Joan Morgan on Black Sex, Identity and the Politics of Pleasure

Welcome to Parlour’s newest smart brown girl series, profiling women of color in academia. Delving into their research, we’ll discuss what’s going on in the hearts and minds of those at the forefront of intellectual discussion in America and around the world. Who said feminism, intellectualism and learning was dead?For our inaugural feature, we chatted with Joan Morgan, author of 1999’s When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost, a feminist who negotiated a love of hip-hop. Ms. Morgan’s currently completing her ph.D program at New York University in American Studies while teaching a class at Stanford University this semester entitled The Pleasure Principle: A Post-Hip Hop Search for a Black Feminist Politics of Power, centering around the Politics of Pleasure. On Wednesday she's hosting a panel discussion on the topic with several female scholars of color at Stanford at 5:30 p.m. PST at the Roble Theater followed by a talk on pleasure and relationships with author, journalist and activist Kevin Powell on Friday at Harmony House. And if you don’t know what Politics of Pleasure means, don’t worry, we didn’t either exactly so we asked.Parlour: You talk a lot about the Politics of Pleasure, what does that mean?Joan Morgan: Much of my work as a feminist revolved around how do we improve black women’s lives. I had been investigating how we talk about black women, particularly in terms of sexuality, without talking about pleasure. Instead, we identify the racial and sexual history, particularly in the United States, and why that history prevents or complicates black women’s sexuality from enjoying a sex positive space.Feminism is very good at dissecting the politics of respectability and the culture of dissemblance thanks to Darlene Clark Hine. Still, we’re not so good at articulating a language for pleasure, which is crucial for any human being but it plays a critical role in other black women’s issues with which we don’t necessarily make the connection. For example, if we’re talking about black women and the rate of new HIV cases – the percentage of black women among new infections is disproportionately high – but when you look at the prevention, the language is ‘If he doesn’t want to use a condom, tell him to back off’ or, ‘If he really cares about you he’ll use protection.’ The discourse is centered around men’s pleasure.Perhaps women don’t like the way condoms feel either, so how about developing protection that feels better without centering the conversation around men ...For black women, I think about our health and the diseases that compromise our lives due to stress, and we will send out the call to arms around obesity or heart disease. But we’re not talking about making a real commitment to joy in our lives, particularly around the erotic or sex and the body. I’m very interested in that little taboo area. With the Politics of Pleasure I begin to argue that what’s missing is language, and I really wanted to begin to articulate language and introduce pleasure as a feminist priority for Black women.Where do Latinas fall into that theory, especially since the Catholic church has a special type of guilt for all things sexual. How does a woman’s relationship with religion play into the Politics of Pleasure?The Politics of Pleasure is supposed to be a question around brown women, though I am particularly talking about black women’s racial and sexual histories. Still, I’m very aware about how those histories intersect with other racial and sexual narratives, black women don’t exist in a vacuum. In terms of finding strategies to address that, I mine a lot of different places like queer studies. I look very closely at its non-identitarianism, the way that it actually makes us part of its agenda, sexual freedom, and a kind of tolerance without being judgmental.I also looked at what I call ‘Caribbean erotics,’ including writers like Carolyn Cooper and others. I’m looking at different cultural spaces, not identity politics, but different theorizations around sexuality that can lend to this particular discourse of pleasure. I already come to this discussion knowing that the church and racism are problems.In the class I’m teaching at Stanford this semester, we begin to articulate language in this discourse and my first tactics is to say the narrative and our history will not change. However we do have the power to reframe that narrative. History doesn’t have to be stagnant and how we interpret that history or what we look for, in terms of black women in the archives of history, does not have to be stagnant. I believe that pleasure has always existed, it had to have existed, even in the Middle Passage or we simply could not have survived as a people. What I think though is that those stories get sacrificed to the agendas of racism, sexism or misogyny. Intellectually, my job as a feminist and a scholar is to unearth and reframe those stories so that there actually is some attention to pleasure.So part of your focus is to illuminate our sexual history, combatting the idea that during the Middle Passage, people were too stressed out to have sex; we were busy trying to survive.Yes, and some scholars are challenging that notion, saying there was probably same sex love during that time and even during slavery. In this way, Caribbean fiction, like Marlon James’ The Book of Night Women, has been really helpful. We often look at Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson are the beginning of the story but there were multiple kinds of sexual relationships that black women had during slavery; involuntary, voluntary, strategic, non-strategic, love. But these conversations have been erased out in order to lay the blame for much of the black female struggle on racism and white supremacy, where it needs to be. I get that but I’m very concerned about what is taken out of the narrative to fulfill that agenda.On your class syllabus, you list Real Housewives and the lesbian coming-of-age drama Pariah as texts, how do those works tie-in with your pleasure principle?We didn’t watch Pariah or Real Housewives, instead there was Beyoncé, director Ava Duvernay’s work and dream hampton. I use pop culture in a number of ways because I’m aware that my students do not just live in a world where they’re dealing solely with written text. It’s important for me to talk about Scandal, because I want them to learn how to use those sources as text, responsibly. We need to have a conversation about why you can’t read a music video as you would a documentary. Rihanna performing “Man Down,” her song about killing an attacker, doesn’t mean that she’s going to go kill somebody. One of my students began to do post critical readings and one of them is to think of Black women’s bodies as performance as a way to create safe erotic spaces and what is the power of just performance in itself, not just for the performer but for the women who are watching and enjoying the performance. To me Beyoncé does work that isn’t discussed beyond ‘Why did she have to gyrate that way?’ or ‘Why is she wearing that kind of clothing?’I want to get past that. I want to look at how people, and women, are getting pleasure from what Beyonce does and so is she, and why that’s important.Did you hit these ideas in the ‘Decoding Beyonce’ conversation you hosted at Stanford?My lunch discussion, through the CCSRE (Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity) and the African and African American Studies Department, was on Beyoncé with two of my students so people could get an idea of what we’re doing in our Pleasure Principle class. Some things that arose were how we read Beyoncé’s body and what’s she doing, that became a deep conversation about African dance tradition and her connection to it shown in more than a couple videos. What are the reasons we don’t recognize that as African dance and call it something else? What does Beyoncé do and how does she work through the male gaze to position herself not a merely for justification but how does she use that gaze not only for her own empowerment but for the empowerment of women? What does it mean to have an all-female band in the testosterone space of the Super Bowl? We had difficult conversations too, like her blackface fashion spread in a French magazine in 2011. If that depiction is in a French magazine, do you read the blackface the same way you would in America? What happens if you superimpose the U.S.’s racial and professional history every where else? It was intense, tricky and fun, and that’s what happens when you talk about pleasure.This Wednesday you’re hosting an all-star panel at Stanford around the Politics of Pleasure, how did that come about?I reached out to the Institute for Diversity of the Arts at Stanford because I wanted to know the possibility for hosting a space where I could get together with other feminists, activists, scholars, cultural workers and singers. Stanford responded with ‘We’d love it but would you also teach a class on whatever you want?’ So I designed my course this semester very close to my own interests. Ultimately, it’s camp pleasure for the next three days. We talked seriously about re-theorizing the idea of black women’s sexuality, how do we make interventions into different kinds of spaces, not just academic spaces, conferences and panels? I call the panel participants my pleasure ninjas, we’re all committed to rethinking this. This round I have Dr. Treva Lindsay from the University of Missouri, Dr. Brittney Cooper, of Rutgers University who’s also founder of the Crunk Feminist Collective, Esther Armah, a radio journalist at New York’s WBAI, and Dr. Kaila Story of University of Louisville.For the last three days, it’s been our time. We didn’t share with anyone except ourselves which is great. Feminism by nature is one of those few intellectual forms of study within the academy that is a collective work. We work better that way. I’m so grateful to Stanford for the space and time to meet with each other and not only to share ideas. We’ve scheduled in massages, we did some dancing on Sunday and they’ll be some retail therapy somewhere. We’re talking pleasure in the more holistic sense. On Wednesday, I’ll be moderating the Politics of Pleasure panel on campus at Roble Theatre at 5:30 p.m. PST and that’s the big community event. On Friday, Kevin Powell and I having a new discussion at Stanford’s Harmony House about relationships and pleasure. It’s going to be pleasure week!