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ETD Abstract Container

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Imagining Beyond the Body: The Speculative Erotic Power of the Flesh

Dixon, Lynette Mawolu
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1555686939405447

Abstract Details

2019, Master of Arts, Ohio State University, African-American and African Studies.
Mining hip hop as an archive of slavery and its afterlives, I read Black feminine performances to excavate both how anti-Blackness overdetermines and limits the discourse surrounding Black women’s flesh and the ways in which these performances illuminate novel readings about Blackness, gender, and sexuality. Primarily, I utilize Hortense Spillers’ conception of the flesh to interrogate Outkast’s “Jazzy Belle,” Janelle Monae’s “Q.U.E.E.N,” and Missy Elliott’s “The Rain [Supa Dupa Fly]." I read and excavate these Black feminine performances in hip hop through a framework I name speculative eroticism. Speculative erotism refers to a set of performance and is employed as a method of reading performances that are informed by enslavement, domination, and unfreedom and which are also attuned to the possibilities of Black feminine insurgency. I argue that performing readings centered upon Black feminine flesh necessarily demands attention to pleasure, joy, sensuality, and the erotic. Therefore, each chapter contends with the ways in which unfreedom, abjection, and pathology wound Black feminine flesh as well as the ways in which Black feminine performances navigate, resist, and rewrite these scripts.
Franco Barchiesi (Advisor)
Treva Lindsey (Committee Member)
Ryan Skinner (Committee Member)
66 p.
African American Studies; Womens Studies
flesh; erotics; hip hop; performance; Black feminism

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Dixon, L. M. (2019). Imagining Beyond the Body: The Speculative Erotic Power of the Flesh [Master's thesis, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1555686939405447

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Dixon, Lynette. Imagining Beyond the Body: The Speculative Erotic Power of the Flesh . 2019. Ohio State University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1555686939405447.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Dixon, Lynette. "Imagining Beyond the Body: The Speculative Erotic Power of the Flesh ." Master's thesis, Ohio State University, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1555686939405447

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1555686939405447
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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.