Playing with power: Kink, race, and desire

Although the separation between “real life” and “play” appears to reinscribe liberal notions of autonomy, BDSM practitioners actually mobilize this boundary to trouble liberal understandings of the liberal autonomous rational agent. Through understandings desires as inextricable from power, and fetishes as displacements of anxieties, BDSM practices recognize “irrational” desires and multiple, fractured selves. In examining kink practices of queer women of color in the Netherlands, this paper explores the transformative potentials of BDSM for queer people of color, especially in resisting colonial discourses that privilege liberal discourses of agency and conceptualize bodies of color as nonmodern, inferior, exotic, and irrational. In the face of discourses that pit Dutch freedom and sexual expression against ethnic minorities and sexual constraint, marginalized kinksters are forming communities that radically centralize marginalized kink experiences and reject pathologizing discourses, as they critically alter the implications of and possibilities for slippages between daily life and kink.

Sisters in the Life

Yvonne Welbon, an award-winning filmmaker and founder of the Chicago-based nonprofit Sisters in Cinema, interviews Alexis Pauline Gumbs, cofounder of the Black Feminist Film School, as part of a larger trans-media project on the history of queer Black lesbian media makers, SistersintheLife.com. Gumbs speaks about Black feminist practices of education and filmmaking, delving into the founding and inspiration of the Black Feminist Film School and its mission to “create the world anew.” She explains her “community accountable practice” that is connected to traditions of Black intellectualism, her position as provost of a “tiny Black feminist university” that she calls Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind, as well as how she and her collaborators have been inspired by QWOCMAP (Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project).

Walk like a Man, Talk like a Woman

This chapter upends the myth that all queer women of color are butch, or masculine-presenting. Johnson’s interlocutors reveal that gender presentation and expression for women in the South have historically been much more fluid and malleable than is commonly assumed. Moreover, the women expose the inability of terms like ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine” to fully capture how they play with gender.