Session 2 (Units 3-4): Singing, Sexuality, and Seasoning -- The Crucial Nexus of Appetites

Unit 3: The Vagina Dentata: Purity, Discordance, Getting Loosed in Gospel Sexual Purity.

Hostile, biting, or tight vagina imagery resembles predominantly Black male speech with which I grew up in the Word of Faith movement that cultivates faith-based practices of Black female sexual silence, as observed by womanist religious ethnographer Monique Moultrie. These ministries influence and control Black female sexual agency and moral decision making in inequitable procedures and discourses. A metaphorical sexually silenced vagina dentata symbolizes a stronghold on respiratory (larynx), digestive (intestine, anus), and reproductive (uterus, vagina) appetites as well elimination, that is, defecation of that which is consumed.

In this article, I apply components of my “when and where I enter” framework of an intra-cultural, same-gender listening in an extended analysis of Black vagina polylogues. By an intra-cultural, same gender listening, I am connoting the ways in which Black women are listening to their own appetites in…