The Vagina Dentata: A Case for Unlocking Mouths, Loosing Hips, and Spreading the Gospel of Healing Women's Sexual Performance Anxiety

This article explores how vagina dentata folklore—stories and imagery about a mythical "toothed vagina"—connects to the ways Black religious communities often cultivate silence around women’s sexual lives, particularly within the “Worth the Wait” and Word of Faith movements. Ignited by womanist religious ethnographer Monique Moultrie’s scholarship on sexual silence in these movement, I take seriously the musicological chasm by exploring how these ministries influence Black women’s sexual agency and moral decision-making through inequitable theological procedures and discourses. The vagina dentatametaphor emerges as a symbol of constrained appetites—respiratory (larynx), digestive (intestine, anus), and reproductive (uterus, vagina)—reflecting broader sociocultural and religious controls over Black women’s bodies. Through an extended analysis of gospel music's public relations narratives and a genealogy of the commodification of Black women’s sexual purity, this article reveals the profound socio-religious implications of these dynamics and advocates for a reclamation of autonomy and agency within these contested spaces.