Color Pynk

Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley is a professor of Black studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of BeyoncÉ in Formation: Remixing Black Feminism, Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism between Women in Caribbean Literature, and Ezili's Mirrors: Imagining Black Queer Genders.

This is not just a book.  This is a function.  So the question is, what are you going to wear to this gathering? Omise'eke Tinsley gathers us once again, turning her brilliance to creative femmifestations of black femme fierceness in the so-called Trump Era.  (Or what I prefer to think of as the Tourmaline Ascendency.) Theorists, fashionistas, sweethearts, and innovators: we are all here in loving revelation.  I wear a quilted robe the color of a rose from my grandmother’s garden. I wear a hot-pynk, ribbed tank top screenprinted by a black lesbian yogi. I suggest you wear your curiousity, your vulnerability, and your desire to look like love. - Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals In The Color Pynk Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley pays homage to the foremothers of Black feminism by developing a Black femme reading practice.  Tinsley’s analyses of Black femme cultural production are rendered poetically and with the deft critical eye we have come to expect of her. Indeed, Tinsley’s is one of the most important voices of her generation. - E. Patrick Johnson, Northwestern University, author of Honeypot: Black Southern Women Who Love Women A beautiful commitment to and demonstration of Black femme poetics, The Color Pynk offers a radical alternative to the genre of the academic book, one that celebrates Black queer language as its own tactic of freedom-dreaming. Conjuring a Black femme future with each sentence, Tinsley writes in collaborative solidarity and with love for Black femmes of all shades and genders. With her lyrical prose - in her words a 'joy-tinted freedom song for the twenty-first century'-The Color Pynk manifests Black femme freedom, now and forever.(Autostraddle) The Color Pynk appears as a beautifully experimental and generous text, where a new concept emerges to help us theorize from the ground that the Black, queer femme has tilled, rather than asking her to fit within a failed feminist framework. Daringly, she challenges readers to revise what they think of as feminist resistance under Trump and what we readily mark as Black or queer in ways that erase Black femmes. With this, Tinsley offers a kind of scholarship that generates as many pathways forward as the Black femme-inist artistic practices at the center of the work. (Frontiers)

• Prologue: For Alice WalkerIntroduction: Femme-inist Is to Feminist as Pynk Is to PinkPart One: Pussy Power and Nonbinary VaginasJanelle Monáe: Fem Futures, Pynk Pants, and Pussy PowerIndya Moore: Nonbinary Wild Vagina Dresses and Biologically Femme PenisesPart Two: Hymns for Crazy Black FemmesKelsey Lu: Braids, Twists, and the Shapes of Black Femme DepressionTourmaline: Head Scarves and Freedom DreamsPart Three: Black Femme Environmentalism for the Futa(F)empower: Swimwear, Wade-Ins, and Trashy EcofeminismJuliana Huxtable: Black Witch-Cunt Lipstick and Kinky Vegan Femme-inismConclusion: Where Is the Black in Black Femme Freedom?Epilogue: For My ChildAfterword by Candice Lyons: Pynk Parlance, a GlossaryAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex