Willoughby-Herard crafts original bawdy fables and fashions crude proverbs to analyze Black LGBTQ+ experiences in academia as a ground for theory that navigates the promise and peril of telling. The essay takes seriously Evelynn Hammonds’s advice that Black sexual and gender others recall their journeys as a mode of defense, analysis, meaning making. Using vulgar tales to throw shade, while wrestling within and beyond the limits of trauma porn and spectacle, makes for a hard-won cultural legacy and remittance that points to possibilities for survival and being. Recalling bitter experiences in academia exposes social relations anchored by collective violence. Following Alicia Levy-Seedat, vulgarity, deployed by working-class speakers of Jamaican Patwah (patois), cuts through patronizing conditions. Willoughby-Herard’s notion of “writerly extravagance” enables telling while feeding on the rough laughter and crass pleasure of readers and hearers to create something like survival, or at least having the last laugh.
“I guess I have to just put my dick on the table”: Rough Trade, Tenure, and Black Sexualities as Self-defense
tiffany willoughby-herard is a professor of global and international studies at the University of California, Irvine, and Professor Extraordinarius in the Chief Albert Luthuli Research Chair at the University of South Africa. They research Black globality, gendered racisms, and Third World feminism. Along with Waste of a White Skin: The Carnegie Corporation and the Racial Logic of White Vulnerability (University of California Press, 2015), which focuses on how philanthropies mobilize whiteness and knowledge production to weaponize white poverty, recent editorial work includes a special issue on the politics of self-care for Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International (2022) with Aisha Finch and Jessica Millward; a special issue on Black feminism for Theory and Event (2018) with M. Shadee Malaklou; and a collection titled Sasinda Futhi Siselapha (Still Here): Black Feminist Approaches to Cultural Studies in South Africa’s Twenty-Five Years since 1994 (Africa World Press, 2020) with Derilene (Dee) Marco and Abebe Zegeye. Willoughby-Herard is currently working on youth-led politics in South Africa.
Tiffany Willoughby-Herard; “I guess I have to just put my dick on the table”: Rough Trade, Tenure, and Black Sexualities as Self-defense. differences 1 September 2024; 35 (2): 32–54. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-11259689
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