When you’re the only Black kid in the honors program or (any program) at your mostly white high school, or one of a handful of Black graduate students in your PhD program, or one of two African American women on the faculty at your Pac-10 employer, it’s not your gender non-conformity that sets you apart from your peers. In those environments, your Blackness is the first thing people notice about you. Still, there are other ways of being different--and feeling different--that can’t be attributed to race, especially if you’re one of the people whose awareness of the unwritten rules of what it means to be a boy or a girl (or a man or a woman) is tempered by the fact that most of those rules don’t feel quite right. In Gender Studies: True Confessions of an Accidental Outlaw, Ajuan Mance gives comic treatment to the challenges, complexities, and occasional absurdity of life at the crossroads of race, gender, and geekiness. This graphic memoir answers important questions like: How many preschoolers have to mistake you for your dad before you actually start to forget your own name; if a Black girl is awful at double-dutch jump rope is it a reflection on her gender identity, racial identity, or both; and is viola player a gender or just a sexual orientation? Ajuan Mance’s comic Gender Confessions take up each of these questions and more, as it invites to share in those moments that mark the path of a gender explorer.

"Although feminists have studied the social construction of the female body for many decades, few have focused on black women. In Recovering the Black Female Body, the editors present a pioneering collection of original writings by academics and artists on 'how African-American women, from slavery to the present, have represented their physical selves in opposition to the distorted vision of the dominant culture.'"-Publishers Weekly "A collection of essays that examine the complex workings of race, gender and the body. Editors Bennett and Dickerson explain that it seeks to 'amplify' African American women writers' attempts to 'take back their selves and reappropriate and reconstitute a body that has often been hyperoticized or exoticized and made a site of impropriety and crime.'"-The Women's Review of Books "By examining African American women writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the book not only makes a significant contribution to a body of scholarly work but also attempts to 'recover' a more accurate representation of the African American female body."-DePauw Magazine "A highly original and very informative collection of essays that theorizes the complicated intersection of the black female body and its Western symbolic meanings. The collection is essential for anyone interested in the tensions between post-structuralist and humanist understandings of subject formation, social agency, and performative identity."-Claudia Tate, Princeton University Despite the recent flood of scholarly work investigating race, gender, and representation, little has been written about black women's depictions of their own bodies. Both past and present-day American cultural discourse has attempted to either hypereroticize the black female body or make it a site of impropriety and crime. The essays in this volume focus on how African American women, from the nineteenth century to the present, have represented their physical selves in opposition to the distorted vision of others. Contributors attempt to "recover" the black female body in two ways: they explore how dominant historical images have mediated black female identity, and they analyze how black women have resisted often demeaning popular cultural perceptions in favor of more diverse, subtle presentations of self. The pieces in this book-all of them published here for the first time-address a wide range of topics, from antebellum American poetry to nineteenth-century African American actors and twentieth-century pulp fiction. Recovering the Black Female Body recognizes the pressing need to highlight the vibrant energy of African American women's attempts to wrest control of the physical and symbolic construction of their bodies away from the distortions of others. Michael Bennett is an associate professor of English at Long Island University and coeditor of The Nature of Cities: Ecocriticism and Urban Environments. Vanessa D. Dickerson is an associate professor of English at DePauw University. She is the author of Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural, and editor of Keeping the Victorian House.