Graduate Works in Progress: Black BDSM: Negotiating Power in the Afterlife

Abstract

For Black women and femmes, sex and violence have been and continue to be deeply entangled. Within enslavement, sex was introduced through violation and coercion, shaping how pleasure, pain, power and intimacy are experienced and understood today. As we continue to live in the afterlives of slavery, Black women and femmes remain in persistent proximity to violence—including within spaces of intimacy and desire. Within Black sexual economies structured by racial capitalism, pleasure, labor, and coercion blur.
In dialogue with Adrienne Davis on racialized sexual economies and Patrice Douglass on the afterlives of slavery—and in conversation with Ariane Cruz on BDSM considerations—this paper examines Black BDSM as a practice through which Black women and femmes renegotiate relationships to pleasure, pain, and violence. While enslavement denied Black people sexual autonomy and sexual self-determination, BDSM centers explicit negotiation, consent, and power exchange. Through these practices, Black BDSM becomes a site where intimacy, sexual responsibility, and desire can be reclaimed, re-examined and reimagined.
By embracing deviance and refusing white-cisheteropatriarchal sexual scripts, Black BDSM operates not simply as erotic exploration, but as a practice of survival, resistance, and world-making for Black women and femmes navigating ongoing afterlives of racial and gendered violence.

--

The Graduate Colloquium Works In Progress Speaker Series pairs a 30-minute graduate-student work-in-progress or conference-style talk with 30 minutes of questions, discussion, and feedback. All pre-candidacy graduate students will present during the 2026–27 academic year. To see the full calendar of WGSS Works in Progress Talks visit go.umd.edu/wgsswip27