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being-in-blackfeminineflesh

Towards an Embodied Veneration of BeTTy BuTT’s Inexhaustible Pleasures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2023

Ra Malika Imhotep
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Abstract

In the Dirty Southern vernacular medium of the twerk video, performances of eroticized Black femininity by digital performance artist BeTTy BuTT and others knead into traumas of ecological dispossession, sexual vulnerability, and patriarchal violence. As an aesthetic survival strategy forged in the Black sexual economies of the contemporary Dirty South, being-in-blackfeminineflesh occasions a critical reappraisal of the performative labors of contemporary Black feminine figures, how our bodyminds witness them, and how we write about them.

Type
TDR Brown Consortium Section
Information
TDR , Volume 67 , Issue 3 , September 2023 , pp. 15 - 31
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press for Tisch School of the Arts/NYU

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References

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