UC Berkeley

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary, multi-sited project that utilizes auto-ethnographic methods and site-specific archival research alongside humanistic textual analysis to think critically about the ways Black women and gender non-conforming (GNC) Black femmes relate to, embrace and challenge the political and economic landscapes of a cultural circuit that moves between Atlanta, Georgia and New Orleans, Louisiana. Decoupling Black femininity from essentialist notions of “womanhood,” this dissertation surfaces a queer Black feminist sense of political economy that accounts for a broad range of survival and sustenance strategies. My research asks: How do Black women and gender non-conforming Black femmes utilize aesthetic practice to make sense of themselves and the histories their bodies carry as they represent and transgress the overdetermined relationship between Black femininity and labor? Giving close attention to Southern vernacular aesthetics in works of Black art and performance created and circulated outside of mainstream markets, I argue that 20th and 21st century Black feminine cultural production carries and transforms the mark of 19th century Southern plantation economies. Here, “the mark” refers to the historical conscription of Black female flesh as both a foundational commodity, the channel through which racial inequity reproduces itself, and the origin of modern Blackness (Spillers 1967). In the work of 20th century vernacular visual artist Clementine Hunter (1888 -1989), 21st century online performance artist BeTTy BuTT (1992 - 2014) and my own work as a Black feminist performance artist, I trace the transformation of this mark into a terrain of radical ambivalence and dirty possibility.