BLACK FEMALE SEXUALITY AND NATURE OF WOMANHOOD: THREE WORKS BY AFRICAN-AMERICAN FEMALE AUTHORS: Harriet Jacobs, Zora Neale Hurston and Gayl Jones

Concepts of sexuality and nature of womanhood in this book include a variety of issues: sexual victimization and exploitation of black women, sexual pleasure and desire, notions of love and marriage, intersection of race, gender and class, problems of finding a voice, perception of black female bodies, need to refute sexual stereotypes, motherhood, female liberation from patriarchal power, autonomy and self-definition. The intention is to examine the ways sexuality and the nature of womanhood of African-American women have been depicted in Black women's literature and how the sexuality discourse has developed since the end of the 19th century until the 1970s. Three representative works by Harriet Jacobs, Zora Neale Hurston and Gayl Jones are chosen to examine the treatment of the issues of black women's sexuality and multiple oppressions. These works were written in the late 19th cent., the Harlem Renaissance and the 1970s, historical points which had an enormous importance for the development of black female consciousness and African-American female literature, and they offer an overview of the development of black female sexual discourse to everybody interested in this topic.