Research
Book (under review with Duke University Press):
Unseen Bodies: Black Lesbian Worth Making and the Trauma of Gynecology in Bahia
This book examines Black lesbians’ negative affective experiences caused by entrenched intersectional preconceito (prejudice) within gynecology. I argue that Black lesbians’ bem-estar (wellbeing, a term taken up by the women in the study) is a boundary breaking site of knowledge production about their traumatic interactions with unprofessional care fraught with microaggressions and shaped by systems of oppressions and power. I frame gynecology as a social laboratory, what I term as social clinic, for how physicians’ socialities and personal beliefs mirror the broader social violence within society that negatively impact Black lesbians’ strivings for sexual liberatory praxis within these medical spaces. This is an experimental ethnography of how marginal women’s pursuit of their bem-estar as Black female non-normative sexual bodies drives their resistance praxis toward social change, self-care, and communal action in overt and transformative ways. While I engage a robust race and Black feminist scholarship on anti-Blackness, gender, sexuality, and class, my work speaks to the boundaries of non-normative sexual female body politics and life making to shift how we qualify Black life. I articulate the substance of wellbeing by grounding the erotic, relationships, socio-economic struggles, and freedom strivings toward reimagined Black lesbian futures, or what I refer to as a Bem-Estar Negra.
Peer-Review Articles
2020 Falu, Nessette. “Shadowboxing the Field: A Black Queer Feminist Praise Song.” Feminist Anthropology Journal (Accepted September 2020).
2020 Falu, Nessette. “Ain’t I Too A Mulher?: Implications Of Black Lesbians Wellbeing, Self-care, And Gynecology In Brazil.” Journal for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology. 25(1):48-66.
2019 Falu, Nessette. “Vivência Negra: Black Lesbian Virgins’ Affective Experiences in Brazilian Gynecology.” Medical Anthropology. 38(8):695-709.
Public Articles
2016 Falu, Nessette. “Gynecology Talk: Race-Sexuality-Class Privilege and Reproductive Encounters.” Council on Anthropology and Reproduction Newsletter.
2016 Falu, Nessette. “Silenced Prejudices and the Gynecological Encounter.” Anthropology News.
Current Research
My current project examines the extensive sexual misconduct and abuse of medical authority by gynecologists in the U.S. It interrogates sexual assault within a broader culture of neglect on multiple scales that undermines women’s vulnerabilities (mostly BIPOC) within medical institutional spaces. The project further explores the interconnected behavioral, ideological, and racial capitalist ties to a medical industrial complex infrastructure enabling these structures of violence and power in health care.