A daring collaboration among scholars that challenges thinking that sees black sexualities as a threat to normative ideas about sexuality, the family, and the nation.

The essays of Black Sexual Economies: Race and Sex in a Culture of Capital (University of Illinois Press, 2019) highlight alternative and deviant gender and sexual identities, performances, and communities, and spotlights the sexual labor, sexual economy, and sexual agency to black social life. Throughout, the writers reveal the lives, everyday negotiations, and cultural or aesthetic interventions of black gender and sexual minorities while analyzing the systems and beliefs that structure the possibilities that exist for all black sexualities. They also confront the mechanisms of domination and subordination attached to the political and socioeconomic forces, cultural productions, and academic work that interact with the energies at the nexus of sexuality and race.

Mireille Miller-Young contributed as lead editor for the BSE Collective and co-wrote the chapter “Black Stud, White Desire: Black Masculinity in Cuckold Pornography and Sex Work” with Xavier Livermon.

“Black Sexual Economies is the first anthology of its kind to mine the deeply rooted vestiges of late capitalism as they relate to black sexuality. Through analyses of slavery, pornography, popular culture, and music, among other topics, each essay in this carefully curated volume enlivens anew our attention to the stakes of theorizing black sexuality—the fact that we can never think about black sexuality without always thinking about the political economic conditions of its making. Indeed, Black Sexual Economies is a welcomed breath of fresh air to the now well-established field of black sexuality studies.” — E. Patrick Johnson, editor of No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies 

“To represent, to affirm, to understand, and to live black sexualities can be immeasurably difficult. The very foundations of politics, social life—and, as this volume argues, capitalist economies—in the modern world often hinge on pathologizing black people’s sexuality in order to exploit and to destroy black bodies and black lives. Black feminist innovator Adrienne Davis curates here essays that batter down and deftly navigate the thicket of lies that try to render 'black sexuality' unspeakable and unknowable, and point the way forward.”— Darieck Scott, author of Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination