ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that if black feminism is going to live up to its emancipatory potential, it must let go of its scripted, safe, and bounded actuality. It discusses the black feminism and identifies one of its current weaknesses: its inability to address non-normative forms of sexual expression. Among the myriad articulations of black feminist theory (1970s–present), the gold standard formulation comes from the exhaustive work of Patricia Hill Collins. To see black women as different–or use language that communicates their difference, that is, welfare queens, angry black woman and jezebel–is to demarcate black women as marginal, outsiders, and/or non-normative. For black feminist theorists, the ultimate fear is that black women are perceived as faceless and as such, they are marked for death. The black feminist theory is often positioned in opposition to the hegemony of racist and sexist forms of oppression.
