Engendering Blackness Book Talk

In this incisive new book, Patrice D. Douglass interrogates the relationship between sexual violence and modern racial slavery and finds it not only inseverable but also fundamental to the structural predicaments facing Blackness in the present. Douglass contends that the sexual violability of slaves is often misappropriated by frameworks on sexual violence that privilege its occurrences as a question of ethics, sexual agency, and feminine orders of gendering. Rather, this book foregrounds Blackness as engendered by sexual violence, which forcefully (re)produces Blackness, corporeally and conceptually, as a condition that lacks the capacity to ontologically distinguish its suffering from what it means to be human.

Patrice D. Douglass is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley. Her current book project, Race and Abortion Ethics: Antiblackness and the Opacity of Liberty, interrogates the (im)permissibility of abortion in US law and politics. Her research on Blackness, gender, afro-pessimism, reproductive justice, and Black philosophies appear in or forthcoming from Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies of Media and Culture, Political Theology, Journal of Legal Anthropology, Yale Journal of Law & Feminism, PRISM: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature, Souls, Journal of Visual Culture, Theory and Event, Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik: A Quarterly of Language, Literature and Culture (ZAA), and The Black Scholar. She holds a PhD and MA in Culture and Theory from the University of California, Irvine, a MA in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Riverside, and a BA in Feminist Studies and Legal Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

This event is hosted by USC’s Center for Feminist Research, the Consortium for Gender, Sexuality, Race and Public Culture, and Black Visual Cultures Collective (BVCC), which is co-founded by Naima Adams (American Studies), Corrine Collins (English), and Mlondolozi Zondi (Comparative Literature).

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Host or Publisher Center for Feminist Research