“F*ck Y'all Feminism”: Black Girls, P-Valley, Rape Culture, and Erotic Power

This chapter uses the hit television series P-Valley to examine the sexual realities and vulnerabilities of Black girls. Taking care to resist hypersexualization, rape culture, victim-blaming, sexual shaming, and adultification, the chapter argues that, while historical fears around rape culture produced respectability-based sexual binaries meant to combat the consequences and afterlife of sexual and human trafficking during the transatlantic slave trade, Black girls need alternative sexual literacies that honor their right to bodily autonomy, feeling, curiosities, sexual subjectivity, safety, fantasy, consent, and wholeness. That is, Black girls’ value is inherent in their entire being, including the sexual. More, they’re entitled to embrace and articulate this without shame, blame, or threat. Finding balance here is an entry point for rethinking not only black freedom but also more emancipatory ways of relating intraracially and intracommunally. Black girls deserve a feminism and future that can hold all this together.