Queer Black adolescence, the impasse, and the pedagogy of cinema

Abstract

This paper considers the potential of impasses within cinematic assemblages and the pedagogy of cinema to expand the possible horizons of Black queer youth. Black queerness in film provides pedagogical tools for exploring the limits of the category of queer. Both Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight and Dee Rees’s Pariah counter uncritical narratives of pathology, and are research data in their explorations of affective dimensions of gender, sexuality, race, poverty, and love through moving-images and sound. After situating the context of Moonlight, Pariah, and modern-day America within readings of antiblackness and heteronormativity, we explore the pedagogical work of affect and the impasse in film to make worlds differently. Through reading the impasses within Moonlight and Pariah with these concepts, we re/view how isolation, vulnerability, Blackness, and queer feeling entangle toward investment in the possible, but largely unimaginable, futures in a moment overwhelmed by queerphobia and antiblackness. In so doing, the pedagogy of cinema employed maps our collective potential to remake our moment.