Contested Bodies: Black Women in Art and Culture

Contested Bodies: Black Women in Art and Culture is a trans-institutional series of online or hybrid convenings that brings together Black women art historians, artists, performers, and critics from throughout the African Diaspora to discuss contemporary issues of Black female representation and reality. The first event in the series, "Modernism and the Appropriation of Black Women’s Bodies," took place in April 2023 at the California College of the Arts.

In Part 2 of Contested Bodies, we focus on the intersections among issues of gender, sexuality, and pornography in the representations and experiences of Black women. Featuring Amber Jamilla Musser, Mireille Miller Young, and Tiffany E. Barber, and moderated by Laura G. Gutiérrez, Gender, Sexuality, Pornography brings together scholars working in the fields of Black feminisms and sexualities, performance art and sex work, embodiment and identity, erotics and pornography (among others), to discuss their research and engage in conversation.

This event will be live-streamed and recorded for virtual attendees.

About the Panelists

Dr. Amber Jamilla Musser is Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research focuses on the intersections of race, sexuality, queer theory, and aesthetics. She is the author of Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (NYU Press, 2014), Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (NYU Press, 2018), and the forthcoming Between Shadows and Noise: Sensation, Situatedness, and the Undisciplined (Duke University Press, 2024) She co-edited with Kadji Amin and Roy Pérez, ASAP's special issue on Queer Form (2017) and with Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Aren Aizura, Aimee Bahng, Mishuana Goeman, and Karma Chavez of Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies (NYU Press, 2021), and with Linda Bloom and Martha Fineman, "Care and its Complexities" Signs (forthcoming, Fall 2023). She also serves as a member of the Social Text Collective and president of ASAP (Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present). She writes art criticism for Brooklyn Rail.

Dr. Mireille Miller-Young is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The former UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow researches and teaches about race, gender, and sexuality in US history, popular and film cultures, and the sex industries. Her groundbreaking book, A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography (Duke University Press, 2014), was awarded the Sara A. Whaley Prize for Best Book on Women and Labor by the National Women’s Studies Association and the John Hope Franklin Prize for Best Book by the American Studies Association. Dr. Miller-Young was the co-convener of the Black Sexual Economies Project at Washington University School of Law and lead editor of the 2019 anthology, Black Sexual Economies: Race and Sex in a Culture of Capital. Dr. Miller-Young has published in numerous anthologies, academic journals, and news outlets including Porn Archives, Queer Sex Work, Ethnopornography, Sexualities, Meridians, GLQ, Colorlines, Ms., The Washington Post, The New York Times, and $pread, a sex worker magazine. A sought-after speaker and expert for news, radio, podcasts, and documentaries, Miller-Young has been featured in NPR’s Marketplace, HuffPost Live, For Harriet, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Sony’s Hefner podcast serial, Discovery+’s Viagra: The Little Blue Pill That Changed the World, and the recent hit, Netflix’s History of Swear Words starring Nicolas Cage.

Dr. Miller-Young is an editor of The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (2013), which has been translated into German and Spanish and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBT Anthology, and she is an editor of the recently published volume Black Sexual Economies: Race and Sex in a Culture of Capital (2019). Formerly the Advancing Equity Through Research Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Studies at Harvard University in 2019-2020, Dr. Miller-Young is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin where she is working on her next book, entitled Hoe Theory. Additionally, Dr. Miller-Young’s innovative research agenda includes current projects such as The Black Erotic Archive and The Sex Worker Oral History Project.

Dr. Tiffany E. Barber is a prize-winning, internationally-recognized scholar, curator, and critic whose writing and expert commentary appears in top-tier academic journals, popular media outlets, and award-winning documentaries. Her work spans abstraction, dance, fashion, feminism, film, and the ethics of representation, focusing on artists of the Black diaspora working in the United States and the broader Atlantic world. Her latest curatorial project, a virtual, multimedia exhibition for Google Arts and Culture, examines the value of Afrofuturism in times of crisis.

Dr. Barber is currently Assistant Professor of African American Art at the University of California-Los Angeles as well as curator-in-residence at the Delaware Contemporary. Prior to joining the faculty at UCLA, she was Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Art History at the University of Delaware. She has completed fellowships at ArtTable, the Delaware Art Museum, the University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies, and the Getty Research Institute. Dr. Barber is the recipient of the Smithsonian’s 2022 National Portrait Gallery Director’s Essay Prize.

Laura G. Gutiérrez is Associate Professor in the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies. Her primary research and teaching areas of interest are: Latin American, Mexican and Latina/o embodied practices, gender and sexuality, and questions of nation, modernity and the transnational. Gutiérrez is the author of Performing Mexicanidad: Vendidas y Cabareteras on the Transnational Stage (University of Texas Press, 2010), which won The Ninth Annual MLA Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies.

Gutiérrez has published essays and book chapters in the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Culture Studies, Transformations, Spectator, Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, Latin American Literary Review, Feminist Media Studies, Global Mexican Cultural Productions, Velvet Barrios: Popular Culture & Chicana/o Sexualities.

Currently, in addition to completing several essays on Latina/o performance and cabaret performance in the Americas, Gutiérrez’s research and writing includes two book-length projects. The first is a book on the primary figures of rumbera cinema, tentatively entitled Rumberas in Motion (Pictures): Transnational Movements in the Archive of Mexican 'Classic' Cinema. The book examines dance and other corporeal movements to think through the ways in which embodied performances in popular cultural forms (B movies to be precise) are producing ideas about gender, sexuality, and blackness. The second book in progress is a history of political cabaret culture in Mexico City. It specifically focuses on the ways in which political cabaret as a live artistic expression has existed and continues to exist alongside (and in some cases despite) the different moments of Mexican political history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Gutiérrez received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has had teaching appointments at the University of Iowa and the University of Arizona. Gutiérrez’s research and writing has been supported by a César Chávez Postdoctoral Fellowship from the College of Humanities at the University of Arizona and a Rockefeller Residency Fellowship in the Humanities, “Sex, Race & Globalization Project” at the University of Arizona. Gutiérrez is on the Board of Advisors of the Tepoztlán Institute for the Transnational History of the Americas and on the Editorial Boards of Feminist Formations and Estudios de Género (El Colegio de México). She holds affiliate appointments in the Center for Mexican-American Studies and the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies. She is also a faculty associate of the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies and has served on its Executive Committee (2015-2017).

About the Series

Contested Bodies: Black Women in Art and Culture is a trans-institutional series of online or hybrid convenings that brings together Black women art historians, artists, performers, and critics from throughout the African Diaspora to discuss contemporary issues of Black female representation and reality. It is a forum for diverse approaches and inclusive discussions on how Black women's visuality can be more effectively engaged.

Contested Bodies is supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art and is a collaboration between art historians at institutions across the United States: the Center for the Advanced Study of the Visual Arts (Lowery Stokes Sims), the University of Pennsylvania (Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw), The University of Texas at Austin (Cherise Smith), Tulane University (Mia Bagneris), the Maryland Institute College of Art (Leslie King-Hammond), the California College of the Arts (Jacqueline Francis), and Hyperallergic.com (Isis Davis-Marks).