“I guess I have to just put my dick on the table”: Rough Trade, Tenure, and Black Sexualities as Self-defense

Willoughby-Herard crafts original bawdy fables and fashions crude proverbs to analyze Black LGBTQ+ experiences in academia as a ground for theory that navigates the promise and peril of telling. The essay takes seriously Evelynn Hammonds’s advice that Black sexual and gender others recall their journeys as a mode of defense, analysis, meaning making. Using vulgar tales to throw shade, while wrestling within and beyond the limits of trauma porn and spectacle, makes for a hard-won cultural legacy and remittance that points to possibilities for survival and being. Recalling bitter experiences in academia exposes social relations anchored by collective violence. Following Alicia Levy-Seedat, vulgarity, deployed by working-class speakers of Jamaican Patwah (patois), cuts through patronizing conditions. Willoughby-Herard’s notion of “writerly extravagance” enables telling while feeding on the rough laughter and crass pleasure of readers and hearers to create something like survival, or at least having the last laugh.