Unseen Flesh

In Unseen Flesh Nessette Falu explores how Black lesbians in Brazil define and sustain their well-being and self-worth against persistent racial, sexual, class, and gender-based prejudice. Focusing on the trauma caused by interactions with gynecologists, Falu draws on in-depth ethnographic work among the Black lesbian community to reveal their profoundly negative affective experiences within Brazil’s deeply biased medical system. In the face of such entrenched, intersectional intimate violence, Falu’s informants actively pursue well-being in ways that channel their struggle for self-worth toward broader goals of social change, self care, and communal action. Demonstrating how the racist and heteronormative underpinnings of gynecology erase Black lesbian subjecthood through mental, emotional, and physical traumas, Falu explores the daily resistance and abolitionist practices of worth-making that claim and sustain Black queer identity and living. Falu rethinks the medicalization of race, sex, and gender in Brazil and elsewhere while offering a new perspective on Black queer life through well-being grounded in relationships, socioeconomic struggles, the erotic, and freedom strivings.

“An original and necessary work, Unseen Flesh opens an important critical window on well-being and gynecological health in Brazil, which are colored and conditioned by race/color, class, and sexual identity. Nessette Falu’s focus on Black Brazilian lesbians is historic and significant in itself—the result of her long-term, invested, and loving encounters with people who had been silenced.”

Nessette Falu is Assistant Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.