Big Backed Black Femme Erotics

Big Backed Black Femme Erotics is a genre study of literary and real life spaces where queer Black femme sexuality is expressed. The dissertation focuses on Audre Lorde’s theories of the erotic and, at moments, how they are modified by the fat femme. Applying Lorde’s erotic to Black feminist creative writing allows me to think through what literary spaces allow for Black femme sexuality to be spoken. Following a literary study, I then include auto-theory as a means of speaking to the spaces in real life in which my own fat Black femme sexuality is elaborated. Chapter one begins with a study of the coming of age novel, Big Girl by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan as a means of examining the earliest moments young fat Black queer women are able to find power and ways to love themselves. Here I seek to answer how the coming of age novel holds the fat Black femme body. Chapter two is a genre study on poetry, focusing on Cheryl Clarke’s Living as a Lesbian, Britteney Black Rose Kapri’s Queer Black Hoe and Briona Simone Jones’ Mouths of Rain where I discuss how the poetic answers to the queer Black femme erotic and how the form allows for a particular expression. In my third chapter I delve into experimental writing, focusing on Audre Lorde’s Zami, Sharon Bridgforth’s love conjure/blues, and Alexis De Veaux’s Yabo. Here I think through how the fat Black femme’s body breaks literary genres, and bleeds into new forms. Lastly I write auto-theory on my own big backed Black femme body as I attend a Black queer sex party and create my own book club for Black queer people as potential spaces of erotic energy. I focus on the Black queer erotic as a site of recuperation of possibility outside of anti-Black, anti-fat and cis-heteropatriarchal restrictions. Throughout I am thinking of the very real stakes of life as a fat Black queer woman and our possibilities of love.

Department dc:contributor.department

English Language and Literature

Year dc:date.issued

2026

Author dc:creator

• Chantrelle, Leela

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Avilez, GerShun

Language dc:language.iso

en

Identifier

https://doi.org/10.13016/valb-chga

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:drum.lib.umd.edu:1903/35950