Black Queer Research Articles

“You're in the Middle of the World”

Abstract Despite Barry Jenkins's pronounced and intentional allusions to the work of Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar Wai, film scholars have generally made little of the pervasive Asian elements in Moonlight (2016). This essay, however, offers a sustained study of the film's aesthetic and political engagement with Wong's cinema. It highlights how the distinct Asian femininity, or ornamentalism, of Days of Being Wild (1990) and In the Mood for Love (2001) are translated into Moonlight and reinforce the film's key themes on Black queerness, especially its ontological implications for Black (non)being and its material implications for Black embodiment. Furthermore, this essay claims that by borrowing from films in which Wong visually explores postcolonial loss—especially Happy Together (1997), about a pair of queer male Hong Kong migrants who work and live in Buenos Aires—Jenkins emphasizes the historic and global magnitude of queer Black diasporic dislocation and humanlessness. Ultimately, this essay outlines how the convergence of Black and Asian forms in Moonlight disrupts white, liberal, humanist scripts on racial, gendered, and sexual formation.

Gay & Gray XI: Somewhere Over the Rainbow - Aging with Pride!

Having previously tackled topics such as LGBTQ military sexual trauma, revisiting aging populations and HIV, and the intersectional experience of black queer older adults, Gay & Gray this year will focus on the transitional process of aging itself. While seniors cope with life changes as they grow older, LGBTQ seniors face specific challenges that may be especially burdensome. Often, older LGBTQ adults “have to make a hard choice at the end of their lives: Go ‘back into the closet’ or accept inferior care and discrimination” (CBC). This predicament embodies “a fear of loss of autonomy, identity, and freedom of sexual expression,” and often results in compromise “in order to feel safe during a period in which they anticipate… being vulnerable and lacking in power” (Wilson, et al.).In this session, we will discuss powerful issues including the threat of isolation while aging, healthcare access, and moving to long-term housing through the lens of gender and sexual minorities. First, we will explore how older LGBTQ adults are often more isolated than their heterosexual counterparts, with higher rates of living alone, fewer sources of family and social supports, and greater stigma among their peers (SAGE “US Army Vet”, Progress Lifeline). We will also consider reasons why LGBTQ adults may be hesitant to disclose their sexual orientation and gender identity to healthcare providers, fearing inadequate care and even outright discrimination. Afterwards, we will discuss how LGBTQ adults’ transitions from independent living into assisted living and nursing homes are further complicated by concerns about experiencing physical and verbal harassment, as more and more LGBTQ individuals fear “being forced back into the closet” and “conceal… their true selves” in order to access services and avoid harassment (Wilson, et al.). Lastly, we will evaluate potential solutions to promote community and enhance access to safe housing for aging LGBTQ individuals.

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.

Black Sexual Minority Men's Experiences in MPowerment Interventions: Implications for HIV Prevention.

Black sexual minority men (BSMM) are disproportionately vulnerable to HIV acquisition; the MPowerment model is one community-based framework for preventing HIV in this population. It focuses on developing a supportive network of peers to promote health messaging, reduce stigma, and improve resilience. While these interventions have demonstrated general success, there are important challenges related to race, sexuality, and internalized stigma. Our study aimed to explore these experiences among BSMM in MPowerment models focused on HIV prevention. We conducted 24 qualitative interviews of BSMM attending HIV prevention-related MPowerment events in the greater D.C. Metropolitan area. In-depth interviews were conducted via phone, and interviews were analyzed using thematic analysis. We identified four themes from the transcript analysis process: Black queer intersectional social support and community, HIV-related information and destigmatization, social status, and sexuality. Within each of these themes, we identified relationships with overall HIV prevention messaging, including barriers to PrEP use. Barriers related to social status were especially prevalent and described as unique to the D.C. metropolitan area. Overall, MPowerment event spaces provide a forum for BSMM to feel safe and supported while gaining important HIV-related knowledge and prevention access. Challenges related to social status and destigmatization of sexuality are important considerations in designing and implementing this model, especially related to PrEP promotion.

Out on the Floor: Exploring the London Lesbian Club Scene of the 1980s and 1990s

ABSTRACT This article sets out to counter dominant depictions of DJs and clubbing that privilege white male DJs and their scenes, and that erase nightclubbing’s Black queer origins. Using queer oral history interviews and engaging with material fragments from the time (playlist notes, flyers, records), I focus on London in the late 20th century, where Black and white lesbian DJs, promoters, and clubbers created their own club scene. The scene’s events and nights were a combination of queer women’s creative cultural activism and the love of music that DJs and dancers shared, away from the surveillance and gaze of the straight world.

Black Gay Men in Graduate Education: A Collaborative Autoethnography of Finding Black Queer Joy

In today’s sociopolitical climate, many marginalized communities face unique challenges and yet triumph in carving a pathway toward happiness and self-acceptance. Among those resilient individuals are Black gay men, who experience the intersectionality of race, gender, and sexuality, creating an array of experiences. This collaborative autoethnography explores the distinct hardship Black gay men face in graduate education while trying to find Black queer joy, particularly at predominantly white institutions (PWIs), where these programs can perpetuate institutional and systemic racism and homophobia. Through interviews, three themes emerged: a sense of belonging, battle fatigue, and finding joy. Elevating the experiences of Black gay men emphasizes the importance of recognizing intersectionality and inclusivity in institutional spaces for a more sustainable future.

Negotiating rhetorics of diversity through performances of propriety: a quare autocritography

ABSTRACT In this essay, the author, a Black queer Mississippian, advances a methodology they term quare autocritography to reflect upon their experiences of precarity, exclusion, and isolation as a graduate student at the University of Dixie. The author particularly focuses on how they use “performances of propriety,” or strategies marginalized people employ to draw on an institution's commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion as the catalyst for radical liberatory politics and institutional change. Within the context of higher education, these performances help to envision and engender new possibilities and thereby function as avenues of survival for marginalized others.

Felt Pleasures

Featuring an array of Black people of a range of skin tones and gender orientations, Janelle Monáe’s “Lipstick Lover” video registers as a celebration of black queerness; it asserts that freedom comes with orienting toward pleasure. In this article, Musser argues that what distinguishes “Lipstick Lover” is the way that it is haunted by the lesbian. Lesbian appears not necessarily as identity, but as a specific orientation toward pleasure and being in the world that emphasizes the tactile and collective. And notably, in contrast to Monáe’s previous explorations of the future, here the lesbian is grounded in the past—1970s Jamaica, to be precise.

The Nose at the Crossroads: An Intersectional Reading of the Pseudo-Vergilian Moretum

summary: This article provides a new interpretation of the anonymous poem Moretum as erotic satire. Mindful of Shelley Haley's invitation to read it through a Black feminist lens, this article turns to recent Black feminist scholarship on pornography to argue that the presence of sex does not automatically negate the agency of Scybale, the African woman described in the poem as Simulus's custos . Further, I review the evidence for Simulus's own identity. Through a combination of Audre Lorde's Black queer lens and Paul Preciado's trans scholarship on the dildo, I further argue that by imagining Simulus as Black, queer, and/or trans, the power imbalance between Simulus and Scybale is greatly reduced. Lastly, I heed Haley's invitation to read Black protagonists of Latin poetry through Yoruba mythology, and turn to Henry Louis Gates Jr. to argue that Simulus's Blackness brings them closest to Esu, the genderqueer trickster god, which in turn helps us identify him with the author themselves.

Queer Césaire

This essay is a response to calls in Black studies in the last decade, by Jafari Allen and others, to excavate Black queer histories and experiences, including in archives where we least expect them. The author offers a queer reading of a foundational work in global Black literature often assumed to be irrelevant to such critical conversations: Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. He puts Césaire’s poem in dialogue with one of the three sketches produced by the Cuban painter Wifredo Lam for the 1943 Cuban translation of the Notebook—a drawing at once surrealist and decidedly queer. Using Lam’s multispecies interpretations as method and guide, the author teases out the few yet remarkable queer fragments that appear in Césaire’s subsequent revisions of the Notebook. What if in addition to an anticolonial Black poet, we also thought of Césaire as a queer poet?

Black Queer Being/Knowing/Feeling: Storytelling of Barriers to Reproductive Healthcare.

Anti-Blackness and heteronormativity are the driving forces that determine access to reproductive healthcare and services in the United States, and the rate of Black birthing-related deaths continue to skyrocket. Still, there is a dearth of literature that includes the reproductive experiences of Black birthing people and their interactions with the healthcare system. This current study builds power with 10 Black Queer birthing people (or Partners) by centering on their gestation-based storytelling within discourse about reproduction. By blending these Partners' self-examination of their lived experiences with gestation with health research, Black feminism, and researcher interpretation of their stories, this study reveals the unparalleled truths of Black Queer reproduction. Six thematic areas within the healthcare system as experienced by Partners are explored. Additionally, through this disruptive approach, this study identifies the lived and material needs that necessitate reproductive justice for all.

“Somewhere listening for my name”: Black Queer Kinship and the Poetry of the HIV/AIDS Pandemic

Abstract This essay is about poetry, publication, and intergenerational caretaking in the context of a mass death event—the HIV/AIDS pandemic. It reads the work of contemporary Black, queer American poets Danez Smith, Jericho Brown, and Pamela Sneed for their intertextual and interpersonal engagement with queer and of-color literary texts and voices (in particular, those of Essex Hemphill, Melvin Dixon, and Donald Woods) under threat of erasure by HIV/AIDS and its effects and aftermaths. In doing so, it argues that Smith, Brown, and Sneed enact in their writing a political, spiritual, and historical project of recuperation and republication, taking the term “republishing” to encompass varying forms of print, performance, allusion, thematic evocation, formal echoes, and citation. In examining the complex, varied, and cross-temporal processes of poetic and scholarly caretaking and kinship—and of publication, “depublication,” and republication—this essay shows that the imprinting of HIV/AIDS into countercanonical poetry offers a crucial, ongoing, and collective counterweight to prevailing assumptions and stereotypes about the virus and the disease it causes, as well as creating and sustaining alternative sites of memory, mourning, and meaning making.The implications of the kind of republishing that Smith, Brown, and Sneed gesture toward—this way of remembering and reminding others of lost texts and writers—are manifold, if complex and unavoidably constrained, and include new readerships; the preservation of stories, legacies, and knowledge; and the mitigation of Black queer literary losses as a result of HIV/AIDS.

Leisure as black survival: ballroom, vogue, and black queer and trans+ embodied activism in Canada

ABSTRACT Within Canadian leisure spaces anti-Black racism can make survival difficult, not least for those who identify as two-spirit lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer and trans+ (QT+). The Black QT+ Ballroom scene in Canada is a leisure practice that began in Toronto within groups of chosen families called ‘houses’ that offer participants a physical and social place of love, comfort, refuge, leisure, physical activity, fashion, dance, music and art. The events that bring these artistic and embodied skills to light are referred to as ‘balls’ in which participants gather to socialize and compete, showcasing their dance skills, runway walking/moving, fiercest outfits, and ability to tap into beautiful parts of their body, gender, sexuality, and race. This article describes Black QT+ ballroom and details how expansive and affirming bodily worlds created in and through ballroom afford true self-expressions and full vibrant lives. We answer the question: why is ballroom important to Black QT+ survival?

Remembering Marielle Franco: Haunting online presence and the memorialization of resistance on social media

Social media has transformed how we construct collective memory, with increased opportunities for dispersed individuals and groups to participate in collective remembrance. With the ever-changing nature of social media practices, the field of critical memory studies begs for more research on the role of digital media in memory construction. Based on a critical rhetorical analysis of YouTube and Instagram archives, I examine how social media is used to remember Marielle Franco, a Brazilian black queer city councilwoman killed in 2018 by former police officers. Specifically, I argue that two communication strategies – mediating a resistant specter and mediating something-to-be-done – are articulated on social media in the construction of a haunting online presence of Marielle. I further suggest that this digital memorialization is consequential for how Brazil remembers the racial, gendered, and social injustices that inform Brazil’s past, present, and possible future. The analysis contributes to previous literature on cultural memory by articulating the notion of haunting online presence as a heuristic tool to theorize about public mourning, digital memory, and activism.

“I Wanna be Bad”: Black Joy and Deviant Caretaking

The disciplining technologies of schooling overshadow Black women educators’ movement beyond the classroom and shape the logics of spaces meant to encourage their joy and pleasure. A group of Black teachers’ experience negotiating delight while at a strip club inspired the writing of this article. Black queer political theory and Black feminism re-territorialize this moment as both a signifier of Black educators’ erotic embodiment of Black Joy as well as their discursively produced subjectivities as careworkers within the disciplinary arm of schooling. Black Joy is a slippery concept subject to the perniciousness of antiBlack heteropatriarchal capitalism. As a result, conversations about Black Joy in education must include Black educators’ erotic embodiment to confront the traps of capitalism and assimilation that conflate Black Joy with the maintenance of the status quo. Ultimately, Black women educators can practice what I call deviant caretaking to embody new sites and practices of rebellion.

Sexual/Orientation: Navigating the Asylum System as a Queer Black Man in Edafe Okporo’s Asylum (2022)

Unable to live in his homeland of Nigeria because of his sexuality, Edafe Okporo fled to America. Seeking asylum in the so-called Land of the Free, however, proved harder than he expected. In his memoir and manifesto Asylum, Okporo traces his search for refuge from Nigeria to New York City.The result is a harrowing tale of loss, detailing Okporo’s tiresome fight to find refuge from persecution. Recent ethnographic studies have explored the experiences of queer refugees, specifically how queer community groups have supported and excluded queer refugees in asylum, but also how the safety of queer refugees within the asylum system is extremely precarious. Asylum, however, provides a rare insight into an asylum system from a queer refugee’s perspective. The narrative also offers an in-depth exploration into the often- hidden parts of the asylum process, such as his initial moments of exile and life in detention in the United States.

Erotic senses: Powering Brazilian Black queer existence in gynecological spaces.

This paper explores how Brazilian Black queer women's sensorial knowing expresses the ways that anti-Blackness and anti-queerness are experienced within Brazilian gynecological spaces. I show how Black queer forms of sensory representations signal the intimacy of occupying place and time in power relations. What does it mean to feel, touch, and see the mechanisms of prejudice and institutional power? What are the sounds and vibrations of racism and heteronormativity in medicine? What do the senses tell us about Black queer bodies' orientations and adverse reactions within those spaces? I engage the senses to understand how sensorial knowledge is keenly embedded in the evidence and informs how Black queer life is shaped within the quotidian. I discuss how sensorial experiences for the critical possibilities of conceptualizing sensoriality and social meanings of medical space and place and in relation to the material world of gynecology and its technologies.

Minority stressors and psychological correlates of sexual distress among Black queer and heterosexual women

Many women experience distress related to their sexual functioning. In fact, sexual distress is often the first sign of sexual functioning disorders. Yet, little is known about Black women’s experiences of sexual distress. The purpose of this study is to explore the correlation between psychological factors (distress, post-traumatic stress disorder, perceived stress, and financial worry), minority stressors (superwoman schema and sexual objectification), and sexual distress among Black queer and heterosexual women. A cross-sectional survey was administered to 448 Black women aged 19–67, recruited via social media and snowball sampling. The data was analyzed using bivariate correlations to explore the differences between Black queer women and Black heterosexual women. The findings of this study showed significant differences in sexual distress scores between Black heterosexual and queer women. However, there were significant differences in which factors were correlated with sexual distress between these two groups. Implications for culturally responsive treatments for sexual distress are included.

Comparative analysis of black queer feminist isiXhosa and English poetry

Black queer feminist literature remains under-researched. This reflects the societal marginalisation of black queer authors in South Africa. Our article offers a comparative analysis of the representation of black queer women by black queer and cisgender authors in selected isiXhosa and English poetry. The poems selected are from Unam Wena (2021) by Mthunzikazi Mbungwana and red cotton (2018) by vangile gantsho. Firstly, we explore how queer feminism is captured from a Xhosa perspective. Secondly, we explore how English is used to expose readers to black queerness, and, thirdly, we question how literary scholarship influences or limits black queer feminist literature and the functionality of queer feminist poetry as representations of black women. Discourse theory is used to examine how authors of the selected poetry construct knowledge about black queerness from a feminist perspective and shape how people understand it. In this article we adopt a narrative enquiry within the constructionism paradigm with qualitative textual analysis. Our analysis of the poetry reveals that, although the selected poets use two different languages, the same protest voice is foregrounded, with observable differences being primarily technical-namely how form, sound, and structure are employed to set the tone and mood in the issues addressed.

Divine Intimacies

This article foregrounds the complex self-making of Black Jamaican women living with HIV to explore the political and religious significance of their queer intimacies. Jolly argues that women's embodied pleasures and spiritual consciousness present a form of divine intimacy that exposes the complex relationship between queer studies, Black religious thought, and the sexual desires of Black queers in general, and Black queer women in particular. Furthermore, she asserts that the embodied knowledge of queer HIV-positive Black Caribbean women shifts the geography of reason around female sexuality and Blackness in studies of queerness and religion. This article considers how lived experiences of religion play a central role in the construction of personhood and how Black queer women's spirituality requires resisting denominational assumptions and distinctions between the sacred and secular that have no salience in their interpretations of everyday life. HIV-positive Jamaican women have revealed the ways women's spirituality thrives outside the dichotomy of “indecent” subject and “redeemed” victim and beyond the grips of institutionalized sexism, misogynoir, and homophobia within and beyond the church.