In this talk Cruz shares some of her recent research on Black women’s sexuality podcasts as pleasure pedagogies, discursive popular media sites that operate as modes of recreational pedagogy to produce and educate about Black women’s pleasure at the same time they provide knowledge about, and ultimately aid in the construction of, race, gender, and sexuality. Cruz’s research aims to illuminate how Black women’s sexuality podcasts instruct a popular pedagogy of sexuality in which learning to gain sexual pleasure and enhance one’s sexuality is tethered to learning to perform and perfect one’s membership in a racialized and gendered category; that is, “how to” lessons (how to gain pleasure and knowledge about pleasure) are bound with implicit information on how “do” race and gender—how to be Black women. As vibrant mediums of education and entertainment, these podcasts draw from Black women’s historic oral and vernacular traditions and more contemporary trans-media forms of Black women’s storytelling and performance to offer a radical and oppositional vision of Black women’s sexuality, constructed by Black women for Black women, to serve as rich digital audio and visual archives of Black women’s sexuality.
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Tuesday, April 14, 2026, noon–1:00 p.m.
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