Black Feminine Play:

How Black Femmes, Girls and Women Make Life Sweet

Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem NC

September 20-21, 2024

Life is short, and it’s up to you to make it sweet ~  Sadie Delany

When was the last time you played? Remember being on the playground and asking, “Do yuh wanna play with me?” How did it make you feel? We define play as engaging in activities for pleasure, enjoyment, desire, and joy rather than for serious, practical, or strategic purposes. Play, in all of its forms, is integral to making life sweet. 

Black femmes, girls, and women are often discouraged from playing. Our bodies become weapons that can result in our harm, and outside is a space that is also viewed as dangerous. So, play, over time, is perceived as dangerous.

Yet, play is intimately connected to Black women’s liberation from colonial and misogynoir politics. As Audre Lorde illustrates, Black women’s erotic (a manifestation of feminine play) is a spiritual resource in which pleasure and power are rooted in a personal political reservoir that defies powerlessness.  So, Black feminine energy needs play, or so we believe. So let’s gather to play.

We organize this symposium to create a space for Black femmes, girls, and women to reconnect with our authentic selves through love, healing, and intimacy. We seek to harness the creative energy necessary to redefine the terms under which we live and claim our power to envision and build a new future for ourselves and our generations. We call on you to join us in challenging false narratives and histories about Black femmes, girls, and women and play in ways that honor and rejoice in our aliveness.

How we imagine our days 

This year, we are doing things a bit differently. Instead of traditional panels, we will organize our time together around "Listening Salons” and “Spaces of Play.”

• Listening Salons: These sessions offer participants opportunities to gather and think. They will be organized around themes based on submissions. Each Salon will have three presenters who will share their work with the group (each lasting 10 minutes). Presenters will be asked to circulate papers ahead of time to invite feedback. After the presentations, the papers will be workshopped. 

• Spaces of Play: These spaces allow for various forms of communal embodied play intended to produce pleasure, enjoyment, merriment, laughter, fun, and, ultimately, healing. The sessions will be fully interactive workshops as well as “play stations” for double Dutch, drawing, jacks, and other modes of play. 

Sub-themes for the symposium include (but are not limited to):

• Play as a space of healing
• Play, reclamation, and voice (poetry, creative, writing, visual art)
• Play, Black social movements, and revolution (pleasure activism, community organizing)
• Intergenerational play (family play)
• Sexual play
• Embodied play, dance, movement, exercise

Submission Guidelines:

We encourage submissions from anyone who has a story to tell about feminine play and the courage to say it; we are not only limited to those in the community of academia. We are accepting proposals for:

• Individual academic and creative papers and readings will be pre-circulated and workshopped at the symposium. 

• Fully interactive/participatory workshops (each lasting 60 minutes) that engage participants in embodied practices that promote pleasure, well-being, and joy. These should be fully interactive! 

Submit proposals using this form

Due date for proposals: May 24, 2024

You will hear back from us by June 5, 2024

Organizers:

The Collaborative for the Research of Black Women and Girls

Julia Jordan-Zachery, Ph.D., Chair & Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department

Wake Forest University

Shamara Wyllie Alhassan, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Arizona State University

Kamille Gentles-Peart, Ph.D., Professor, Roger Williams University