From the feminist 'sex wars' of the 1980s to the queer theory and politics of the 1990s, debates about the politics of sexuality have been at the forefront of contemporary theoretical, social, and political demands. This article seeks to intervene in these debates by challenging the terms through which they have been de ned. Investigating the importance of 'sex positivity' and transgression as conceptual features of feminist and queer discourses, this essay calls for a new focus on the political and material effects of pro-sexuality.

Investigating the figure of the queer black dandy in the art and literature of the Harlem Renaissance, this article argues that African American modernists such as Wallace Thurman and Richard Bruce Nugent revise nineteenth-century, European models of dandyism and decadence in order to critique the cult of authenticity surrounding the cultural construction of blackness. Their rebellion against the commodification of black identity gives birth to a new aesthetic that combines the naturalized simplicity and vigor of primitivism with the artifice of decadenceÐmaking legible a distinctly African American incarnation of the new forms of desire, identity, and community emerging in modern, urban culture.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract