Bringing Flesh to Theory: Ethnography, Black Queer Theory, and Studying Black Sexualities

Abstract

632 Feminist Studies 42, no. 3. © 2016 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Nikki Lane Bringing Flesh to Theory: Ethnography, Black Queer Theory, and Studying Black Sexualities As Dorothy Hodgson tells us, the most common features of an ethnographic project involve “talking to, participating with, and observing the people who produce . . . texts, exploring the contexts of their ideas and actions, and often studying how their situations, ideas, and actions change over time.”1 Practically, this often involves spending months, and more often years, in a particular field site, where one develops relationships with members of the group, community, or institution being studied . Ethnographers are positioned in a place to observe, but also place their bodies on the line—participating, when possible, in the quotidian practices of the group. This observation and participation is captured in the form of “field notes” that may relay in the form of “thick description,” what the ethnographer sees as she observes and participates in various cultural and social practices.2 As such, ethnography requires reflexivity because the ethnographer must constantly consider how her body is affecting and is effected by the communities and institutions in which she is embedded. The benefit of this reflexive ethnographic approach is that, as Faye Ginsburg notes, it “has the capacity to reveal the fault lines in 1. Dorothy Louise Hodgson, “Of Modernity/Modernities, Gender, and Ethnography ,” in Gendered Modernities: Ethnographic Perspectives, ed. Dorothy Louise Hodgson (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 17. 2. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973). Nikki Lane 633 communities, social movements, and institutions, which frequently run along class, race, and generational lines, and that might easily be missed by more deductive and quantitative methodologies.”3 MarlonM.Bailey’s ButchQueensUpinPumps, Jafari S. Allen’s ¡Venceremos ?, Mignon Moore’s Invisible Families, and Mireille Miller-Young’s A Taste for Brown Sugar represent an exciting trend within an interdisciplinary body of research that I am referring to as Black sexuality studies. What links these projects is their use of ethnographic methodologies to understand how Blackness informs racialized gender and sexuality in the everyday experiences of their interlocutors. In relying on ethnography, to varying degrees, they are in conversation with and expand upon methodological trends within Black feminist studies and Black queer studies . Further, the Black sexuality studies projects reviewed here question the (hetero)normative bent within the field of African American studies, the normatively white subject position that exists within queer theory, and the lack of attention to issues of sexual pleasure within Black feminist theory. They also challenge theorists of race and sexuality to move 3. Faye Ginsburg, “Ethnography and American Studies,” Cultural Anthropology 21, no. 3 (2006), 492. Books Discussed in This Essay¡Venceremos? The Erotics of Black Self-making in Cuba. By Jafari S. Allen. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit. By Marlon M. Bailey. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013. Invisible Families: Gay Identities, Relationships, and Motherhood among Black Women. By Mignon Moore. Oakland: University of California Press, 2011. A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography. By Mireille Miller-Young. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. 634 Nikki Lane in the direction of interrogating the flesh, because they go to the site— the place where the body acts, feels, and engages the world—asking the simple question articulated best by E. Patrick Johnson: “What is the utility of queer [or feminist] theory on the front lines, in the trenches, on the street, or anyplace where the racialized and sexualized body is beaten, starved, fired, cursed—indeed, where the body is the site of trauma?”4 In my discussion of these texts, I will focus on how each utilizes ethnographic methodologies in distinct ways. I will argue that regardless of how they employ ethnography’s methods, they make two very important contributions to fields of Black feminist theory and Black queer theory. First, they add information about the lived experiences of Black sexual subjectivity to the ethnographic record. By adding these experiences to the record, they become part of the limited but growing body of available knowledge about the everyday experiences of Black people within the African...