Ajita Wilson blaxploitation, sexploitation, and the making of black womanhood

Abstract

This article puts forward a consideration of Black womanhood by looking at the softcore films starring African American trans model and actress, Ajita Wilson. Wilson starred in many European softcore and hardcore films from the 1970s until her death in 1987. The author is particularly interested in Wilson's 1976 film The Nude Princess and the 1977 film Black Afrodite (Mavri Afroditi) for their use of soul aesthetics. Conceptualized in dialogue with Tanisha Ford's discussion of “soul style,” soul aesthetics are a combination of gestures as well as visual and auditory references in dress, music, literature, and language that were generated by Black people during a period of African and Caribbean anticolonialism and liberatory Black civil rights movements. Because they were born from radical movement politics, these references have transnationally come to symbolize the possibility for Black collective and self-transformation. The author offers an analysis of these films as an example of softcore pornography affirming Black womanhood and focuses on what this process of self-making has to offer Black trans and queer feminist thought.