Resisting Hegemonies: Race and Sexual Politics in Nation, Region, Empire

AV NEEDS: PowerPoint 2003 (or beyond)

Mailing address for all panelists:

Gender Studies Department
Indiana University Bloomington
Memorial Hall East, 130
1021 East Third St.
Bloomington, IN 47405
(812) 855-0101

Panelist contact info.:

Cierra Olivia Thomas-Williams

cthomasw@indiana.edu
Doctoral Student
Gender Studies Department, M06
Indiana University Bloomington
(812) 679-9385

Brad Lane
bhlane@indiana.edu
Doctoral Student
Gender Studies Department, M14
Indiana University Bloomington
(615) 945-9160

Joselyn Leimbach
joleimba@indiana.edu
Doctoral Student
Gender Studies Department, M06
Indiana University Bloomington
(619) 370-3186

Lauren Yu-Ying Hu
huy@indiana.edu
Doctoral Student
Gender Studies Department, M06
Indiana University Bloomington
(812) 272-1341

Panel Abstract: Theorizing Black Sexualities in Visual Culture

In an attempt to provide a corrective to studies of visual culture in which racialized bodies are theorized
solely as “Other,” this panel explores contemporary constructions of black sexuality across mass media,
including representations found in international magazine publishing, mainstream film, and popular non-
fiction print bestsellers. Though each presentation is distinct, our projects are united both in their
intersectional analyses of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation, and in their commitments to
interdisciplinary inquiry across a wide array of disciplinary bodies of knowledge, including film and media
studies, feminist and queer theory, and African-American and African Diaspora Studies. Individually, our
projects connect racialized sexualities to global capitalism and transnational media practices, identity
formation and community building, and epistemologies of healthcare and public policy. Our common
concern with the relationship between mediated practice and cultural representation suggests the need
for further analyses concerning the ways in which institutions of social control continue to mark bodies
and marginalize subjectivities through the regulation of commodified identity categories intent on
inscribing meaning onto bodies.

Individual Abstracts

Social Memory and American Cosmopolitan Sexuality in South African Policy and Practice
by Cierra Olivia Thomas-Williams, Department of Gender Studies, Indiana University
The Cosmo woman of South Africa—produced by the largest globalized women’s magazine
publisher and communications corporation—is symbolic of a transnationally mass produced ideal of
womanhood whose sexual behaviors and racialized subjectivities are mediated through popular culture.
Since the early 1970s Cosmo has been extending its empire to the far reaches of the earth picking up
“developing” economies along the way; Hearst Magazines International could be romanticized as an
American success story if the magazine’s global success did not reflect the insidious reality of empire
building—corporate mergers, acquisitions, takeovers, and monopoly—resulting in the globalization of a
distinct class of womanhood. While Cosmo is creating “imagined” subjectivities, it is literally creating and
legitimizing “real” world cities (and, by extension, nations) that are able to participate in this lucrative
endeavor of publishing and distributing Cosmopolitan. It is in this way that Cosmo has become a
globalized brand and a lifestyle for metropolitan women whose ideas, ideals, and identities circulate in
global cities making the Cosmo woman a citizen of the world.
This project explores the global (re)production of Americanized, racialized, and sexualized
subjectivities through consumer practices, which are traceable transnationally using, as artifacts,
magazine issues of Cosmopolitan South Africa. Situated within the context of the U.S. involvement with
the creation and implementation of current African national policies dealing with women’s health and well
being, this study will explore how directly or indirectly issues such as rape and rape prevention, HIV, and
reproductive health issues are dealt with (or not) in Cosmo South Africa. Further, in order to historically
contextualize the South African Cosmo woman, this research project examines Cosmo U.S. during the
period of 1948-1968, when the U.S. was actively involved with the making and implementation of
apartheid policy in South Africa. Taking into consideration Diaspora theory and social memory, this
project will consider where, exactly, South African women fit into the Diaspora of imagined black
subjectivities that make up the global Cosmo woman.

“Contrary to Popular Belief: Representations of Black Lesbians in American Mainstream Film”

By Joselyn Leimbach, Department of Gender Studies, Indiana University
Though gays and lesbians have achieved unprecedented visibility in American mainstream
media, their representations are often limited to middle class homosexuals of European decent. Due to
this invisibility of gays and lesbians of color, a focused examination of the representations of black
lesbians in a range of American mainstream films provides insight into several facets of the production
and consumption of visual culture: namely, the ways in which actors, directors, and writers construct
characters of black lesbians in order to make them both understandable and recognizable to mainstream
audiences; the ways in which the identities of social class, gender performance, race, and sexual
orientation act together to create a “mediated woman”; and the ways in which black lesbian characters
interact differentially with the black community and the lesbian community.
As I will show, certain stereotypical presentations of black lesbians recur across these registers,
especially the treatment of black lesbians as both hypersexual and asexual-- and as masculine in their
gender performance while performing traditionally feminine professions—as well as in the construction of
these characters as simultaneously both insiders and outsiders to the black community, the lesbian/queer
community, and the mainstream community. By examining the ways in which each of these components
interacts with one another in a given character or film, I explore the various elements that contribute to the
depictions of black lesbians and the ways in which those representations inflect stereotypes of social
class, gender performance, race, and sexual orientation.

Are Closet Walls Always White? Towards An Epistemology of the Down Low
By Brad Houston Lane, Department of Gender Studies, Indiana University
Since the early 2000s, the down low has been featured in stories in national newspapers such as
The New York Times and USA Today, fictionalized in a series of New York Times bestselling novels by
author E. Lynn Harris, and treated as an infamous topic of concern on daytime television’s Oprah. In
particular, the discourse of the down low has enjoyed widespread circulation as it pertains to African-
American men and has featured prominently in discussions of HIV in the African-American community,
often serving as an explanation for the rising cases of HIV in African-American women. The sheer
prevalence of the down low as a discourse in circulation within contemporary U.S. mass media suggests
the need to connect such understandings of ‘secret’ sexual practices to queer theorizations of the closet
and to account for the particular role that racialized sexualities, as well as connected understandings of
race, sexuality, and illness, have had in formulating designations of the down low as a phenomenon that
marks the non-white body.
Using two recent non-fiction bestsellers, Keith Boykin’s Beyond the Down Low and J. L. King’s
On the Down Low: A Journey into the Lives of ‘Straight’ Black Men Who Sleep With Men, I analyze how
the down low circulates in popular discourse in opposition to or in tandem with discourses surrounding the
closet. Building upon the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Marlon B. Ross, Siobhan Somerville, and
others, I suggest that the down low becomes an appropriate identity claim for some African-American
men, not so that they may operate under conditions of anonymity or enact desire in secret, but so that
they may repudiate identity categories like ‘gay’ which seem to them to be pre-eminently racialized as
white. Concomitant with the down low’s potential for the reorganization of sexual categories in more
explicitly racialized ways, however, I also detect a simultaneous-- and perhaps related-- tendency for the
down low to further homophobia, bi-phobia, and even racism through its discursive spread in ways that
must be theorized more fully. Here, I am particularly attentive to the down low’s role as “explanation” for
the contemporary AIDS crisis in the African-American community. That the down low can further entrench
racist paradigms even as it opposes white constructions of masculinity, and that it can it expand
homophobic discourse even as it challenges the gay/straight binary, suggests that the ‘down low’
operates via complex discursive formations that deserve further analysis on a deep, sustained level.
Whether the closet will remain an epistemological framework that constructs (only) white sexual identity,
or whether it will be evidenced that closets ought to have some color on their walls, is the work of
theoretical projects such as this one.

Panelist Bios:

Brad Houston Lane is an associate instructor and Ph. D. student in the nation’s first doctoral program in
Gender Studies, at Indiana University, where his research concerns representations of sexuality and the
body in contemporary American visual culture. Currently, his research interests include studies of
sexuality across new media and the arts, including queer theorizations of the cultural politics of twentieth
century sexuality in popular culture, as well as interdisciplinary work on queer theory and feminist and
queer pedagogy. He has served as a contributor to LGBTQ America Today and presented his research
and multimedia artwork at national conferences, including the Center for New Designs in Learning and
Scholarship at Georgetown University and at regional and national meetings of the Pop Culture
Association/ American Culture Association and the Cultural Studies Association. Previously, he served as
a Lecturer in Women’s and Gender Studies at Vanderbilt University, where he taught courses on LGBT
studies and queer theory.

Cierra Olivia Thomas-Williams is a Native American single mother of twin five-year-old girls who had
the honor of joining the inaugural class in the nation’s first Gender Studies Ph.D. program at Indiana
University Bloomington in 2006. Her research interests include examining the interactions of race, class,
sexuality, and gender in popular print media as they work to uphold structures of mainstream culture.
Cierra has contributed to the academic journal On Campus with Women, a publication of the Association
of American Colleges and Universities, in a special issue entitled Visibility and Invisibility: LGBTQ
Students on Campus. She is the Indiana University Diversity Scholar and serves the university on
several committees.

Joselyn K. Leimbach is on fellowship at Indiana University’s Gender Studies program where she is
currently examining in the representation of lesbians of color in English language lesbian films. Her
interests include feminist and queer theory, race relations within socio-political borders, and film studies.
Previously she has acted as assistant editor of The Journal of Lesbian Studies and has contributed
to The Encyclopedia of Race and Racism (2007)and the Encyclopedia of North American Sport (forth
coming). She received her Master’s in Women’s Studies from San Diego State University where she
acted as a guest lecturer. While there Joselyn investigated the treatment of Black lesbians in American
mainstream film and presented her findings at the Pacific South West Women’s Studies Association
annual conference.