#parasexuality

PhalloGynic

The post-war black modeling agencies, such as New York City’s Brandford Modeling Agency and the Grace Del Marco Agency, elaborated discourses of both bourgeois respectability and mid-century glamor to define a commercial space for the display of the black female body that sidestepped older stereotypes of the asexual mammy on the one hand, and the hypersexual jezebel on the other. Marketers elaborated the twin discourses of black, class-inflected respectability and a public, managed sexuality—what the historian Peter Bailey has called “parasexuality”—to signify and enable blacks’ full inclusion in American citizenship, through consumption.