Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought

by Bettina Judd

How creativity makes its way through feeling—and what we can know and feel through the artistic work of Black women
 
Feeling is not feelin. As the poet, artist, and scholar Bettina Judd argues, feelin, in African American Vernacular English, is how Black women artists approach and produce knowledge as internal and complex, entangled with pleasure, pain, anger, and joy, and manifesting artistic production itself as the meaning of the work. Through interviews, close readings, and archival research, Judd draws on the fields of affect studies and Black studies to analyze the creative processes and contributions of Black women—from poet Lucille Clifton and musician Avery*Sunshine to visual artists Betye Saar, Joyce J. Scott, and Deana Lawson.
 
Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought makes a bold and vital intervention in critical theory’s trend toward disembodying feeling as knowledge. Instead, Judd revitalizes current debates in Black studies about the concept of the human and about Black life by considering how discourses on emotion as they are explored by Black women artists offer alternatives to the concept of the human. Judd expands the notions of Black women’s pleasure politics in Black feminist studies that include the erotic, the sexual, the painful, the joyful, the shameful, and the sensations and emotions that yet have no name. In its richly multidisciplinary approach, Feelin calls for the development of research methods that acknowledge creative and emotionally rigorous work as productive by incorporating visual art, narrative, and poetry.

Genres: Poetry

232 pages, Paperback

First published December 15, 2022

About the author

Bettina Judd is an interdisciplinary writer, artist, and performer whose forthcoming book Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure Politics and Black Feminist Thought is on Black women's creative production and our use of visual art, literature, and music to develop Black feminist thought. Her first collection of poems on the history of medical experimentation on Black women titled patient. won the 2013 Black Lawrence Press Hudson Book Prize. Her essays and poetry can be found in Feminist Studies, Meridians, Torch, The Rumpus, The Offing and other journals and anthologies. More information on her and her work can be found at www.bettinajudd.com.