Where Are the Studs?

This essay begins by asking what Simone Leigh's work at the Venice Biennale can tell us about how Black feminism takes shape in the twenty-first century—namely, querying the extent to which the field has become organized around the Black femme. The essay takes up Evelynn Hammonds's hermeneutics of Black lesbian absence to chart the intellectual-economic systems through which this happens and to ask what a figure like the stud might offer Black feminist methodologies and socialities in the age of neoliberalism.