Dope Diaspora Podcast
Interseções de Empoderamento Sexual Feminino (Ep 1)
Guest: Preta Ferreira
Host: Johneé Wilson
The evolution of black female sexual empowerment can be examined through the lens of African diaspora language and music to understand how cultural, political, and socio-economic shifts within specific geographical localities may contribute to the progression of female empowerment and sexuality at the intersections of women in the music industry and within civil society. The Dope Diaspora team conducted an ethnographic study to analyze the African diasporic language, music, and movement within Brasil, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Nigeria, and the USA. The definition of female sexual empowerment is multilateral because women, who are descendants of the African Diaspora, are breaking the silence globally and redefining this concept. They are using their platforms to advance music and language in a way that shift cultures, politics, and socio-economic trends. In more colloquial lingua, black women are "bussin' up the silence"and deconstructing racist, sexist, and classist narratives as a means to advance female empowerment and female sexual empowerment across race, gender, and color boundaries.
Preta Ferreira, musician, activist, and cultural curator, is a product of the African Diaspora. She sat with me to share a dialogue about how her experience as a black Brazilian woman, and how language and music shape her activism and art for positive social change. We discussed her recent musical project and book publication, Minha Carne (My Flesh), which directly contests racism, sexism, and classism against black bodies in Brazil. She uses her platform to shift the narrative of binaries and addresses the pluralities of identities that were birthed through the diaspora: trans-women, LGBTQIA + persons, Quilombola, Indigenous, and other marginalized identities that are living expression of female [sexual] empowerment.
Research Paper (Working Title):
Brasileiras Buss Up Da’ Silence:
Defining Female Sexual Empowerment Through African-Diaspora Language and Music
Contemporary Afro-Brazilian music is reshaping, reframing, and redefining black female social and sexual empowerment by using language and movement to advance black women forward along a spectrum of identities–LGBTQIA+, Quilombola, Indigenous, non-binary, quare, Yorubic–to change the systemic narratives and behaviors defined by Brazil’s slave trade. One clear measurement of this empowerment is the focus on sexual liberation and healing justice which is the result of a queer-black feminist framework.