Queer Practices and African American Culture

Abstract

The texts in this article offer perspectives on queer practices in African American culture that cut across empirical and speculative forms of scholarship, alongside primary sources. These lists combine works of scholarship with primary documents, particularly since the mid-twentieth century, to the extent that both broad genres participate in the documenting of Black queer lives as Black queer lives. Along these lines, the texts collected across these lists deploy a variety of methodological and disciplinary strategies for representing practices that resist in necessary ways being reduced to scholarly discourses. Black historiography is, itself, a practice of recovery from the archives of an antiblack world. A tradition of Black feminist practitioners in history and cultural studies have demonstrated the manifold ways Black life is distorted by archives of Black subjugation. Recovering Black histories has meant reading across distortions and absences within these archives. Representing contemporary Black life practices has, likewise, meant working through and against ongoing forms of structural violence that pathologize Black life. Scholarship on queer practices in Black cultures, whether historical or contemporary in focus, requires working through distortions and gaps in already-fraught archives, and requires working against multiple, simultaneous forms of pathologization. For the purposes of this article, both “queer practices” and “African American culture” will be defined broadly. On the latter concept, notwithstanding the challenge of delineating something called “culture” within a social field that has, historically, maligned the inventiveness of Black people, “African American culture” here encompasses the array of Black inventive practices from the everyday to the extraordinary. In the context of this article, queerness shall encompass nonnormative sexualities and genders. This preliminary definition is immediately complicated by the sexual politics of structural racism. Namely: What, for Black Americans, might be the parameters of a normative gender or sexuality? From the perspective of an antiblack world, is there such a thing as an intersection between Blackness and the normative? In Aberrations in Black, Roderick Ferguson puts it this way, “as figures of nonheteronormative perversions, straight African Americans were reproductive rather than productive, heterosexual but never heteronormative” (p. 87). To be sure, really existing African American communities have their own standards of normative and nonnormative behaviors around and performances of gender and sexuality. The challenge for scholarship is to attend to the specificities of Black queer lives without ignoring the queerness internal to Blackness itself, which is also to say the queerness and the Blackness of life itself.