NeMLA 2024 Panel - Bodies in Excess / Excess(ive) Bodies
Hortense Spillers describes the Black woman as “a locus of confounded identities”: “‘Peaches’ and ‘Brown Sugar,’ ‘Sapphire’ and ‘Earth Mother,’ ‘Aunty,’ ‘Granny,’ God's ‘Holy Fool,’ a ‘Miss Ebony First,’ or ‘Black Woman at the Podium.’”[1] Borrowing Nicole Fleetwood’s term “excess flesh”[2] which refers to the hypervisibility of Black female bodies, this panel seeks to engage with the representation of bodies that are seen as “excess” or “surplus.” Fleetwood explores artists and performers that reclaim or subvert the attributed “excessiveness” of the Black female body using this very corporeality to (re)gain ownership of Black female subjectivity and narrativization.