Full Description
Asks how Black women tap into their feelings to develop ways to live freely.
Erotic Testimonies draws inspiration from Audre Lorde's "Uses of the Erotic" to explore how Black women access their interiority and use their feelings to engage in processes of self-actualization and make themselves free. Blending genres and resisting the confines of conventional scholarly analysis, Julia S. Jordan-Zachery undertakes what she characterizes as a performative embodied reading of testimonies by four "wild" women from her own life. Jordan-Zachery takes care not to define what constitutes a wild woman-that's been done enough to oppressive ends-but rather tends to these women's forms and means of self-articulation. Complex accounts of wildness, freedom, femininity, the erotic, and the divine emerge from her field notes. Erotic Testimonies attests to the experience of the individual as well as, and even more importantly, how the individual speaks to a broader collective that here includes Lorde, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, Janet Jackson, the author, her grandmother, and many more.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Feeling, and Deeply: A Source of Knowledge
1. Testifying: An Introduction
2. Oh! Isn't It Wild?
3. I Want to Be Totally Free: Maya's Testimony
4. It's Just Easier to Fuck: Sekile's Testimony
5. A Barefoot Girl Howling at the Moon: Val's Testimony
6. Since I Am Divine and I Am Feminine, It Is All Me: Lakeesha's Testimony
7. Talking to the Sugar Canes: What My Gran Taught Me about Seeing Myself
Notes
References
Index
