Black Queer Freedom

Abstract

In this book, GerShun Avilez argues that queerness, here meaning same-sex desire and gender nonconformity, introduces the threat of injury and that artists throughout the Black diaspora use queer desire to negotiate spaces of injury. The space of injury does not necessarily pertain to a particular architecture or location; it concerns the perception and engagement of a body. Black queer bodies are perceived as social threats, and this perception results in threats (physical, psychological, socioeconomic) against these bodies. The space of injury describes the potential threat to queer bodies that lingers throughout the social world. Attending to such threats and challenging them constitute defining elements in Black queer artists’ work. In each of the two parts to the book, the author examines how perceptions of the Black queer body in different environments create uncertainty for that body and make it a contested space because of racial and sexual meaning. Part 1 focuses on movement through public space (through streets and across borders) and on how state-backed interruptions seek to inhibit queer bodies. Part 2 explores movement through institutional spaces (prisons and hospitals), which seek to expose the queer body to make it vulnerable to control. Ultimately, the book insists that desire and artistic production function as means to queer freedom when actual policies and legislation fail to ensure civic rights and social mobility.