Ebook: The Color Pynk: Black Femme Art for Survival

The Color Pynk is a passionate exploration of Black femme poetics of survival. Sidelined by liberal feminists and invisible to mainstream civil rights movements, Black femmes spent the Trump years doing what they so often do best: creating politically engaged art, entertainment, and ideas. In the first full-length study of Black queer, cis-, and trans-femininity, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley argues that this creative work offers a distinctive challenge to power structures that limit how we color, gender, and explore freedom.

Tinsley engages 2017–2020 Black femme cultural production that colorfully and provocatively imagines freedom in the stark white face of its impossibility. Looking to the music of Janelle Monáe and Kelsey Lu, Janet Mock’s writing for the television show Pose, the fashion of Indya Moore and (F)empower, and the films of Tourmaline and Juliana Huxtable, as well as poetry and novels, The Color Pynk conceptualizes Black femme as a set of consciously, continually rescripted cultural and aesthetic practices that disrupts conventional meanings of race, gender, and sexuality. There is an exuberant defiance in queer Black femininity, Tinsley finds—so that Black femmes continue to love themselves wildly in a world that resists their joy.