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Hostile Geographies

Black Girls Fight to Save Themselves and the World

Dehanza Rogers

Abstract

In this article, I engage in a parallel reading of the consumption of Black girlhood in speculative fiction in the television series The Passage, and the film The Girl with All the Gifts, and in the classroom. In these texts are nonconsensual attempts to harvest biological materials from Black girls, exhibiting the belief that Black bodies are utilitarian, at best, and meant for consumption. Like these narratives, the classroom consumes Black girls physically along with their futures. I explore how Black girl resistance disrupts such consumption and interrogate texts in which Black girls create narratives for themselves. In these narratives, so-called disposable Black girls map out new cartographies of narrative resistance and new liberatory geographies for their future.

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Masculinity, Sex, and Dicks

New Understandings of the Phallus

Andrea Waling and Jennifer Power

This special issue brings together interdisciplinary work exploring the relationship between bodies, masculinity, and the penis or phallus. The symbolism, significance, and meaning of the phallus or penis has varied historically and across disciplines. In the psychoanalytic tradition, “the subject…can only assume its identity through the adoption of a sexed identity, and the subject can only take up a sexed identity with reference to the phallus, for ‘the phallus is the privileged signifier’” (Segal 2007: 85). Jacques Lacan's work has inspired feminist critiques of “phallocentrism” in high and popular cultural texts since the 1970s (Segal 2007). Elizabeth Stephens (2007) describes the ancient Greek ideal of small penises as indexing self-control and rationality, while the Romans celebrated virility and power, which they associated with a large penis. Other scholarship has explored the racialization of penis size, such as the stereotype of Black men as possessing large penises, indexing hypersexuality and often depicted in racist terms as representing aggression or lack of civility (Lehman 2006).

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Sohini Saha

Abstract

This article focuses on the place of phallus/penis in the practice of brahmacharya, the Hindu concept of celibacy. Contrary to the supposed irrelevance in the ascetic sphere, the article argues how brahmacharya seeks to embody the potent concept of the phallus. In following the ontological turn, this article seeks to move away from the notion of phallus as only a representation or a symbol; to rethink the concept in its relation to penis in order to argue for an embodied idea of phallus and the theoretical possibilities it garners in the sphere of asceticism. Engaging into an ethnographic study in the “ascetic” spaces of bayam samitis (traditional gyms) and akharas (place of wrestling), the article seeks to understand the phallus through the everyday bodily practices of brahmacharya in an attempt to argue how men's efforts to embody the phallus is aspired for and constantly undermined in these austere everyday practices.

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Renewed Possibilities

Showcasing the Lived Realities of Black Girls using Ethnopoetics

Dywanna Smith

Abstract

In this article, I explore how ethnopoetics can be a profound research methodology and can also offer a pathway to self-actualization. When ethnopoetics is combined with a Black feminist/womanist theoretical framework, it allows for Black girls to self-define and self-validate their existence. The verse novel provides an opportunity to communicate Black girls’ and women's feelings and experiences to researchers and educators in accessible ways. It also serves as a platform to grieve, praise, love, and grow. Such work stands in marked contrast to dominant narratives of Black girlhood.

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A “Sense of Presence”

The “me of me” in Black Girlhoods

Claudia Mitchell and Ann Smith

We begin by paying tribute to feminist Black scholar, bell hooks, who died 15 December 2021. As the numerous citations in just this issue alone bear witness, she has had a huge influence on feminist ways of thinking particularly in relation to how race, gender, and capitalism intersect. In her well-known essay, “In Our Glory” on Black girlhood and visual culture (), she offers a memory of losing a photograph of herself as a young girl in the 1950s masquerading, as she called it, in full cowgirl regalia.

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Hanieh Bakhtiari

Abstract

While visual eroticism is an accepted theme in cinema, the penis is still the last frontier of representation onscreen, either covered from the gaze of viewers or coated in phallic status in its rare representations. This article explores a rupture with the mythic penile representations in cinema within the recurrent scenes of full-frontal male nudity in Steve McQueen's Shame (2011). Through generating a space between the corporeal penis and the abstract phallus, Shame foregrounds the untold vulnerability and volatility inherent in the supposed rigid heterosexual position of male sexuality. The research highlights such a shift in the phallic visuals of male nudity and its implications for a possible alteration in the significance and function of the penis.

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Spatializing Black Girlhood

Rap Music and Strategies of Refusal

Asilia Franklin-Phipps

Abstract

In this article, I begin by taking seriously the cultural contributions that Black women and girls make to hip-hop, thereby shifting the sociocultural and political landscape. Black girls and women do this in a variety of ways, but here I focus on how Black women rappers model and perform multiple embodied refusals that expand the possibilities for Black girls. Inspired by the cultural force of the current moment in hip-hop that is increasingly dominated by young Black women, I reflect on how Black women rappers reconstitute space through performance, music, and performances rooted in practices of refusal.

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Taking on the Light

Ontological Black Girlhood in the Twenty-first Century

Renee Nishawn Scott

Abstract

When society invokes Cashawn Thompson's hashtag phrase, “Black Girl Magic,” we laud the accomplishments of Black women and girls as if those triumphs are innate. In this article, I suggest that Black girls participate in a process that I call light making, or embodying that which is lighthearted, encouraging, and self-preserving. In exploring this particular ontology, I deconstruct Black Girl Magic by focusing on contemporary examples of light making as a way of understanding the critical role that Black girls play in Black cultural formation. By focusing on Black girl joy and play in social media, I stress light making as an ontology located in Black girlhood.

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Toward a Politics of “Raw Dicks”

Authenticity, the Alt-Self, and New Understandings of the Phallus

Chris Ashford and Gareth Longstaff

Abstract

Law arguably shapes contemporary culture and phallic politics. In England and Wales, like much of the Global North, the second half of the twentieth century and early twenty-first century saw a general shift from a criminal legal framework that understood sexuality as sexual acts to a civil law framework that seeks to privilege institutions - notably marriage - and lifestyle as signifiers of sexuality. This article contributes to legal and cultural understandings of the phallus, specifically the “raw dick,” as key to understanding the self-representational spaces of “authentic” and “alt” selves on social media. It situates the “raw dick” as the locus of this cultural, legal, and social exchange in which the legal outlaw of male phallic desire has been incorporated into queer citizenship. We argue that the aesthetics of the alt-self provides us with new and important ways to understand the phallus and its relationship to sex and sexuality.

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Becoming a Man

Trajectories of Young Gay Men in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil

Wendell Ferrari and Marcos Nascimento

Abstract

This paper seeks to analyze the affective-sexual trajectories of young gay men in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Based on qualitative research with 15 young, urban, low-income gay men aged between 19 and 24, carried out in 2019, this article shows the learning of masculinity and its consequences on the men's sex lives. As a result, we argue that these young men have been brought up for the exaltation of heterosexuality and being a real man since boyhood; that the pedagogies of masculinity produce hierarchies among gay masculinities; and that the connection with other social markers, such as race, social class, religion, sexual preferences related to being active or passive, and gender expressions, upholds the notion of hegemonic masculinity. Regarding those who escape this pattern, these young men reveal several vulnerabilities and multiple violent acts during their trajectories.