Ezili's Mirrors: Imagining Black Queer Genders

by Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley

From the dagger mistress Ezili Je Wouj and the gender-bending mermaid Lasiren to the beautiful femme queen Ezili Freda, the Ezili pantheon of Vodoun spirits represents the divine forces of love, sexuality, prosperity, pleasure, maternity, creativity, and fertility. And just as Ezili appears in different guises and characters, so too does Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley in her voice- and genre-shifting, exploratory book Ezili's Mirrors . Drawing on her background as a literary critic as well as her quest to learn the lessons of her spiritual ancestors, Tinsley theorizes black Atlantic sexuality by tracing how contemporary queer Caribbean and African American writers and performers evoke Ezili. Tinsley shows how Ezili is manifest in the work and personal lives of singers Whitney Houston and Azealia Banks, novelists Nalo Hopkinson and Ana Lara, performers MilDred Gerestant and Sharon Bridgforth, and filmmakers Anne Lescot and Laurence Magloire—none of whom identify as Vodou practitioners. In so doing, Tinsley offers a model of queer black feminist theory that creates new possibilities for decolonizing queer studies.

Genres: Queer, Nonfiction, LGBT, Gender, Race, Academia, Theory

264 pages, Paperback

Published February 27, 2018

About the author

Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley is Professor of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Motivated by love for boundless black femme creativity, her research focuses on queer and feminist, Caribbean and African American performance and literature. She recently completed a manuscript entitled The Color Pynk: Black Femme-inist Love and Criticism, which explores black femme aesthetics of resistance in the Trump era. Earlier monographs include Beyoncé in Formation: Remixing Black Feminism (2018); Ezili’s Mirrors: Black Queer Genders and the Work of the Imagination (2018), winner of the 2019 Barbara Christian Prize in Caribbean Studies; and Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism Between Women in Caribbean Literature (2010). She has published articles in journals including GLQ, Feminist Studies, Yale French Studies, and Small Axe and is a contributor to Time, Ebony, The Advocate, and Huffington Post.

Reviews

[Alok Vaid-Menon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is such a refreshing read. Finally -- an academic work that flagrantly and fabulously rejects the assumed parameters of "academic writing," and instead embraces poetry, storytelling, and beauty. The text is actually informed by the values it generates -- it's an embodiment in the kind of freedom dreaming that Tinsley is writing about here.

It feels like so much scholarship is mired in critique of western/white gender systems, but never really gets to imagining alternatives. That's why this text is so exceptional: it brackets critique, and instead embraces creation. Tinsley draws from Afro-Caribbean spirituality to theorize gender, femininity, and embodiment from an otherwise. She effortlessly weaves contemporary analysis of Black femme cultural figures like Whitney Houston and Azalea Banks with ancestral spiritual figures in vodou and other Caribbean traditions. It's a meditation on mental health, glamor, movement, ancestry, and becoming.

I highly recommend this for people who are looking for alternative epistemologies to Western medicalization to think through and relate to gender and embodiment.

[Yasamin Rezai · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this book like a song ... and your soul will fly :)

"I left my wrinkled summer dress on the shore and went swimming naked
in a pond, laughing and drawing the women friends I had come with into
the water with me. And she didn’t claim me then, in daylight, but that night
I learned a lesson I never expected from Ezili. Yes, that night when I went
to listen to drumming on the beach, something happened that I couldn’t
explain. All I knew was that it felt like the first time I kissed a woman—like
my body was not mine, and my body was made for this. And in the space
of a moment, in one movement of my hand, the safe fences that I’d drawn
around my research and myself—here is Afro-Caribbean religion as I study
it in a book, here is desire as another someone theorized it, here is what I
know and here is what I feel—they all collapsed, torrentially, and still I am
swirling. Still, there are no words for this and still, I search to learn them."

[aïs · Rating 5 out of 5]

tinsley écrit cet essai en trois voix : celle de la théorie, de l’académique, celle de la spiritualité, de la mythologie vodou, puis celle des voix ancestrales qui l’habite, des voix féminines que l’on a souvent oublié. ses trois voix s’allient et dialoguent entre elles pour raconter l’espoir, le sens de la communauté, l’amour qu’offrent ses déesses carribéennes aux communautés queers. tinsley parle tantôt de witney houston et de la dépendance cachée des femmes noires, tantôt de rihanna et son rôle dans la décolonisation de l’industrie musicale. c’est beau beau beau, c’est touchant et remarquablement écrit.

[Clara Sophia · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful satisfyingly academic exploration of what has been and what could be.

[Clare · Rating 4 out of 5]

The best academic book I have ever read. It informed through story and through people in a way I have never seen before.

[Maggie Kirwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm actually rating this one because it was pretty cool and interesting. Definitely the best book we've read for Religion and Gender

[Asia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for school

[Mills College Library]

305.30972 T592 2018