Shakedown

Leilah Weinraub is an artist and director living in New York. A short version of her film Shakedown was included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, and the full version of the film previously screened at MOMA, the Whitney, the Tate Modern, and MOCA. She is the CEO and Creative Director of Hood By Air, the New York-based fashion collective known for luxury ready-to-wear. Weinraub helped to radicalize fashion by championing what she calls “modern people”: the rising class of consumers who subvert traditional markers of race, class, and gender and revel in freedom, lawlessness, and spectacle. As a filmmaker, Weinraub has helped document such unacknowledged tastemakers, particularly those belonging to queer, autonomous communities of color whose creative output is often plundered by mass culture but whose stories are rarely told on their own terms.

Mireille Miller-Young is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. She researches and teaches about race, gender, and sexuality in US history, popular and film cultures, and the sex industries. Her book A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography was awarded the Sara A. Whaley Prize for Best Book on Women and Labor by the National Women’s Studies Association and the John Hope Franklin Prize for Best Book by the American Studies Association. Miller-Young was a co-convener of the Black Sexual Economies Project, a multi-year think tank at Washington University School of Law, and is a founder and convener of the New Sexualities Research Initiative at UC Santa Barbara. Miller-Young has published in numerous anthologies, academic journals, and news outlets including Porn Archives, Queer Sex Work, Sexualities, Meridians, The New York Times, Ms., The Washington Post, Coming Out Like a Porn Star, and $pread, a sex worker magazine. With Constance Penley, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, and Tristan Taormino, she is an editor of The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (The Feminist Press, 2013). She is also lead editor of Black Sexual Economies: Race and Sex in a Culture of Capital, which is forthcoming from University of Illinois Press in 2019.