Dominique Young Presents at Three Conferences on "Black Panther" and D'Angelo's Music
February 04, 2020
Dominique Young has three forthcoming presentations in the Spring.
Two will be held at the NeMLA Conference in Boston, and the third at the Annual Black Popular Culture Conference in Philadelphia, focusing on Marvel's Black Panther and the music performance of D'Angelo through Disability Studies, Black Feminism, critical race theory, and performance theory.At the Annual 2020 Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) Conference in Boston, Dominique will present two papers. She will present her first paper, “Reading Queerness and Disability in Killmonger,” at the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Examining a Post-Endgame World conference roundtable. In this paper she analyzes the film Black Panther and uses the intersection of a Disability Studies and Black Feminist framework outlined in Sami Schalk’s book Bodyminds Reimagined to argue that the film’s antagonist, Killmonger, is both a psychologically disabled and queer character. Ultimately, she encourages readers to consider how the intersection of Disability Studies and Black Feminism offers new ways of thinking about black masculinity and disability in the film.
Her second 2020 NeMLA paper, “How Does It Feel?: Gendered, Racialized, and Transhistorical Eroticism by D’Angelo,” analyzes the iconic music video, “Untitled (How Does It Feel),” by neo-soul music artist, D’Angelo. Drawing on critical race theory, performance theory, and film analysis, this paper interrogates the perceived hypersexuality of D’Angelo by exploring how the hypersexualized socio-historical meaning of the black male body induces the eroticism of the video, and how spectators are also complicit in constructing the hypersexuality of the video when they attend to D’Angelo’s body with this limited understanding of black masculinity. Dominique will also present this paper at the Annual 2020 Black Popular Culture Conference in Philadelphia where she will extend her analysis to situate the music video within a larger 1990s black popular culture discourse surrounding black romantic desires.
Finally, Dominique’s latest forthcoming project will analyze a music video by another neo-soul music artist from the 1990s. In this project she explores the artist’s engagement with the police-state as a participant in black eroticism, love making, and sexual desirability.