On Being a Black Sexual Intellectual

Abstract

This chapter provides a critical reading of Cheryl Clarke's second volume of poetry, Living as a Lesbian. Situating this text within the larger context of black women's poetry, Green argues that its erotic aesthetic works to critique the historic erasure of the black lesbian body in the discourse of African American life as it simultaneously pushes toward and away from theories of sexuality that limit and thus reduce black women’s linguistic economies to metaphors of sexual desire.