Joan Morgan: Why We Get Off--Moving Towards a Black Feminist Politics of Pleasure

Why We Get Off: Moving Towards a Black Feminist Politics of Pleasureby Joan Morgan | The Black Scholar, 45:4, 36-46
This, right here, is an origins tale. A deliberate, black, feminist, once upon a time that details one of three preliminary but critical pit stops on my theory-making journey to a black feminist Politics of Pleasure. Part of my current project, “Pleasure Politics” is a multi-pronged effort that includes my dissertation, my public-intellectual work and two years of critical intellectual labor with “The Pleasure Ninjas”: journalist and playwright Esther Armah and Drs. Yaba Blay, Brittney Cooper, Treva B. Lindsey and Kaila Story—a collective I founded in 2013 during my tenure as a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University. 
As black feminist theorists, we’ve made a commitment to reframe the existing narrative about black female sexuality by positioning desire, agency and black women’s engagements with pleasure as a viable theoretical paradigm. “Pleasure Politics” asks: What possibilities can a politics of pleasure offer for black feminist futures? Specifically, how can deepening our understanding of the multivalent ways black women produce, read and participate in pleasure complicate our understanding of black female subjectivities in ways that invigorate, inform and sharpen a contemporary black feminist agenda?
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Joan Morgan is an award-winning feminist author and a fifth-year doctoral candidate in NYU’s American Studies program. A pioneering hip-hop journalist, Morgan coined the term “hip-hop feminism” in 1999, when she published the groundbreaking book, When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost. Her book has been used in college coursework across the country. Regarded internationally as an expert on the topics of hip-hop and gender, Morgan has made numerous television and radio appearances. She is a currently a 2015 Woodrow Wilson Dissertation in Women’s Studies Fellow.