Sexuality and Violence as Release

Dear Angela Davis,

In your piece "Blues Legacies and Black Feminism", not only do you disprove the assumptions of conformity of black women within white patriarchal ideologies post-Reconstruction, but you also provide penetrating against academics who misread the complexities presented by women blues singers and lyrics and simplify them as normative. The subject of black women, even in a contemporary academic examination, is so often simplified into the dichotomy of compliant or rebellious, white purity or black deviance. This trap of categorizing black women's history into a single narrative is what historians aware of the intersectional and personal complexities of women from the past must prove fallacious.

Your commentary especially on black women's sexuality as the "tangible expression of freedom" is paradigmatic in understanding blues lyrics and, thus, black women's lives of the time (8). Until then, black women were oppressed most through their sexuality, or rather the complete repression and denial of its existence. White slaveowners viewed enslaved black women as reproductive machines, dehumanized to a point where sexuality was never a matter of choice. This is the embodiment of violence. It is no wonder, then, for black women to seek sexual liberation and violent revenge - at the very least, by expression through song and not real enactment. Sex and violence are the two cornerstones of human psychology, particularly in regard to trauma and the processing of it. With blues being a form of "secular spiritual", as you referenced James Cone and C. Eric Lincoln, the psychospiritual healing and release that blues songs sung by women provided towards black women audience was sensational then still is now.

Best regards,
Christina