Video | Joan Morgan on Pleasure, Black Women, and Being Creative

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(23:16) “Pleasure Politics is about the development of language. It also asks us to think about: What are our expectations of black women’s labor, particularly the labor of art and creativity? Black art has long been linked to what I call a “liberation ethic.” So you create something, it’s supposed to do something for black people. It’s often expected to correct, like, 400 years of oppression; it can’t just exist. And there’s a way that this expectation is gendered, particularly around women. So that women … are expected to be the keepers of … the cornerstones of the community. The art just can’t exist for art’s sake. And so what I am saying is that we need a theoretical paradigm that doesn’t just expect black women’s labor to W-O-R-K, but recognizes the way we WERRRK.”

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