The Color Pynkis a passionate exploration of Black femme poetics of survival. Sidelined by liberal feminists and invisible to mainstream civil rights movements, Black femmes spent the Trump years doing what they so often do best: creating politically engaged art, entertainment, and ideas. In the first full-length study of Black queer, cis-, and trans-femininity, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley argues that this creative work offers a distinctive challenge to power structures that limit how we color, gender, and explore freedom.

Tinsley engages 2017-2020 Black femme cultural production that colorfully and provocatively imagines freedom in the stark white face of its impossibility. Looking to the music of Janelle Mone and Kelsey Lu, Janet Mock’s writing for the television showPose, the fashion of Indya Moore and (F)empower, and the films of Tourmaline and Juliana Huxtable, as well as poetry and novels,The Color Pynkconceptualizes Black femme as a set of consciously, continually rescripted cultural and aesthetic practices that disrupts conventional meanings of race, gender, and sexuality. There is an exuberant defiance in queer Black femininity, Tinsley finds–so that Black femmes continue to love themselves wildly in a world that resists their joy.

Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley is a professor of Black studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author ofBeyonc in Formation: Remixing Black Feminism,Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism between Women in Caribbean Literature, andEzili’s Mirrors: Imagining Black Queer Genders.

• Publisher: University of Texas Press (November 1, 2022)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 280 pages
• ISBN-10: 1477326448
• ISBN-13: 9781477326442
• Item Weight: 1.08 pounds
• Dimensions: 6 x 0.9 x 9 inches