Introduction: Embracing Black Feminist Joy and Pleasure in Communication Studies

Abstract

“Blackness is an immense and defiant joy,” Imani Perry recently declared in The Atlantic. This embrace of Black life reflects the Black feminist praxis of understanding joy and pleasure as forms of resistance, self-care, and power. To be clear, Perry asserts that “exhilaration in black life is not to mute or minimize racism, but to shame racism, to damn it to hell... . Do not misunderstand. This [joy] is not an absence of grief or rage, or a distraction. It is insistence.” Unlike Black feminist praxis, mainstream media has largely ignored or distorted the immense and defiant joy to which Perry refers in its representations of Black life. Narratives of loss, sorrow, violence, and anger have overwhelmingly driven most media that centers blackness. As such, it is not surprising that the relationship between blackness and joy or pleasure has been underexplored within communication scholarship. This forum, “Embracing Black Feminist Joy and Pleasure in Communication Studies,” places Black feminist explorations of joy and pleasure—broadly defined as a feeling of happiness, enjoyment, or satisfaction—in conversation with the field. The insistence on embracing individual and collective pleasure that has long been integrated into Black feminism is illuminated in Audre Lorde’s influential 1978 essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” Lorde argues that women have a particular capacity to experience a pleasurable sense of satisfaction in all areas of their lives when they are in touch with the internal sensation that she refers to as “the erotic.” Following Lorde’s work, contemporary Black feminists, such as Jennifer Nash, Joan Morgan, and adrienne maree brown, to name only a few, have similarly centered the role of pleasure in the lives of Black women. However, when Black feminist scholar bell hooks considered Black women’s relationship to media in her essay “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” she observed that, for many Black women, their “encounter with the screen hurt.” While hooks placed hope in Black women’s ability to “contest, resist, revision, interrogate, and invent on multiple levels” as critical spectators, she primarily emphasized that the “oppositional gaze” that Black women employ when engaging with media can support Black women in navigating the pain, rather than embracing the pleasure, in media. It is worth noting that communication scholarship has addressed the affective sensation of enjoyment or pleasure gained from media. And there is a glimmer in recent