ABSTRACT
In one way or another, a large portion of black feminist scholarship involves (re)tracing, (re)narrating, or (re)visioning the history of black women's bodily and embodied sexual exploitation. This chapter utilizes disidentification as both a theory and pedagogy; as a theory, disidentification provides an interpretative lens for black women's sexuality; as a pedagogy, disidentification is a unique tool to expand students' thinking about black women's history and resistance. It evaluates how black women scholars might design a curriculum that reclaims desire as an important site of analysis from which to theorize black women's bodies. The chapter posits teaching about black women who practice Bondage, Discipline, Sadism, and Masochism (BDSM) via the lens of disidentification, which allows us to see them as engaged in a form of agential practice. It suggests that disidentification as a robust theoretical framework will allow us to better contextualize and understand black women who play at the margins of sex and sexual identity.
