in isolation. Take the study of sex work. I study sexual economies, centering on the labor experiences of marginalized workers. Alongside the surveys, interviews, and focus groups I conduct, I must read across fields to fully understand their lives holistically. I look to global histories of sex work for much-needed context. I examine work across the social sciences and humanities to understand the laws that shape sex workers’ labor, the markets they labor in, the public health issues they face, the psychological tolls of pervasive unjust stigma caused by criminalization, the whorephobia perpetuated by media and the culture industry, and how power, resistance, and pleasure are fundamental to sex industries.
Sexualities are multifaceted, complex, and dynamic. Interdisciplinary reading and citational practices help us capture dimensions of erotic life comprehensively. We must break free from academic silos that force us to miss advances in other subfields. Black feminists give us excellent models for doing this type of work (Evans 2024; Nash 2024).
Experiential Knowledge
The Black erotic imagination makes space for the enduring Black feminist autoethnographic tradition of embracing one’s experiential knowledge. Scholars in the social sciences often dismiss autoethnographic methods or the use of personal stories as data, deeming them illegitimate. However, autoethnography is critical to knowledge production as it disrupts modes of power in academic writing that actively silence Black and Brown, poor, disabled, trans people, and other marginalized groups.
I challenge notions of so-called navel-gazing—that emotion is antithetical to academic or theoretical rigor. As Miles (2019) writes, “Black feminist tools and frameworks cannot be separated from narrative and storytelling; they are intertwined” (p. 2). Personal stories are not only engaging, but as the Black feminist tradition also shows us, testifying allows for witnessing and sharing stories that others can find themselves in.
Consider one of my favorite contemporary examples. In In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Christina Sharpe (2016) illustrates the intellectual rewards of vulnerable storytelling. Sharpe, in exquisite prose, explores the afterlife of slavery and compares the long-standing effects of white supremacist chattel slavery to the rippling effects of a boat’s wake. She uses the profoundly personal, including the death of siblings and other painful experiences, to elucidate how anti-Blackness is entrenched in the quotidian.
Marrying the autoethnographic and theoretical infuses vulnerability and passion into theoretical discourse, disrupting academic conventions and bringing to life the power of the erotic realm. The strategic use of autoethnography can be vulnerable, especially in sexualities. Still, its benefits are numerous for challenging epistemic injustice, theory-building, and producing prose and texts that are as equally engaging and pleasurable to read as they are intellectually valuable.
Applying the Black Feminist Erotic Imagination
As a provocation, I pose a few final questions for your consideration.
Eroticism: What are the advantages of centering eroticism in your work? What and who gets excluded when we center sex and not eroticism?
Embodiment: What role does the body play in your work? How does centering people’s embodied experiences advance your resea-rch? If you are a qualitative scholar conducting ethnography, interviews, or focus groups, are you attentive to your own body in your research?
Marginality: Do you center marginalized people’s experiences in your work? In the context of your research, what are the advantages of doing so? Suppose your sample overrepresents people from any privileged social group and underrepresents those from systemically disadvantaged ones; how do you address this in the research process?
Power: When you apply an intersectional frame, are you analyzing identity only or connecting them to systems of power? Are there systems you are not attending to, and are there demographic variables such as disability that you do not even collect? Why?
Pleasure: Do you center pleasure in your work? How do you do that? How can you use pleasure as an analytic shaping your research questions, methods, and analysis?
Praxis: What do you hope your research does in the world? Who is your audience, and why? If you are writing about any marginalized group, are you conducting community-engaged work? Do they understand the language you use in the written texts you produce?
Interdisciplinarity: Are you citing Black feminists across disciplines? If not, do you acknowledge this reflects and reproduces institutionalized misogynoir? Are you reading across fields? What are the limitations of intellectual silos? Would your work benefit from engaging more with interdisciplinary research and writing?
Experiential Knowledge: What is your relationship to your field of inquiry? Do you use autoethnographic methods? Why or why not? Does implicating yourself feel vulnerable?
Considering these preliminary questions, I invite all sexualities scholars to ask themselves if they are squandering Black feminist gifts and apply the Black Feminist Erotic Imagination in their work.
