Audre Lorde delivered “Uses of the Erotic,” one of her most seminal works, in 1978 at the Fourth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women. Lorde coined the erotic as “a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.” In doing so, she made it clear that pornography (and all that it encompasses) was not be taken considered in a women's erotic sensorium.

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As an eminent figure of the black feminist tradition, she symbolizes how segments of black feminist thought can at once refuse an essentialist understanding of a black experience while forming a collective standpoint on controversial issues of relevance. Pornography’s spectatorship and performance requires pleasure and evokes visceral feelings, so what was the source of this disavowal? A rhetorical question, because I recognize that much of the work of black feminism is to protect black women (and representations thereof) from perverse, violent racial fictions. I wanted to participate in the work of scholars like Jennifer Nash, Ariane Cruz, Mireille Miller-Young, and LaMonda Horton Stallings who, among their many interventions, actively reinscribe pleasure into black feminist praxes. 

But what started out as a project rife with uncertainty and a preoccupation with Lorde became a conversation with myself about sexual and desirability politics. I chose to foreground this in hip-hop and R&B music because it relies on the use and image of women’s bodies and it is the genre that feels most like home. The goal was to create a public forum for fans to express, grapple, and explore their desires as it relates to hip-hop and R&B music. And it encourages you to be critical fans of your favorite NSFW music, because we are all indebted to the communities who have modeled radical, nonreproductive possibilities of pleasure to first and foremost honor their own desires.

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You'll find some words from me that express my thoughts, like on how the genre foregrounds explicit/illicit sexualities, focusing on key Internet moments of black men participating in the unfair scrutiny of female artists. There is also something like a playlist for you to tune into—but maybe you want to add some of your own thoughts?

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Enjoy!