M Horsley
Assistant Professor, Center for the Study of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity
Faculty, Women’s and Gender Studies
Specialty: African American and African Diaspora Studies, Black Feminism, Black Queer Theory, Black Music Videos, Black Female Sexuality, Visual and Sonic Culture, Black Women in Hip-Hop, Film and Media Studies
Phone:
E-mail: mhorsley@ithaca.edu
Office: Center for Health Sciences
Ithaca, NY 14850
I am a pleasure seeking activist visual artist scholar. Unapologetically Black and sexually liberated. I use visual and sonic culture as tools of empowerment for Black girls and women to define and embrace our sexuality, femininity, women and bodies. The driving force behind my research is my passion for social justice and Black female liberation.
I am currently expanding my dissertation into a book, which interrogates Black female sexual liberation through the trope of Black femme(inine) in popular and sonic culture.
My dissertation Nasty Girls: Reclaiming the Black Freak in Music Videos and Sonic Culture, argues that the sight and sound of contemporary Black female soul singers and Hip-Hop artists is an affirmative space for navigating pain and claiming pleasure. Artists accomplish this through the exaltation of Black culture’s “freak” as a figure who challenges the social conditions responsible for pain in Black life. Through the Black femme and stud aesthetic I access the pleasure of Black imagination. I read the self-representation of four Grammy-winning contemporary Black female musicians—Beyoncé, Lalah Hathaway, Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott, and Nicki Minaj, locating them within Black representational spaces—claiming their own insights as the most authentic way to investigate the political significance of the Black female body in ecstasy. These artists construct visual and sonic representations of poor and working-class Black women’s sexuality in music and video for the purpose of creating a radical self-love politic.
These musicians were specifically chosen because they use their bodies strategically to deliver social justice messages that are intended to combat anti-Blackness rhetoric; this is done by constructing spaces in music videos that depict the artist as queer, fat, monstrous, or a sex fiend. In this dissertation I contend Black female musicians offer alternative futures for musicians in Hip-Hop, R&B and soul music and the Black female as consumer of music, video and fantasies.
Essential to this study is understanding the ways in which Black female Soul singers and Hip-Hop artists move or guide and potentially redirect the listener to remember and imagine a shared experience based on feelings. The range of their instrument/voice and their choices while performing evoke from listeners the sentiment of their messages, through incarnations of excess.
I am a native of Southern California. I received a PhD in African American and African Diaspora Studies with a minor in Media Studies from Indiana University. I hold a M.A. in Women’s Studies and M.Ed. from Claremont Graduate University. I graduated Summa Cum Laude from UCLA.
I’m dangerous Black femme.
