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This chapter examines black women’s participation in BDSM and how these performances illustrate a complex and contradictory brokering of pain, pleasure, and power for the black female performer. I reveal BDSM as a critical site for reconsidering the entanglement of black female sexuality and violence. Within BDSM, violence becomes both a mode of pleasure and a vehicle for accessing and contesting power. The chapter begins with a brief section that frames black women practitioners of BDSM in the context of still very vigorous feminist debates surrounding sexuality, violence, and BDSM. Here, I stage the unique theoretical and practical challenges of the unspeakable pleasures aroused in racial submission and domination that BDSM presents to black women specifically. I examine race play as a particularly problematic yet powerful BDSM practice for black women, one that unveils the contradictory dynamics of racialized pleasure and power via the eroticization of racism and racial-sexual alterity. In particular, I argue that race play unsettles the dichotomies of transgression/compliance, subversion/reproduction, mind/body, and fantasy/reality that buttress BDSM. This chapter unveils performances of black female sexual domination and submission in BDSM as critical modes for and of black women’s pleasure, power, and agency.

Introduction: Governmentality Against Itself lays out the book’s overarching arguments and analytical contributions to anthropology and feminist theory. Rather than debating how “we” as Western subjects should think about cutting, this book attends to the political concerns and ethical dilemmas of Ghanaian and other African women and men who are most engaged in and affected by the efforts to end and regulate cutting. It addresses two questions: Are efforts to end female genital cutting a problem, and if so, what kind of a problem are they and for whom? For whom is the ending of cutting a problem and why? I redefine answers to these two questions from the perspectives of Ghanaian lifeworlds rather than liberal debates about FGM. In Ghana, cutting has been ending in many districts, and dramatically so in areas where sustained, decades-long campaigns have taken place. The waning of cutting has been accompanied by critical responses to the colonial order of things and its afterlives in the liberal governance of everyday life. These critiques are voiced not in public protests or debates but in a different key: in indirect speech and in practices of living. They gather their force from sensibilities (that is entanglements of thought, affect, and habitus) formed at the interstices of social and governmental logics, and in consonance with tacit principles on which society is built, such as the ethics of relationality and mutual responsibility.

The youth’s narratives can add depth to many literatures, and chapter one reviews some of the core assumptions within the fields of youth violence, critical youth studies, and punishment in the juvenile justice system and schools. Chapter one also includes a brief review of the colonial history of Hawai‘i.

The introduction of Exposed briefly lays out the methodology, theories, arguments, and central questions of the book. It argues that a material sense of exposure and pleasure fosters ontologies, epistemologies, ethics, and politics that interconnect the human with the nonhuman, the inhuman and the more than human. As a cultural studies project, Exposed takes activist and other “low” practices seriously, as potent modes of political contestation.

The conclusion of Exposed critiques substantial paradigms by the ways of new materialism. It critiques object-oriented ontology by ways of material feminisms. It argues that there is no positions outside, no straight paths, no transparent global systems of knowledge, but only modest protests and precarious pleasures from within compromised locations shadowed by futures that will surely need repair.

The introductory chapter positions tourism as a neocolonial enterprise in which globalization and U.S. imperialism are implicated along with the history of slavery and colonialism. It argues that tourism is one of the most powerful conduits of neocolonialism not only because of economic and political reasons, but also because tourism drastically shapes the socio-cultural landscape of the region. The chapter demonstrates the intersections among tourism and diaspora studies and issues of consumption, mobility, culture, sexuality, and sexual labor. Many critics of tourism are referenced in order to trace the legacy of slavery and colonialism found in the tourist industry, which emerges in economic, socio-political, cultural, and sexual terms. The sexual-cultural politics of tourism are introduced as well the sites of resistance and the methodology and feminist postcolonial framework of “resisting paradise.”

Chapter three examines girls’ early childhood experiences in families and at school, and we highlight the pressures that girls uniquely experienced while growing up. We look at how girls’ family responsibilities, dress, demeanor, and their status in families and at school were constrained by numerous gender inequalities – a set of conditions that the girls thought of as inherently unfair and “unjust.” Considering these pressures, some girls spoke and struck out against those who harassed and targeted them, sometimes violently.

We take up the subject of peer and school-based culture for teens in chapter four, where we outline at the femininity norms confronting female teens. In this chapter we note that notions of femininity were complicated and sometimes contradictory. In this way, girls’ violence is viewed against the backdrop of multiple constraints and contradictions.