Unruly: On a Genealogy of Afrodiasporic Women and Girls

Cathy Thomas
English
UC Santa Barbara

“Unruly: On a Genealogy of Afrodiasporic Women and Girls” asserts that Afrodiasporic women and girls embody boundary-transgressing discourses that traverse multiple sites of national and transnational literary, pop cultural, economic, playful, and ideological vectors in discourses of Black womanhood. Investigations conceptualize and trace unruly formation as both epistemic and performative to theorize the figure of the Black female as a force that shifts and produces cultural livingness in contentious, albeit productive ways. I coin the term anxio-Blackness as a contradictory effect of and affective orientation toward and away from racialized and gendered Blackness. Anxio-Blackness is conceptualized as a value of anti-Blackness that relates to gender. Unruly suggests ways we can think about the forms that Black female anxiety has taken and the forms of resistance it has received in different historical and anecdotal frames. To be anxious means to worry, to be uneasy, to be nervous while, paradoxically and at times simultaneously, also wanting, yearning, and being desirous. I introduce anxio-blackness as linked to gendered bodies on which blackness is ascribed, assumed, and appropriated. In tracing the convergences and disjunctions between race, ethnicity, gender performance, and aesthetics, “Unruly” reckons with critical theory, cultural production, and fabulation.