No Tea

closing lines of Hammonds’s essay to make a case for how indeed the
new black queer studies scholars position the black female body as central.
Hammonds closes with the following: “Fi nally, my search for black
women’s sexuality through queer theory has taught me that I need not
simply add the label of queer to my list as another naturalized identity. As
I have argued, there is no need to reproduce black women’s sexualities as a
silent void. Nor are black queer female sexualities simply identities. Rather,
they represent discursive and material terrains where there exists the possibility
for the active production of speech, desire, and agency.” 27 While
standing by her claims about queer theory being suspect for an analy sis
of the black female subject, Hammonds’s last line actually opens up the
“possibility” for a way to instantiate black female sexuality and, I would
argue, within black queer studies. This is exemplified in the work of several
con temporary black queer/feminist theorists who, through the theoretical
tools of black feminist and black queer studies, produce work that
focuses solely on the black female voice, desires (sexual or other wise),
and the ways in which she has agency over her own life and repre sen tation.
These theorists include Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley (included in this
volume), LaMonda H. Stallings, and Matt Richardson, among others. If,
as Hortense Spillers has rightfully argued, “black women are the beached
whales of the sexual universe, unvoiced, misseen, not doing, awaiting their
verb,” then these scholars have, in part, rescued the whale, pushed her
back into the sea, unsilenced her, and given the whale her due. 28
What I appreciate most about these par tic u lar theorists’ work (and I
thought I would never highly value the trait I am about to attribute to
them!) is its sense of entitlement. That is, it already assumes that black
women’s sexuality is worthy of study; it assumes that race and gender are
legitimate analytic tools; it proceeds as if it has nothing to prove to white
feminists (queer identified or not) or black straight feminists. These scholars
simply go about “the active production of speech, desire, and agency.”
LaMonda H. Stallings’s Mutha’ Is Half a Word was the first of these
books to be published of the three I mention here and employs folklore
studies to engage the ways in which black women function as trickster
figures in black culture. Disavowing the masculinist trickster figures in
African American folklore such as “Brer Rabbit,” “the Signifying Monkey,”
or “Stag- o- lee,” Stallings expands the trickster trope to account for
“the uncensoring of Black women who laugh out loud, curse, sit with
their legs open, and selfishly act on their desires” and “the constructions
of Black female subjectivities cognizant of autonomous sexual desires.” 29
12 • E. Patrick Johnson