Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: No abstract available at this time.

Publication Type: Individual Paper
Abstract: On September 26, 1937, Bessie Smith died as a result of injuries she sustained in a car accident outside Clarksdale, Mississippi. Although she eventually made it to the local black hospital, she did not survive surgery. Speculation that her death had been caused by southern racism began soon after her death and continued for decades. Reports circulated that she was first taken to a white hospital and turned away. Then, she died on the way to the black facility.

I contend that the more likely scenario involved Smith's being taken directly to the black hospital. She was not turned away from an emergency room at a white hospital because local people--both black and white--knew and accepted the fact that white hospitals did not treat blacks in Mississippi. That, however, did not preclude this from being a violent example of Jim Crow. Once involved in the accident, Smith was on a preset course that had already determined what level of medical care she was entitled to have. This paper argues that the events following Bessie Smith's accident were an illustration of structural violence, an indirect form of violence that does not cause direct physical pain but is the result of unjust social, political and economic systems.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper explores the cinematic representation of hip-hop artist Queen Latifah in her lead movie roles in Chicago (2002) and Bringing Down the House (2003). Drawing from black feminist and feminist cultural studies theoretical and methodological approaches to studying popular communication, I analyze Latifah’s form (physicality) and function in the films that construct her as the mammy and hot mama—two controlling images of black womanhood. Depending on her relation(ship) to white female and male bodies, Latifah is the sexual un/desirable. She is a freak. Her characters fall outside white heteronormativity not only because of what the black body is, but also because of what the black body does. In questioning the dialogue of difference—represented through the “oppositional” hip-hop body—I address the processes by which media makers appropriate subcultural icons to signify difference while reinscribing racist notions of blackness, which work to facilitate white hegemony in the popular.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Rarely does the term “Pillow Queen” refer admiringly to a mode of female or feminine lesbian sexual agency; most often it is used as a term of insult. If a good portion of feminist and queer studies works from a history and theory of the sexually abject then why is the Pillow Queen an improper historical sexual subject? Not only has the Pillow Queen been neglected by queer studies, she has been ridiculed and rejected by many forms of lesbian feminism within which the spectacle of seeming feminine passivity can evoke only horror and intimations of deep collusion with the forces of patriarchy.

What’s wrong, I ask, with being a Pillow Queen?

On www.About.com, which promises to be your online guide to lesbian life, PQ-dom is defined as:

A Pillow Queen is someone who likes to be on the receiving end of sex.
She likes to be pleasured and not reciprocate. Also known as: Bottom.

This definition of the PQ as someone who likes to receive, be non-reciprocal, and who can also be called a “bottom” indicates the troublesome sexual peculiarities of the PQ, who, as the spectacle of an idle female (feminine) bottom, receiving pleasure, demanding pleasure, luxuriating in pleasure but then, unbelievably, outrageously, refusing to “reciprocate” tells us all we need to know about the lesbian repudiation of the category. The PQ, here and elsewhere, has been classified as self-serving, as a sexual subject who seeks out pleasure but does not return it. However, if articulated from a feminist and queer theory of sexuality PQ-dom not only provides a model of sexual agency for both straight and queer femininities, it also offers us a complex rendering of the relations between passivity and pleasure, receptivity and subjectivity, sexual behavior and politics.
Of course, lesbian femininity is a curious topic within feminist and queer theories and has been much neglected when compared to the mountains of literature on gay male femininities and lesbian masculinities. A few studies by scholars have laid the foundations for an account of lesbian femininity as an excessive, hyperbolic, non-normative mode of desire. However, in part as a result of the PQ’s “outsider” lesbian status as too ‘naturally’ feminine queer theories haven’t granted her due appreciation as a potential model of transgressive bottoming. In fact, only a few queer theorists have written specifically about the desire to bottom or to be the receptive partner and none of them use the PQ as an example.

In this essay I argue that though the Pillow Queen is often viewed as an historical symbol of a straight-acting, lazy or self-involved, ethnic/racial/classed femininity, as a politically incorrect affront to lesbian feminism, and as marginal to radical queer theories, in my analysis, as she works the glorious fulfillment of countless fantasies of femininity, submission, and passivity the Pillow Queen must be celebrated and installed at the very heart of a queer feminist project situating femininity and sexual transgression

Publication Type: Abstract Proposal
Abstract: At the beginning of the Ramesside period, the tombs belonging to all three types of royal individuals—kings, royal women, and princes—changed significantly. Kings’ tombs became larger, possessed more elaborate plans, and were far more extensively (and, to a certain extent, differently) decorated than those of their 18th Dynasty forbears. Royal women were each provided with a large, elaborately decorated tomb located in the Valley of the Queens, a discrete necropolis separated from the burials of contemporary kings in the Valley of the Kings. By contrast, 18th Dynasty queens were typically buried (singly or in groups)—in undecorated annexes within kings’ tombs or in relatively small, undecorated tombs near those of their kings. Princes’ tombs, for the first time, became a distinct category of decorated royal funerary monument with characteristic programs and plans.

Furthermore, the tombs of Ramesside kings, queens, and princes, in addition to becoming larger and more elaborate than those of their 18th Dynasty counterparts, were clearly differentiated from each other, both architecturally and programmatically; their plans and decoration were determined by, and reflected, the social identity, defining roles, and post-mortem needs of each type of royal individual. Kings’ tombs stress the coercive, aggressive aspect of pharaohs as guarantors of cosmic order and representative of masculine rulership, while queens’ tombs typically highlight the sacerdotal roles held by royal women and show the queen interacting with the gods on her own behalf. Princes’ tombs, which are usually dominated by scenes depicting the reigning king acting as mediator between the gods of the netherworld and his deceased son, emphasize the princes’ roles as the younger, subordinate halves of the dual-generational construct of masculine kingship. That the distinctions between the tombs of kings, royal women, and princes were meaningful is demonstrated by the unique tomb of the late 19th Dynasty, female pharaoh Tawosret, whose assumption of boundary-blurring royal roles during her queenship and her subsequent ascent to the throne necessitated the cutting and decoration of a tomb with an innovative plan and program tailored to her changing roles and identity.

The purpose of this paper is to place in context the dramatic changes made to Ramesside royal women’s tombs by determining the underlying reasons for those made to all three types of Ramesside royal tombs. To this end, I will first explain how the form and decoration of each category of royal tomb was affected by hierarchical status, role, and gender. I will then examine the possibility that complex, interlocking phenomena outside the funerary realm propelled the changes to Ramesside tombs. These include: 1) the foundation of a new dynasty, 2) a Ramesside counter-reaction to the Amarna period transformation of the roles of king and queen, 3) the apparent elevation and divinization of queenship and the reinstatement of the “god’s wife” title for royal women, 4) the increased visibility, prestige, and formalization of the roles accorded to royal sons at the beginning of the 19th Dynasty.