Black Queer Studies Research Articles

Erotic Black Diaspora

“The Erotic Black Diaspora: From Your Hands to Mine” is a theoretical exploration of how the erotic informs Black feminist politics, kinship, love, and spirituality throughout the African diaspora. Through an interdisciplinary approach rooted in literary studies, history, African and African diaspora studies, women’s and gender studies, and Black queer studies, as well as archival research, a close reading of letters sent to Black feminist, writer, and poet Audre Lorde reveals how the erotic functions within Black feminist spaces, particularly in the late 1970s–mid 1980s. In using Audre Lorde’s definition of the erotic, as she defines it in “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” this paper argues that the Erotic Black Diaspora is a way of reading Black feminist love, language, and action. Recognizing the diversity within Afro-diasporic experiences, the Erotic Black Diaspora privileges the erotic (platonic and/or romantic) feelings and expressions across continents cultivated between same-sex-loving and queer individuals throughout the African diaspora. Positioning Black feminist archives, in particular correspondence sent between Black feminist foremothers, as a counter-archive to institutions of oppression informs one’s understanding of the ethics of Black feminist politics, love, spirituality, and community building.

Frottage of Ephemera

Gregory D. Victorianne's Buti Voxx is a window into the diffuse erotic networks across the African diaspora who forged international information networks between the 1980s and early 2000s. The Afro-erotic zine occasions an opportunity to tease out what the author calls ephemera fever, the compulsion across contemporary Black queer studies and queer of color critique to frame the trace as evidence of imagining otherwise. The author attunes to the frictions, or what Keguro Macharia calls “frottage,” between the production of Buti Voxx and José Esteban Muñoz's paradigm of “ephemera as evidence” in an effort to query the conceptual pressures undergirding the process of scaling the quotidian to the erotic and political blueprint. The conundrum of the black vernacular is that objects like Buti Voxx become locked into the affective expectations and hermeneutic feedback loops set in motion by altruistic grammars like ephemera. Frottage of ephemera is a launchpad for thinking through how grammatical possibility concurrently functions as hermeneutic enclosure.

Same-Gender-Loving Black Male Television Characters: A Case Study of the Scripted Television Series Designated Survivor

Descriptive analyses of same-gender-loving (SGL) Black male characters in scripted television series are lacking. This content may expose SGL Black viewers to distinct narratives. Accordingly, I adopt queer theory and Black queer studies, specifically the visibility of sexual identities, and examined the Netflix series Designated Survivor’s two SGL Black male characters, Dontae Evans and Troy Bae. Findings illustrated themes including sexual intimacy, visual representations of safe sex practices, and discussions of emotional and physical health. I argue that visibility, not to be confused with numerical representation, offers SGL Black men the lens to see their complex and layered existence on-screen.

Black Queer Students’ Counter-Stories of Invisibility in Undergraduate STEM as a White, Cisheteropatriarchal Space

Black queer undergraduates experience invisibility at the juncture of anti-Black racism and cisheteropatriarchy in their campus environments. With the absence of research on queer students of color in undergraduate STEM, it has been unexplored how Black queer invisibility is reinforced and disrupted in uniquely racialized and cisheteronormative STEM spaces. Drawing on Black queer studies and a proposed framework of STEM education as a White, cisheteropatriarchal space, our study addresses this research gap by exploring four Black queer students’ experiences of oppression and agency in navigating invisibility as STEM majors. A counter-storytelling analysis reveals how curricular erasure and within-group peer tensions shaped variation in undergraduate Black queer students’ STEM experiences of invisibility. Findings inform implications for education research, practice, and policy.

States of Precarity and Pains of Utopic Pedagogy: Methodologies of Hope in Times of Crises

Drawing on personal teaching experience, this article considers the potentiality and pains of a pedagogic strategy that practises what José Esteban Muñoz calls a "methodology of hope" (2009). How can educators, particularly those located in the "enlightenment-type charade" (Moten and Harney 2013, 39) that is the university, enact a critical yet hopeful pedagogy when the "ghostly aspects" (Gordon 2008) of social life haunt both students and educators before they enter the classroom? Using Gail Lewis' (2014) defense of the reparative position within queer feminist debates on paranoid and reparative readings, I argue that Lewis' emphasis on relationality as a mode of criticality can foreground connection as a reparative mode of pedagogy. Reflecting on my own experience teaching Frantz Fanon's scholarship through a lens that confronts his homophobia and simultaneously refuses his disposal, I argue for the need for connection for both students and educator alike. The reparative stance, in this pedagogic moment, opens students to the analytical modes of Black diaspora studies, Black queer studies and queer of colour critique that thinks insurgently with and through Fanon to imagine otherwise.

“Every Nigga Is a Star”: A Critical Reflection on the Fifth Anniversary of Moonlight

“Every Nigga Is a Star”: A Critical Reflection on the Fifth Anniversary of <i>Moonlight</i>

Black Church Rumor

AbstractIn 1992, Jet published “James Cleveland Infected L.A. Youth with HIV, $9 Mil. Lawsuit Claims,” which detailed how the Chicago-born gospel musician had not only allegedly sexually abused his foster son, Christopher B. Harris, but had also “[given] him the AIDS virus.” This article takes this incident of rumor or accusation as a critical opportunity to think about the archival reality of Black queer sexuality, on one hand, and sexual violence in Black gospel music history on the other. Using the legal documents from Christopher B. Harris v. Irwin Goldring as Special Administrator of the Estate of James Cleveland and commentary from Cleveland's contemporaries, it exhumes Cleveland from dusty church closets for consideration in the history of HIV and AIDS in African American Protestant church and gospel communities and in Black queer studies, ethnomusicology, and gender and sexuality studies. Further, it theorizes “Black church rumor” as a lens for Black queer religious studies and argues that Cleveland's perceived queer sexuality distracted from Harris's allegations of sexual abuse. Thus, it situates Cleveland—the person, the preacher, and the gospel legend—in the literature on “down low” sexuality and explicates the implications of Cleveland's legacy and role in Black gospel music production.

Smithing Queer Empiricism: Engaging Ethnomethodology for a Queer Social Science

Is queer social science possible? Early queer theorists disparaged empiricism as a normalizing, modernist discourse. Nonetheless, LGBTQI+ social scientists have applied queer concepts in empirical projects. Rather than seek a queer method, we ask, Is there an empirical perspective that (ontologically) envisions social relations more queerly—attending to discursive and materialist productions of reality? Dorothy Smith’s work foregrounds people’s activities of engaging texts and satisfies Black queer studies’ and new materialisms’ critiques of early queer theory. Underutilized and often misread, especially its ethnomethodological sensibilities and its vision of actors as relational, practical actors, her work shows how my race is not mine, it is ours; your sexual orientation is not yours, it is ours; their gender is not theirs, it is ours. Smith offers an ontology without essence, grand theory, or normativity, facilitating a range of queer, interpretive projects—from the intersectional to the transnational to the embodied.

Defense, Redemption, Care: Black Feminist and Queer Studies

Defense, Redemption, Care: Black Feminist and Queer Studies

When the Utopian Impulse “Fails”: Queer Spatialities of Traumatic Cultural Memory in Randall Kenan’s “A Visitation of Spirits”

Adopting a Utopian Studies perspective, this essay maps the ways in which the cultural memory of slavery underlies the conflicts and their attempted negotiations in Randall Kenan’s "A Visitation of Spirits" (1989). The central dilemma in the novel is the irredeemable divide between same-sex desire and patriarchal heteronormativity, the roots of which reside in the demeaning definitions of African American sexuality established during slavery, perpetuated in its aftermaths, and transmitted through generations via cultural memory. This problematic position is what Horace, an African American teenager, struggles with in his Black southern community. This conflict is understood as an ideological closure that the narrative seeks to open up and resolve by generating a Queer utopian impulse, a desire to imagine alternative futures to the oppressive status quo. This becomes visible particularly in terms of spatiality, as Horace revisits the central places of his life, where the heteronormativity of the community and the underlying traumatic cultural memory of slavery intertwine with Horace’s personal memories and same-sex desire. While the novel envisions the ways in which Horace’s Queer presence disrupts the heteronormative order and seeks to assert agency, his tragic demise facilitates a consideration of the limits of oppressive social and cultural structures and of the possibility of envisioning alternatives to the status quo. The utopian impulse offers merely fleeting glimpses of the horizon of alternative futures through moments of resistance and belonging that fail to make a lasting impact. Despite this failure within the world of the novel, the text becomes a significant literary intervention that has played a role in calling attention to the problems faced by nonnormative sexualities and underlying the rise of Black Queer Studies.

Black Queerness and the Cruel Irony of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Research Article| October 01 2020 Black Queerness and the Cruel Irony of the COVID-19 Pandemic Marlon M. Bailey Marlon M. Bailey Marlon M. Bailey is associate professor of women and gender studies and African and African American studies and American studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. Marlon’s book, Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2013. In 2014, Butch Queens Up in Pumps was awarded the Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize by the GL/Q Caucus of the Modern Language Association and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Book Award in LGBT Studies. Marlon’s essay, “Black Gay (Raw) Sex,” appears in No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies (Duke University Press, 2016), edited by E. Patrick Johnson. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking (2020) 7 (3): 174–178. https://doi.org/10.14321/qed.7.3.0174 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Marlon M. Bailey; Black Queerness and the Cruel Irony of the COVID-19 Pandemic. QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 1 October 2020; 7 (3): 174–178. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/qed.7.3.0174 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressQED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2020 Michigan State University2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Civic Intimacies: Black Queer Improvisations on Citizenship

This ethnographic book focuses on how Black queer people in Baltimore build support structures in the face of ongoing violence and insecurity in their lives. The author advances the concept of “civic intimacies” to account for a range of practices that enable Black queer Baltimoreans to not only survive but also thrive, as they employ strategies of care and belonging to navigate through civic institutions. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Baltimore, van Doorn provides an excellent sense of the vibrancy of Black queer political work in a variety of contexts. His research asks a lot of important questions while providing fair and nuanced analysis, and the text is theoretically deep and astute. While I had an occasional qualm with aspects of the book, I recommend it without hesitation, especially for sociologists interested in queer theory, neoliberalism, or Black queer studies. The text focuses primarily on three institutions: Baltimore’s HIV-prevention system; the Black Church; and the city’s majority-white BDSM community. All three of these sites are explored in depth, and I especially enjoyed reading these ethnographic chapters. The third chapter and parts of the second are particularly strong, where van Doorn examines Baltimore’s HIV-prevention system. He speaks very directly in these chapters, tying a lot of these efforts to the city’s racist legacies and to the continual reproduction of racial inequality. Sociologists interested in public health and race, along with the increasing role of neoliberalism in medical fields, are likely to find much to admire in these chapters. Scholars interested in Baltimore’s ballroom communities, both historically and currently, will also want to obtain this text, as such communities play a significant role in the book.

Happy Jackie Washington Day: Black Queer Studies in Retrospect

Happy Jackie Washington DayBlack Queer Studies in Retrospect L. H. Stallings (bio) Visions of black liberation which exclude lesbians and gay men bore and repel me. —Cheryle Clarke, “The Failure to Transform Homophobia in the Black Community” We wanted to quare queer, throw shade on its meanings. —E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson, “Introduction” to Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology The “black queer” is entrapped in this methodological quagmire. This is the dreaded condition of the black queer . . . —Calvin Warren, Onticide: Afropessimism, Queer Theory, & Ethics Let me tell you how Hollywood works. They let one black woman slide through per decade. —Jackie Washington Like much of the significant work produced in Black queer studies, if you have read Black feminist theory, Black writers, filmmakers, artists, and musicians, you will appreciate and get why the above epigraphs might be significant to a Black queer studies retrospective. However, if like some classes and books [End Page 10] on white queer studies and Black Studies, you do not engage what is Black, feminist, lesbian, and queer, even when it is not marginal (see white appropriation studies), then you won’t understand. When the field of Black queer studies has been impactful, radical, and innovative, it has been because it incorporates the tired-of-bullshit tone and radical political stance of Black lesbian feminism expressed by poet Cheryl Clarke alongside the artistic performative balance between self-love and egomania as devised by Robert Townsend and Jenifer Lewis in their fictional cinematic collaboration—Jackie’s Back! (1999). The movie, a mockumentary made for Lifetime Television, has become a cult classic. Long before the “serious” and low-budget biopics the Lifetime network has become known for making, and far better in many respects, Jackie’s Back! combined Townsend’s directorial flair for camp dragedy, as seen in his other films Hollywood Shuffle, The Five Heartbeats, The Meteor Man, B.A.P.S., and Holiday Heart. The film encompasses the high physical comedy and stellar presence of the self-proclaimed Mother of Hollywood, Jenifer Lewis. Lewis cerebrally portrays the story of Jackie Washington, a washed-up R&B diva attempting a career comeback being documented by a white British filmmaker. Along with hilarious celebrity cameos, the film contains short musical gems mocking the best of Black performances in music genres: “Yield, Yield, Yield” (Motown pop); “Love Goddess” (Disco); “Cocoa’s Theme” (Blaxploitation soundtrack); “Take Your Jerri Curl and Go” and “Tore Up From the Floor Up” (Blues/juke); and “Look at Me” (over-the-top ballad). Many of the songs serve what scholar E. Patrick Johnson might note as quare critical commentary on Black popular culture and economic politics: exploitative relationships between child stars and mentors, Black hair issues, Black women’s sexuality, cultural appropriation, and white consumerism. I begin my contribution to this retrospective through an appraisal of Jackie’s Back! to signal the importance of refusal, underestimation, and ego in Black queer studies and Black queer culture. The film symbolically embodies the past, present, and future of Black queer studies, and I use its narrative as inspiration for my commentary. A Fiction of Our Own Making For some time now, fans of Jackie’s Back! have bombarded the internet with “Happy Jackie Washington Day” tweets, memes, and videos on July 15 to commemorate and celebrate the significance of the fictional holiday created in 1984 in Kinloch, Missouri, to celebrate the music and influence of Jackie Washington. In deeming the fictional holiday worth such effort, Black queer culture insists upon its own value systems and beliefs. So, too, does Black queer studies. Black queer studies may not have made it possible for all the blacks, anonymous and famous, rumored to be LGBTQ to come out, but it has certainly allowed a freedom to be black and queer in ways that do not [End Page 11] conform to closeted white LGBT identity politics or colonial regimes of gender. It has highlighted bridges between the intellectual, spiritual, political, cultural, and sexual. It has evolved as a mode of knowledge production committed to the creative, imaginative, speculative, and aesthete in building transformative coalitional politics. In short, it has made and unmade...

“Queering” African American religious history

AbstractThis article raises questions about how scholars of African American religions and of Black Queer Studies have historically and historiographically rendered queer and transgender persons as being devoid of a religion of their choosing. It calls for research on LGBTQ+ persons in African American religious history and discusses the necessity of “queering” theories and methods in the study of African American religions. To do this, it traces a genealogy of historians of African American religious history “queering” the study of African American religions in order to analyze the state of the field and chart new directions for future study.

Black Gay Sex, Homosex-Normativity, And Cathy Cohen’s Queer Of Color Theory Of Cultural Politics

Research Article| January 01 2019 Black Gay Sex, Homosex-Normativity, And Cathy Cohen’s Queer Of Color Theory Of Cultural Politics Marlon M. Bailey Marlon M. Bailey Marlon M. Bailey is an associate professor of women and gender studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. His book, Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit (University of Michigan Press, 2013), was awarded the Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize by the GL/Q Caucus of the MLA. Some of Marlon’s essays appear in Signs, Feminist Studies, Souls, Gender, Place, and Culture, and several book collections. Marlon’s essay “Black Gay (Raw) Sex” appears in No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies (Duke University Press, 2016), edited by E. Patrick Johnson. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2019) 25 (1): 162–168. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-7275404 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Marlon M. Bailey; Black Gay Sex, Homosex-Normativity, And Cathy Cohen’s Queer Of Color Theory Of Cultural Politics. GLQ 1 January 2019; 25 (1): 162–168. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-7275404 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsGLQ Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2019 Duke University Press2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

'The Sweet Meat of My Feelings': The Ghost of Leroi Jones, The Black Maternal, and the (Re)Birth of a Nation's Kweer

'The Sweet Meat of My Feelings':The Ghost of Leroi Jones, The Black Maternal, and the (Re)Birth of a Nation's Kweer L. Lamar Wilson "In the beginning was not only the word but the contradiction of the word." —Ralph Ellison, "Society, Morality, and the Novel" "The African-American male has been touched, therefore, by the mother, handed by her in ways that he cannot escape, and in ways that the white American male is allowed to temporize by a fatherly reprieve. … The black American male embodies the only American community of males handed the specific occasion to learn who the female is within itself. … It is the heritage of the mother that the African-American male must regain as an aspect of his own personhood–the power of 'yes' to the female within." —"Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe," Hortense Spillers, Diacritics (Warning: This piece recounts graphic descriptions of sexual assault detailed in the works of Jones/Baraka.) After enduring the murder of Malcolm X in March 1965, a severe beating by police in his native Newark, New Jersey, in July 1967, and the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968, LeRoi Jones (née Everett Leroy Jones) made a final and dramatic shift in his poetics and life that had been underway at least seven years. He adopted the personae of Imamu Ameer/Amear Baraka and ultimately Amiri Baraka. These noms de guerre were among many he had chosen during the first half of his life, all of which allowed Jones to shed on the page—in layer by metaphorical, typological layer—the beatnik ideals that had shaped the personal and artistic experimentation he had cultivated over a decade among Eastern-European and Jewish immigrant yuppies, publishers, and patrons with whom he had aligned intellectually in New York's Greenwich Village. Free of Everett Leroy, Le Roi, and LeRoi Jones, Amiri Baraka committed fully to the Marxism and radical black nationalism he had begun to proselytize in Harlem and his hometown, which would intensify over the latter half of his life. There was much for LeRoi Jones to cast off publicly to become Amiri Baraka. He had been in an interracial marriage to the former Hettie Cohen, a Jewish-American which [End Page 124] produced two daughters, and had sired another daughter, born to Italian-American poet Diana di Prima, in 1962, two years before he was formally divorced and four years before he married his partner for the last 48 years of his life, Amina Baraka (née Sylvia Robinson), with whom he raised five children and midwifed a movement to liberate the souls of black folk from their "respectable Negro" ideologies. He also had documented in several semiautobiographical works—most notably the play The Toilet (1964), the novella The System of Dante's Hell (1965), and Tales (1967), his sole short-story collection—the complex same-sex desire that manifests in brutally violent encounters that characters respectively named Foots, Ray, and Roi have with teen and young adult peers and older men. Fred Moten's In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Radical Tradition (2003) and José Esteban Muñoz's Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009) have examined these intimacies in Jones's plays at length, and most of the past few decades' leading black gay intellectuals, including E. Patrick Johnson, Robert Reid-Pharr, Ron Simmons, and Darieck Scott, have unpacked the homophobia throughout the aforementioned works, particularly his fiction.1 I focus in this essay, then, on Jones's poetics—both in lineated poems and lyrical prose—and I parse the sonic, metaphysical, sociopolitical, and linguistic choices that Jones crafts into his speakers' mouths and narratives. As I constellate my own interventions in black queer studies, I resurrect the nominalism kweer2, the Middle English term for foreign cantors (primarily of Jewish descent) in the young Christian church, to reanimate the proverbially dead personae of LeRoi Jones. These speakers and characters are all but forgotten, I argue, because they are male survivors of sexual assault who not only challenge the discourse that paints Baraka as an anti-Semitic homophobe but also flout a widely...

No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies ed. by E. Patrick Johnson

No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies ed. by E. Patrick Johnson

Resilient Scholars: Reflections from Black Gay Men on the Doctoral Journey

Using an intersectionality and Black queer studies framework, this article presents reflections from Black gay men who are current doctoral students or recent graduates of higher education, student affairs, and leadership studies programs to provide a deeper understanding of the challenges and successes that they experienced during their doctoral journey. The authors conclude with recommendations for providing comprehensive support for doctoral students who are at the intersection of identities, specifically Black gay men.

Still Here

Still Here

Introduction to Afrocentric Decolonizing Kweer Theory and Epistemology of the Erotic

In this article, the author introduces a framework for conceptualizing, understanding, and working with the existence of same-sex sexual practices among people of African descent—Afrocentric Decolonizing Kweer Theory (adkt)—and an epistemology of the erotic to advance that framework in the field of Black sexology. adkt is situated in the interstitial space between Afrocentric Thought, Black Feminist Thought and Black Queer Studies. On the way to the introduction of adkt, the author critiques imperialist white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy in mainstream Afrocentric discourses on sexuality and challenges Eurocentricity in Black Queer Studies by relying upon African-centered cultural thought.