Research
In Unseen Flesh, I explores how Black lesbians in Brazil define and sustain their well-being and self-worth against persistent racial, sexual, class, and gender-based prejudice. Focusing on the trauma caused by interactions with gynecologists, I draws on in-depth ethnographic work among the Black lesbian community to reveal their profoundly negative affective experiences within Brazil’s deeply biased medical system.
My work broadly intervenes to understand forms of hidden, silenced power in gynecology and medicine but in doing so, I center analytically and methodologically the study of Black life at multiple dimensions such knowledge production, forms of protest, sex and erotic power, family, and partners, and even spirituality, particularly in this book, Unseen Flesh, in which I frame medical narratives and Brazilian gynecology through Brazilian Black queer women’s lives beyond those spaces to argue that Black lesbians in Salvador, Bahia, a large urban city located in the northeast region of Brazil, enforce wellbeing against intersectional intimate violence in gynecology, leading them to evaluate, protect, and chart their sense of worth within these spaces and draw upon their daily sense of worth making and our need to reimagine how the impact of institutional violence is carried in the everyday world.
In the face of such entrenched, intersectional intimate violence, my informants actively pursue well-being in ways that channel their struggle for self-worth toward broader goals of social change, self-care, and communal action. Demonstrating how the racist and heteronormative underpinnings of gynecology erase Black lesbian subjecthood through mental, emotional, and physical traumas, I explores the daily resistance and abolitionist practices of worth-making that claim and sustain Black queer identity and living.
I rethink the medicalization of race, sex, and gender in Brazil and elsewhere while offering a new perspective on Black queer life through well-being grounded in relationships, socioeconomic struggles, the erotic, and freedom strivings.
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Peer-Reviewed Articles
2024. Falu, Nessette. “Erotic senses: Powering Brazilian Black queer existence in gynecologic spaces.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly. pp. 1-13. DOI: 10.1111/maq.12841
2023. Falu, Nessette. “The Golden Seeds of Reproductive Injustice.” Special Issue, “Reproductive Injustice.” Scholar & Feminist Online. Issue 19.2.
2021 Falu, Nessette. “Shadowboxing the Field: A Black Queer Feminist Praise Song.” Feminist Anthropology Journal. 2(2): 242-249.
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.