Mahaliah A. Little

University of California, Irvine | UCI · Gender and Sexuality Studies

Short essay exploring the temporal anxieties around sexual trauma, the multiple meanings of the prefix "post," and how temporal boundaries, such as the one between before/after, melt away when confronting the ubiquity of anti-Black, gendered sexual violence.

This essay engages our shared interest in the capriciousness of sexual expression and desire.1 By analyzing the discontinued WGN television series Underground (2016–17) as an ephemeral site for imagining black women's erotic interiority and theorizing black sexual desire as a scattered effect of the archive in Cheryl Dunye's film The Watermelon Wom...

In the Wake operates using a central theoretical metaphor that is diffuse in its application and meaning: one of ships, of boughs, of cresting waves, and of the ocean. Each chapter is named after a different maritime fixture or feature: “The Wake,” “The Ship,” “The Hold,” and, then finally, “The Weather.” These dictive choices cement the bedrock of...

In "The Flesh is Weak: African American Women's Sexuality and the Utility of Trauma," I argue for a reconsideration of the ways in which trauma and sexuality are often conceptualized as mutually exclusive states of being in Black feminist theory. By tracing an incomplete, but coherent history of the sexualized violence exacted against Black women t...

My first publication began as a passion project during an undergraduate internship at the Ralph J. Bunch Center for African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. The faculty members that mentored me that summer, Dr. Lisbeth Gant-Britton and Dr. Sarah Haley, encouraged me to submit an edited version of my manuscript to a CFP...