Inside the Body of Black Feminism

Inside the Body of Black Feminism charts a cultural genealogy of anti-racist and feminist engagement with some of the most objectified internal “parts” of racist medical and scientific inquiry: bones and blood, brains and hearts, wombs and guts. In a move counterintuitive to Black feminism’s emphasis on externalized representations of the body, Samantha Pinto reinterprets the relationship between embodiment, health, and race through cultural archives that reimagine the inside of the Black body. Working through materials such as medical textbooks, memoirs, data visualizations, museum displays, speculative fiction, and horror films, Pinto explores how a visually inaccessible corporeal interior becomes discernable and racialized in the public sphere. Inside the Body of Black Feminism engages expressive cultural work to ask how we might know the inside of the black body differently through Black feminist theory and how scientific and medical inquiry might enable us to understand political subjectivity anew.