Let’s Play: Exploring Cinematic Black Lesbian Fantasy, Pleasure, and Pain Available to Purchase

Jennifer DeClue takes up Juana Maria Rodriguez’s challenge to embrace the pleasure of “untamed erotics” and not shy away from exploring the materiality of sexuality and the problematics of sex play and fantasy among racialized subjectivities. In so doing, DeClue examines three films of black lesbian erotica that explore sexual domination and submission, as well as pleasure and pain, as ecstatic modes that can release the trauma of sexual violence and racial oppression. Against the haunting presence of both historic and personal traumas that complicate sex, fantasy, and power play within the black lesbian community, DeClue’s attention to these very sites aims to theorize and visualize the materiality of black lesbian sex through the language of the cinematic.