by Sharon Patricia Holland

About Sharon Patricia Holland

Sharon Patricia Holland (she/her) is the Townsend Ludington Distinguished Professor in American Studies and Chair of the Department of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of The Erotic Life of Racism and the forthcoming project “hum:animal:blackness.”

The Erotic

In a brief moment during my unattached life, I found myself journeying with a small group of lesbians in the Triangle (a region in North Carolina) who gathered to do “lesbian” things together and then, after, share a meal. On that particular prespring day, we found ourselves in Chapel Hill’s Internationalist Bookstore—the convergence point for all things radical. The reading that day was billed as a showcase of personal stories and performance pieces from LGBTQ community members focusing on the scope and range of the erotic in their lives. I think that people in my group thought it was going to be sexy. I don’t think they paid much attention to the moniker “S/M” that was also in the publicity for the reading. For the next hour and a half, I watched the absolutely stunned faces of the women in my group of lesbians—not the kind of dykes (what we called ourselves when we were reclaiming that language) I knew in my community of lesbians in Ann Arbor, Michigan, really—as the readers talked about their girlhoods, their sexual fantasies, and yes, their sexual proclivities, including being hit in the face and/or bitten while having sex with a partner. Obviously, none of these women had ever spent any time with erotica author Susie Bright and/or traveled much to the Bay Area, where communities embracing such consensual sexual practices are common.