Position Paragraphs
In the spirit of open dialogue, participants were asked to submit Position Paragraphs. These position paragraphs engage the core themes in the panel descriptions, and prompt moderators and panelists to put forth their thoughts and provocations as the basis for the panel discussions.
Click on each panel to jump to the position paragraphs.
Friday, April 4th:
Representing the Race: Queer Images of Blackness
Disciplinary Tensions: Black Studies and Queer Studies
How to Teach the Unspeakable: Race, Queer Studies & Pedagogy
Saturday, April 5th:
Policing Black Bodies: Queer Studies, Public Policy, and The Law
Black Queer South: Regionalism & Transnational Flows
Sunday, April 6th:
Representing the Race: Queer Images of Blackness
This panel focuses on the ways in which the black (homo)sexual body is represented through the mediums of film, theater, and/or live performance, engaging the politics and possibilities of these representations.
Amber Musser
In many ways we are in a fascinating moment vis-à-vis Black queer representation. Not only are we are seeing the stories of many different types of queer people on television and film, but these representations often possess cultural cachet. Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion can sing about wet-ass pussies, Janelle Monae can describe her lipstick lover, and Doechii can pose in jockstraps and sweater vests. While we might celebrate these forms of representation, the abundance of these offerings also allows us to get into other questions about Black queer representation beyond that of presence, absence, or scarcity. By this, I mean we can begin to explore those invocations of Black queerness that might be more opaque and which do not necessarily cater to commercial needs or appetites (or do so differently). Here, I am thinking about the work of artists like King Cobra or Tiona McClodden who are what I would describe as performance-adjacent in that they both produce installations that center Black queerness, but which do not necessarily show Black people. I wouldn’t exactly say that this happens in the absence of bodies, but that the viewer/ visitor supplies the body while these artists (and their artwork) induce the queer sensations. Cobra’s silicon body parts, for example, work through the horror of Black objectification and the desire for retribution and wields black queerness and pleasure as something that cannot be contained by the white male gaze. McClodden’s installations, by contrast, invites spectators into rituals of spirituality, community, and leather described in Black gay male literature from 1980s. I bring both artists into this conversation because I think they add important insight into discussions about what kinds of queerness gain visibility, how desire can be felt even when it is not explicitly made visible, and different ways of working with Black queerness.
La Marr Jurelle Bruce
1. Does black queer representation require a “black (homo)sexual body” at all? If so, must that body be visibly black and actively (homo)sexual to register as black queer representation? I respect the uses of representation—with its potential affordances of recognition, inclusion, and affirmation in liberal public spheres—but I also want to think beyond representation-as-visibly-embodied-presence. I wonder: How do black queer aesthetics (shout-out to Charles Nero), black queer idioms, black queer methods, black queer affects, and black queer sensibilities inflect myriad cultural forms. . . even when a “black (homo)sexual body” is absent?
Consider, for example, Beyonce’s “Formation” video. It’s punctuated by the utterances of two black queer New Orleanians. Messy Mya’s posthumous voice opens the song and Big Freedia’s voice speaks a sort of bridge—but neither appears as an embodied “black (homo)sexual” representation (representative?) in the video. How do we sort such (non)appearances within the field of black queer representation? How do these black queer figures orient the video—though neither appears, in the flesh, to join the “ladies” as they “get in formation”? Consider, also, rock and roll progenitor Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Her virtuosic guitar riffs and licks are the opening salvo of rock music. . . even as her black queer femme body is mostly omitted from rock’s iconographies. How might her queer clutch of that electric guitar be said to (re)calibrate the whole genre?
It seems to me that everything from Civil Rights to popular slang, from fashion trends to Black Power, from hip hop music to Gay Liberation surges with black queer inflections. . . even when black queer bodies are unseen and/or absented. Sometimes the absence of such bodies is a symptom of antiqueer/antiblack erasure. Sometimes such absence is proof of the marvelously shapeshifting quality of black queerness, its power to exceed specific bodies and permeate the entire universe. Sometimes both are true at once.
2. We've witnessed a proliferation of black queer representation-as-visibly-embodied-presence in the last decade: From Zaya Wade to Lil Nas X, from Pose to Rustin, from Janelle Monae in Wondaland to Lori Lightfoot in Chicagoland, from Moonlight to Renaissance, from Cynthia Erivo and Lena Waithe’s heart emojis to Niecy Nash and Jessica Betts on the cover of Essence, all while Don Lemon and TS Madison commentate. While these developments warrant attention, I’m at least as interested in black queer redaction (shout-out to Christina Sharpe), black queer opacity (shout-out to Édouard Glissant), black queer dissemblance (shout-out to Darlene Clarke Hine), black queer ambiguity, black queer elision, and black queer evasion as praxes beyond representation-as-embodied-visibility. Thus I wonder: How do we engage black queer forms that withhold or evade representation? And what is the efficacy of evading representation? I’m thinking, for instance, of Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight. The film refuses to represent sex between Black and Kevin when they rendezvous in its final frames. I recall feeling like the dark screen of the closing credits redacted a love scene that I longed to see. But maybe that withholding, that absence, activated a power and poignancy in excess of representation.
p.s. When we step to podiums to deliver talks or rise before classrooms to lead discussions, we are doing "live performance" and we are engaged in the project of representation. How might we mobilize our own representational labor toward liberation
Disciplinary Tensions: Black Studies and Queer Studies
This panel revisits the ways in which Black Studies has historically elided issues of (homo)sexuality and/or how Queer Studies has elided issues of racism and race and explores the trajectories of “black queer studies” or “black gay studies” as a critical intervention of both disciplines. The panelists examine if such interventions have signaled the inclusiveness they have purported and offer future articulations of “black queer studies” within the context of our contemporary moment.
Michelle Wright
As the prompt indicates, over two decades of Black Queer Studies has most certainly revolutionized thinking on Blackness, gender and sexuality, but it has not radically changed the composition of those two disciplines that seem most intimately related to it: African American or Black Studies, and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Yet, in a strange, insistent way we are not the love child of these two fields. Race, in this case Blackness, is assumed to be a biological collective created and prolonged by heterosexual reproduction, and thus threatened by queerness. Gender and sexuality, at least in the West, are assumed to be centered in whiteness if not also heterosexuality. In both cases, these two disciplines choose hierarchies to keep Black Queerness at worst non-existent, at best marginalized. African American Studies/Black Studies uses the logic of Black heteropatriarchy to implicitly determine us as less authentically Black, thus almost erasing our presence in its survey courses, documentaries, reference guides, and rhetoric. WGSS uses racial hierarchies, where only whiteness can be trusted to be truly objective and universal in its theorizations, to relegate us to their margins in much the same way. We become racialized queerness, and they reify themselves as the (white) norm. But Black Queer Studies simply isn’t a subset of African American Studies and/or WGSS anyway. Perhaps most excitingly, we have no hierarchy to protect, and can thus allow knowledge to be a dynamic that troubles, exposes, expands and transforms every time it achieves greater poignancy through yet more connections. We can be free of many of the heavy, burdensome legacies Enlightenment through has bequeathed to those who work on heterosexual racial identities and white queer and gendered identities by actively rejecting the notion of discrete boundaries, and actively embracing the desire to understand this world rather than dictate to it. If it is our birthright to unsettle and trouble notions of purity and authenticity, then it is also on us to continue to seek out more connections and intersections across and beyond the academy.
Jeffrey McCune
How to Begin this Black|Queer Sentence: Accepting an Ontology of Disobedience
In the early field of Black Studies, queerness or (homo) sexuality was an unthought; and, within the early field of sexuality/queer studies, black queerness was an afterthought. Responding to the lacunae, prompted a sort of incorporative logic, which draws out a framework for thinking about black queer/gay life in contradistinction, or relation to, black heterosexuality and white gayness. Though early Black Queer Studies’ scholars definitely drew out unique and particular intersectional realities of Black LGBT folk—and arrived at critical and essential theorizations of black queer life— we often forged parallel discourses, which prioritized certain epistemological frameworks for thinking through black queer life broadly. For example, the central family discourse which pervaded Black Studies was appropriated into Black Queer Studies as an alternative naming of kinship (“family”). Rather than reading such structures on their own black queer terms, we were pressed to read these constructs within/against nuclear structures—thus, eliding the porous, multi-identity, non-binary, even sexual dimensions of our familial and cultural arrangements. Drawing from Disobedient Reading (my forthcoming book), this canonical reading produced a genealogical conundrum—wherein the production of the archive pretends that black queer life was a clean parallel to black heterosexual, all the while what fell out of any of our Black queer gender-sexual worlds was much more dynamic and disobedient. I do not think this analytical tendency materially played out in the everyday lives of Black LGBT folks, but it was prominent in the academic discourse which relied heavily on certain relational modes of analysis or incorporative logics, rooted often in a version of Black Studies that still had disciplinary roots (English, sociology, anthropology, etc.). The rootedness in disciplines also facilitated an investment in certain questions and topics of whatever historic moment, often injecting black queer constructs, concerns, or thoughts as addendums or alternatives to ongoing conversations within normative contexts and disciplines. Here, I want to offer what I believe—then and now—may have been needed to land us in a Black Queer Studies that truly begins with indecipherable and inseparable black|queer; a way of thinking which approaches all matter with an understanding that Black Queer thought is how we as black queers come to any subject or object. Too often, we have been trained in families, communities, and disciplines—to pretend that we weren’t always “quaring” what was given in front of us—acting as if
disobedience was not our ontological frame.
1. What is gained if we legitimate our black queer disobedience lens, as other ways of knowing queer and black life—to the point that the “nonsensical” is the best archive of our LGBT lives?
2. How do we build Department of Black Studies, which anchor Black Queer Studies as both ethical and intellectual frames for the department, without feeling like we are duplicating WGSS?
Olivia Polk
In the version of this panel convened in 2000, Wahneema Lubiano argued that Black studies had foreclosed its epistemic possibilities by over-relying on empirical evidence and doctrinaire methods oriented to research in sociology and public policy in order to secure "disciplinary validation" from the university. Speaking from a moment where she and others were trying to interrupt the hegemonic, politically neutralizing project of neoliberal multiculturalism in favor of a vision of what elsewhere she called "radical multiculturalism," Lubiano said Black queer studies should function as "a space in which one might experience freedom in the form of pedagogical and epistemological pleasure" (Woodard, 2000). Thinking 25 years hence, I wonder how we might carry forward Lubiano's vision for the labors of Black queer studies when the neoliberal university is apparently transforming into an authoritarian university? For me, "disciplinarity" no longer conjures the debates over total fidelity to archival sources, New Criticism, or "subjectless critique." Instead, the concept evokes institutions' violent and very much embodied expressions of regulatory power toward students and faculty in response to protests to end complicity in genocide. Disciplinary power now seems to most relevantly described as the use of counter-insurgency tactics with military-grade surveillance technologies by campus police and administrators, and the federal government’s attempts to coerce research initiatives to quite literally erase minoritarian subjects from scientific knowledge and the curricula of the humanities by withholding public funds (Chatelle 2024). As we consider the circumstances that shape what's at stake in discussing “disciplinarity” now, I feel we've been successful at shaping a trajectory for Black queer studies that has enabled us and our students to know that "we can be whatever we want to be," and to understand that possibility of freedom as a material call to action, a responsibility to the world (Tourmaline 2020). How do we imagine that ethical gesture-- where we labor to create pedagogical and epistemological pleasure for ourselves and others-- has to adapt itself under conditions of punitive regard from our institutions, as opposed to the kind of will to incorporation that my generation of scholars have so far been most familiar with? (WC 350)
How to Teach the Unspeakable: Race, Queer Studies & Pedagogy
This panel asks what is at stake when black queer pedagogy is institutionalized in the academy, especially at a time when the state has questioned the legitimacy of teaching sexuality as a category of intellectual inquiry. How do teachers and students navigate issues of power inside and outside the black queer studies classroom?
Bryant Keith Alexander
What does it mean to engage "Black queer pedagogy"? This is a question that verges on the intersections of blackness/queerness (Black queerness) and questions of what to teach, how to teach, and why to teach—through Black queerness. Definitions are needed that establish technologies of knowing and doing that are undergirded by principles of “quare studies” and the ethics of emerging critical and emancipatory pedagogies. The times in which we are living demand that we wear these definitional frames of practice and personal importance as shields and weapons of defense. To both teach the unspeakable and to be full live in time of trouble and challenge—which is the everyday.
Questions/Quar(ies)
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In light of the times in which we live-in—Can we further construct, characterize, and communalize Black queerness as a performance of resistance against the regimes of the new-normal? Hence reenacting and revisiting our pedagogies of crossing in/as pedagogies of resistance in the academy?
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Navigating issues of power inside and outside the black queer studies classroom is an on-going/everyday performance of survival. How does this current moment further demand a radical activism of being black and queer?
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What are the roadmaps to navigating black queerness in the classroom/in the academy?
Keith Clark
Given this unutterably distressing, dis-ease-inducing moment, the stakes involved regarding the “institutionalization of black queer pedagogy” are astronomical. One’s own professional/institutional positionality—tenured/untenured; Full Professor/Associate Professor; Associate Professor/Assistant Professor—provides even greater layers of complexity and makes the issue an even more vexing one. While I’m pleased to say that, since presenting at the inaugural BQSC, I’ve taught “African American LGBTQ Authors” three times, I’m saddened to admit that three years after offering the initial section, I now wrestle with whether I’d feel empowered—institutionally, personally—to teach such a course in 2025 here in the cradle of the Confederacy, with the state’s political apparatuses relentlessly promulgating anti-____ness (in a nod to Walker’s decision to insert a blank space, to visually signal Miss Celie’s resistance in refusing to inscribe her abuser’s unspeakable name). The State (locally, nationally) has gone beyond “questioning the legitimacy of teaching sexuality as a category of intellectual inquiry”: it is now openly and rabidly questioning the very ontological “legitimacy” of Black queer people—those of us whom Black SGL historian Michael Henry Adams deemed a “double negative” in America. While self-back-patingly “teaching truth to power” as my own form of talking b(l)ack, this latest paroxysm of diversity-phobia—not new, albeit perhaps startling in its undistilled venomousness—now aims to stamp out any and all forms of difference, anything and anybody not Anglocentric, Androcentric, heterocentric, cisgendercentric. Still, while I hesitantly admit that the comparable safety of teaching “Major African American Authors” might be an appealing if craven response to the fusillade of weapons formed against us, I ultimately am left with what Essex Hemphill might have deemed the “ass-splitting truth” in the form of a rhetorical query moderator Bryant Keith Alexander posed in his essay from the published collection of papers from the inaugural conference: As a black gay man, “How can I not speak the unspeakable?”—and, concomitantly, not persist in teaching the unspeakable no matter how unspeakably menacing this time and this place.
I’d pose the following questions:
● How would those of us who’re tenured (also given further hierarchical distinctions/privileges such as full vs. associate) advise probationary faculty who’re grappling with whether to risk teaching the still unspeakable, given the myriad considerations involved (e.g., geographic location, private vs. public institution). It’s certainly one thing to teach at an institution in New York or Illinois, quite another in Arkansas or Virginia.
● How do we continue bell hooks’ critical imperative to teach transgressively, when the powers of state—politicians, university/college boards of governors/visitors—are literally surveilling, proscribing, and criminalizing websites and course syllabi (I’m thinking, for instance, of state statutes prohibiting the
teaching of the “1619 Project”)?
Beverly Guy
Sheftall
Having spent my entire academic life at HBCUs, I am interested in exploring/reflecting upon the particular challenges of teaching Black queer studies in HBCU classrooms. I am also wanting us to explore why Queer Studies has been so absent from HBCU curricula, even in African American Studies classroom spaces.
Questions/Quar(ies):
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What would it take to institutionalize BQS at HBCUs?
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What strategies have I found useful from my experiences at Spelman’s Women’s Research and Resource Center over many decades of struggle?
Reginald Blockett
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Black queer pedagogy carries a radical charge. It pushes the boundaries of teaching and learning as it emerges from resistance, from the lived experiences of those whose identities disrupt normative structures of race, gender, and sexuality. Institutionalizing this pedagogy in the academy presents both an opportunity and a risk. On one hand, it provides a space for Black queer knowledge production to thrive, equipping students and teachers with intellectual tools to interrogate power and resist hegemonic frameworks. On the other, institutionalization can lead to domestication, where radical Black queer critique & analysis is absorbed into neoliberal multiculturalism, stripped of its political urgency. At a time when the state actively questions the legitimacy of sexuality as an intellectual category—through book bans, anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, and attacks on critical race theory and intersectionality—what does it mean to teach Black queer studies in spaces that are structurally hostile to its very existence? How do we resist the depoliticization of Black queer knowledge within institutions that demand legibility on their terms?
Beyond the classroom, power is navigated through networks of solidarity and subversion. Drawing from the work of scholars like Lance McCready, Mitsunori Misawa, José M. Aguilar-Hernández, and Sharon Patricia Holland, I hope to discuss how Black queer pedagogy can remain accountable to the communities from which it emerges. I also want to explore how students and educators create counterpublics—through community-based learning, digital activism, or underground reading groups—to resist the academy’s constraints. An example I will lift in this discussion is the work of influencer, advocate, and content curator, RaeShanda Lias. Best known for her comical and often satirical videos shared on her social media platforms using the catchphrase “lets check the board”, RaeShanda undoubtedly employs a queer of color analysis as she teaches everyday folks valuable lessons through the lens of a self-identified black queer woman from the US south. Her content resists status quo imaginaries by offering a critique of social and cultural norms that often undermine Black queer and trans sensibilities. With RaeShanda’s lessons in my head, I question: if institutionalization is inevitable, how can we strategically leverage the academy while ensuring that Black queer pedagogy remains a site of radical possibility rather than assimilation?
Policing Black Bodies: Queer Studies, Public Policy, and The Law
This panel examines the intersections between queer studies and public policy/ law, with a focus on policies that directly impact gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people of color. The panelists will address queer political organizing and reflect on how issues of poverty, discrimination, homelessness, and access to healthcare affect black LGBTQ communities.
Mel Michelle Lewis
As the planet continues to warm, climate emergencies are becoming more frequent; environmental hazards are increasing exponentially, while supreme court rulings and executive orders seek to rollback policy gains. The NAACP and Clean Air Task Force report found that “Black people are 75% more likely to live near oil and gas refineries, and Black Americans face higher risks of premature death from power plant pollution.” An analysis of EPA data in the report confirms there is unequal access to safe drinking water, based most strongly on race. Climate data also indicates that Black communities are about twice as likely as other communities in the Southeast to experience a hurricane. The Center for American Progress reports that “LGBTQ+ people have long been subject to a disproportionate burden of pollution compared with cisgender heterosexual people—due to discriminatory housing policies, ‘heteronormative NIMBYism,’ or the exclusion of LGBTQ+ spaces in certain communities, and higher poverty rates.” Studies have also found that lack of legal recognition of LGBTQI+ families by FEMA and the prevalence of discriminatory practices in faith-based disaster relief has led to unequal distribution of resources. Although environmental justice research is limited regarding the specific impacts on QTPOC+ populations, an intersectional analysis of existing studies does suggest systemic discrimination results in:
1) Higher rates of exposure to environmental hazards, such as disproportionate toxic pollution burdens and lack of access to clean water
2) Heightened vulnerability in climate emergencies for unsheltered populations and those with housing vulnerable to flood or damage
3) Lack of access to emergency response relief from faith-based organizations who may legally refuse services and federal agencies who may require identification or other documentation
4) Worsened physical and mental health outcomes following these hazards and mergencies due to systemic displacement, lack of legal recognition for families and individual gender identities, and lack of access to medical care
How can Black Queer Studies amplify the ways in which poverty, discrimination, homelessness, and lack of access to healthcare exacerbate climate harms and address scholarship and policy gaps that have ignored the nexus of environmental and QTPOC+ justice? (Word Count: 344)
Black Queer Digitality
The digital is often perceived as both a space for Black queer community building, bypassing the gatekeeping mechanisms that have limited Black queer expression, but also as a site where Black queer communities can be targeted, exploited and even replaced by AI and avatars. This panel addresses Black queer investment in digital and virtual spaces, the potentials of those spaces to create new modes of connection, collaboration, and cultural citizenship, but also the anxieties and risks posed by these same participatory opportunities.
Shaka McGlotten
Black Magicks: Digital Conjure in the Algorithmic Age
Digital conjure practices emerge from long histories of extraction and violence—from the algorithmic logics of the slave ship's ledger to the Kenyan content moderators paid $2 an hour to scrub AI chatbots of toxicity. Yet Black subjects have also consistently transformed containment technologies into tools for connection and survival. Drawing on Black diasporic spiritual and resistance traditions, from Obeah to the counter-surveillance practices of the Black Panthers, my current work on what I call “the computational hex” explores, among other things, the uncanny convergences between Black conjure and digital culture. Through experimental encounters with AI and my Black queer students' speculative ethnographies in a course called “Black Futures,” I examine how algorithmic technologies enable new forms of world-building while always being possessed of the histories of violence and extraction characteristic of Western technoscience. Consider the "Hydronoir"—hybrid descendants of slaves thrown overboard during the Middle Passage who merged with deep-sea creatures, imagined by one of my students as a way to think Black survival through the figure of the Black mermaid. Or, in other contexts, the ways Black queer content creators navigate platform capitalism's demands for authenticity while developing innovative strategies for evading algorithmic censorship. These practices of digital conjure suggest ways of engaging with AI and algorithms not merely as tools of surveillance and control but as potential spaces for reworking what Katherine McKittrick calls "the mathematics of Black life." Yet they also raise critical questions: What happens when AI tries to simulate Black queer sociality? How do we distinguish between digital marronage and platform capture? What kinds of spells might we need to cast—or break—in our algorithmic ordinary?
Key examples I'll discuss:
· My experiments using AI image generators to create "twinks," revealing how queerness and race are encoded and policed in these systems
· Student projects imagining Black queer digital futures through the lens of marronage and mutation
Provocation: Rather than asking whether digital spaces are "good" or "bad" for Black queer life, how might we understand them as sites of contemporary conjure—spaces where the boundaries between liberation and capture, authenticity and simulation, community and commodity are being negotiated through practices of technological cunning that echo much older traditions of Black Atlantic spiritual and political resistance?
Moya Bailey
When Black queer digital content creators were finally able to monetize their work, it seemed a beautiful thing. With major news outlets and white profiteers stealing their IP, the need for those very demure, very mindful digital artists to get some coin from setting the tone for the culture made sense. But the old adage “Everything in moderation” remains true; the viability of generating enough to live on is only feasible for a chosen few. Even with follower counts on fleek, backlash and burnout abounds. How can the monetizing of what used to be just for fun, for friends, family, and feels, feed our collective liberation? The individualism and atomization of the digital terrain into influencers and the influenced has fundamentally shifted what was a vibrant ecosystem of gloriously good and terrible content into a cesspool of derivative dribble designed to drive up likes and views. The oversaturation of our digital diaspora with hot takes and take downs contributes to a technological forgetting that thwarts collective organizing. My hope is that we hop back into a dance with the digital that includes some steps from the analog and has us reimagine a digital future that is less dependent on content for cash and more collaboration for community. I see the reintegration of technologies past, as a way forward and like we do, it has already begun. The spread of new line dances, Black queer folks exploration of Red Note, Southern snow days, and more are just a few examples of the possibilities that an integrated digital and analog life makes possible. I want to play with and imagine the southern sensibilities of a digital landscape that knows to bring something to the function but also doesn’t overextend its welcome, offers to help clean up, knowing they won’t be asked. I am thinking about southern hospitality for the world we want and boots on the ground for the digital futures we desire.
Legacy Russell
We are imperfect, flawed, and incomplete through and beyond our screens. The idea of being “whole” is a mythology. The thing that has become a paradoxical twist in our internetted selves is that for an entire generation of individuals who have come of age in the age of the digital, many of us have transformed and built community there as a means of allowing ourselves to be complicated and rhizomatic. The paradox, then, is that there is a whole version of social media and digital being and becoming that is fixated on being fixed—as in, creating the representation of a fully realized individual, rather than seeking to achieve a representation of self that is subject to change and, in fact, encourages it. This is why when celebrities and influencers blunder and let the mask slip the world is always ready to perform outrage; online in a certain type of algorithm the politics of being human have to be scrubbed clean of any trace of human nature whatsoever in order to be viable “content”.
We’re given a choice, then, of what kind of people we want to “be” online, and also what type of internet trace and engagement therein we want to have. For me, the choice I make is that being online is the place where historically I’ve been able to be open, joyful, enraged, devastated, tender, intimate, and everything in-between and beyond, a great relief for a hypervisible Black queer femme laboring in the arts who is constantly being held to the brutal standards of the same respectability politics I was raised to shuck and have spent a lifetime refusing. This means that cyberspace—and I make intentional use of this word, in all of its historical, speculative, utopic, imaginary, grinding and extravagant connotations as it has arced over time—has been a place that has for me, as with many folx, given me a place to curl up and dream. This is not a romantic notion, it is a real way of being and surviving, a mechanism of participation that keeps
one whole by allowing one to live a private life, albeit in public space.
Growing up it wasn’t possible for me to have the kind of community I needed solely by relying on that which lived beyond the screen; I imagine many people across ages, backgrounds, and localities can still say the same. It’s for this reason that I always smile when I meet someone who shakes my hand and gives me the professional nod, who then later follows me on social media and I learn has been thinking radical thoughts or reading gorgeous things but never would have spoken those delights aloud in our first encounter. Some might call this a splitting of self, but I would, indeed, describe this as a beckoning. The flattened self that capitalism asks us to enact not only to ourselves but to others—a way of existing that strips us of the right to think, feel, speak, move with the full freedoms that might best empower us—is a dead self. So to push oneself and one another to really journey and be gooey and monstrous and decadent and outrageous in the moments where that feels true and honest, slimming the boundary between the external and internal, the masked and unmasked, this is truly what being alive is, what it means to really live and to do it holistically.
I’ll never forget the moment that occurred in the global tumult and transformation of 2020 during an institutional meeting having a colleague call me afterward and say to me, “You look so sad.” This moment—certainly not unique to me as across the state, country, world, there were many people who were experiencing the exact same types of uninvited “feedback” from those inside and outside of their places of employment—was a special moment still because it was a searing reminder that I could be seen and that my feelings were legible. Yes, indeed, I was sad. I was heartbroken, in fact, aching for all I was living, for all that every person alongside me was living, for all those who had lost their lives and no longer could march with us. While the remark itself grated on me in a moment of being laid bare, vulnerable, it also rung and rattled inside of me because it was a reminder that my showing of grief in a moment that demanded it, and the readership of that grief that triggered discomfort in others, was not a failure on my part, it was a failure of a culture that expected me and so many others to keep carrying the impossible and suffocating weight of keeping up appearances. My sadness was a violation of a cultural determination toward fixity; it was a revelation that I am blurred and runny and glittering—in-progress and in transformation in my becoming.
In a period where the line between fiction and reality continues to constantly be renegotiated, transgressed, and trespassed, the digital landscape of the future has to keep pushing itself to make space for realness. The fact that there are people online who I’ve never met in physical space but still I rely on dearly as critical to my community where I can be weird and wild and have that again be exactly right speaks to the importance of cultivating digital space that specifically allows for that to be possible. I want an internet that lets us get lost and then lights the way again; I want an internet that makes equitable access to information and knowledge; I want an internet that has intersections and overlaps of oppositional positions that still engages with gentleness, care, rigor, and criticality; I want an internet that doesn’t seek constant consensus but rather seeks collectivity, a commitment to action, a commitment to wrestling with ideas and growing through that imagination. Over decades now seeing icons, idols, and beloved peers whom I admire make and remake, world and reworld themselves and the galaxies that surround them has been instructive to me—as a kid, as a teen, and now even as an adult. What we know is this: the shifts never end, we keep shedding and
discovering new skins. In beckoning, we welcome the next generation into the good trouble necessary for centering the material of cyberspace as a site of generative performativity, to fantasize about how to do living and growing better and differently, rather than to front and fake a fixity that, in its harm, fails first.
Brian A. Horton
Black queer culture is the blueprint. Period. Dot. Full stop. Yes, I know I am stating the obvious but it needs to be said, repeated, and said again until the message becomes a mantra. I am reminded of this fact every time I open my phone to doom scroll or crash out because I cannot keep up with the current state of the world. My leisurely tumbles down the virtual rabbit hole of Reels and TikToks do not last too long before I hit trending sounds laced with AAVE, collide into ballroom lingo (a casual “Feeling P*ssy.” Or “Serving C**t” captioning an otherwise basic OOTD sele ), or crash into heated debates in the comments about whether or not the Drag Race fandom truly understands the meaning of “trade.” In the virtual boom and bust cycles of social mediascapes, the volatility of trends pivots on the simultaneous abundance of Black queer culture and the alienation of Black queer people. By abundance I am suggesting that our culture is everywhere on social media. It is in trending sounds, dances, images, aesthetics, and not so subtle nods to Black queer life. Abundance here also gestures to our expansive creativity and resilience—perhaps a paradigmatic example of what scholars have called techne and elan vital. However, that abundance is also constrained by the alienation of Black queer people and our labors from the very viral cultures that we have produced. This paradox between Black queerness being both everywhere and nowhere in digital spaces is perhaps the starting point for Black queer theories of social media. Our culture is captivating: it is enchanting; it holds attention; it IS the moment. And yet we are also captive: simultaneously mobilized and stagnated through forms of representation that evade our recognition as vital agents and actors in the economies of trends and viral culture. I reiterate that Black queer culture is the blueprint. But perhaps this is not a blueprint to the familiar structures of corporate campuses, architectural marvels, or infrastructure itself. Maybe it is a blueprint to a vestibule, a threshold or zone of passage through Black Queer worlds enroute to status a ordances, attention, going viral, clout, and capital.
Black Queer South: Regionalism & Transnational Flows
This panel takes the fact that this symposium/conference is situated in the American South as a starting point for thinking black queer studies through the regional and the transnational. Using the South as a reference point for both the American South and the Global South, panelists explore how regional and transnational differences, linkages, and contexts shape (and are shaped by) black queer cultures, representation, and praxis.
Darius Scott
In some ways, the American South has long been central to Black queer studies, not least due to the formative contributions of its thinkers—E. Patrick Johnson, Randall Kenan, Roderick Ferguson, and others—who have reflected on their ties to the region. At the same time, there can be a tendency to historicize the South as a site of nostalgia, even when it remains an active terrain of dispossession. If Black queer studies were to center the American South and the Global South more purposefully, I imagine it would necessitate deeper engagement with matters like social death.
In my oral history work with older Black gay men living in the rural South, I found that stigma, isolation, and profound disconnection often remained unresolved across a lifetime—suspended rather than overcome. For some, their only “heterotopias” have been their own bodies—bodies marked by queerness, Blackness, and a belonging to Southern Black communities that is both tenuous and costly. They remain, as Ferguson put it, “the sissies at the picnic,” included but apart.
The American South is also a landscape of entrenched human-nature relationships—a region where Black life has historically been shaped by swamps, forests, hurricanes, and humid atmospheres. If Black queer studies were to take this ecological intimacy seriously, it could unsettle the field’s prevailing metropolitan orientations and reveal how Black queer life has always been entangled with land, climate, and nonhuman forces. As discussed in the June 2024 Black Erotic Ecologies workshop, engaging these entanglements takes on particular urgency in the context of present ecological crises.
During the panel, I hope to reference McCraney’s reverence for the natural environment both as a site of transformation and as a force of potential destruction in Moonlight and Marcus; or the Secret of Sweet. What happens when we refuse to treat the South as a fixed site of the past and instead reckon with it as a site of possibility and transformation?
LaToya Eaves
In 2019, I was invited to participate in UNC’s IAAR Twitter chat, which was (largely) on/about Black Geographies. During the conversation, I argued that the South presents a productive site for queer analysis, as its history and present are marked by practices that challenge normative understandings of place and power. Queer South ontologies and epistemologies augment dominant perspectives on the South by positioning the region as a global queer site. Centering Black queer studies in the South galvanizes new insights into how queer Black placemaking disrupt(s) socio-spatial structures that produce and privilege binaries. Further, we can explore how the queer Black South as an analytic requires us to reconsider everything that has stabilized and normalized geographies, a particular kind of globalization, which includes notions of citizenship, nation-building, and political order alongside Southern economies. Put another way,
how do we think about the queer American South as part of the Global North? What are the possibilities for queer South-South solidarities?
I have two examples to share that are taken from different projects. One project places the city of Miami as significant to considering Southern, queer Black geographies. For it, I read queer Miami with Julio Capo Jr., whose Welcome to Fairyland described the power dynamics of the American South and the presence of Black Caribbean culture that became infused into the birth of the city as Black. Miami, then, is both Black American South and Black Global South. I use examples from Black queer cultural production and placemaking as well as the continuous, deliberate containment of Blackness over the past four or five decades.
In the second example, I offer a (preliminary) Black queer geographies reading of the afterlives of Southern deindustrialization. I place Black queerness as an essential analytic to understanding the value of the South outside of spatial normativities as rendered through capitalist logics and economic globalization. I look at how deindustrialization has shaped Black queer life, particularly through the development of community and kinship networks, emergent mutual aid practices and continuous land stewardship, which challenge existing power structures.
Lyndon K. Gill
Trespass Against US: African Diaspora, Spirituality & the Meta-Politics of Queerness
In the closing kiki of my contribution to No Tea, No Shade, I play with the conceptual conundrum plaguing what has now become a mass mediated OTA fetishization freak-off of black queer language, aesthetics, and cultural products. Nearly a decade ago, I cautioned us about the reduction of African diasporic queerness to a simplified apolitical umbrella reference for increasingly U.S.-centric, institutionalized, and cutely consumable “yaaas queen” minstrelsy. Inspired still by Cathy Cohen, M. Jacqui Alexander and all— as Jafari Allen prophesized— they might help us become despite the breathtaking pace of “normalization” designed to disorient our heritage commitment to a radical black queer politics— which is to say a radical transnational feminist politics— that defies nationalisms, capitalism, neoliberal individualism, and hierarchical regionalisms. Rinaldo Walcott already reminded the children that Diaspora itself is an always
already queer affinity intended to pervert normative border-patrolled logics of state-sanctioned citizenship and map cultural continuities in excess of confining national narratives. I asked then as now what black queer anti-normative ways of being we might conceive together transnationally in a global society where the norm is increasingly unjust, unfair and unethical. In other words, where is our refuge now that all the violent hostilities, hatreds, exclusions, and supposedly Biblically-sanctioned disavowals that were once used to comfortably chastise both the U.S. and the global south in the self-righteous erudite (African) American imaginary have all come “home” to roost? In my new book Sacred Sensorium, I suggest that Harlem Renaissance novelist, playwright, essayist and wayward anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston may have hidden in plain sight at least one clue she found in her travel and thinking across the U.S. South and the
Caribbean. If, as African American feminist anthropologist and renaissance woman Irma McClaurin contends, Hurston is the underrecognized godmother of black studies writ global and so much of Hurston’s work is deeply spiritually attentive, then it makes good black queer political sense to follow our ancestors as Audre Lorde and Alexis Pauline Gumbs have been showing us all along. In short, what’s tea with the apolitical and hyper secular cannibalization of black queer culture when black queer life has never been delimited by the tangible, the purely aesthetic or the natal and when so many Afroqueer alternatives are reaching towards us from the other side?
Rico Self
How would Black queer studies be different if the American South and/or the Global South were at its center? What experiences and stories, phenomena and practices, threats and possibilities would we learn about if that were true?
In the popular imagination, narratives of Black queer history and expressive culture have often been tied closely to urban centers in the United States, particularly New York City, Detroit, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Such narratives have resulted in a largely asymmetrical understanding of Black queer life in the U.S.. That is, these narratives seem to paint linear accounts of acceptance and progress in the Northeast, Midwest, and West while suggesting that the U.S. South is “yet” backward–racially regressive and hostile to nonnormative expressions of gender and sexuality. In recent years, though, the South has experienced a Black queer renaissance, and Southern cities like Atlanta, New Orleans, Houston, Charlotte, Dallas, and D.C. have emerged as vibrant sites of Black queer life. Additionally, many Black queer people, partly driven by the New Great Migration, have begun to “return” back down South. I would argue for a similar return back down South, as it were, for Black queer studies (BQS). While the South features prominently in the BQS origin story, less scholarly attention has been given to first-person accounts of the specific role the region plays in Black queer identity formation. Indeed, the South’s ethos is one of contradiction, yet it continues to play a key role in shaping dominant ideas about the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Thus, a return to the South, particularly through what I call quare automethods (autobiography, narrative co-construction, autoethnography, autocritography, etc.), would enrich BQS by providing important first-hand narrative accounts of how Black queer folks in the South make due, resist, honor the past, build community, and create worlds despite the pervasive conditions anti-Blackness and anti queerness that work in tandem to leave us for dead.
Question
In what ways can storytelling function as a source of connection for Black queer people in the U.S. South and Global South?
Example: Self and Asante, Review of The Border of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance by Karma
Chàvez
Black Queer Writing: Who’s Reading Us?
The writers in the Black queer literary tradition are creators of queer worlds and audacious possibilities that black queer scholars, activists and community builders hold close. These panelists demonstrate how Black queer writing has transformed the thinkable moving Black Queer Studies beyond critique into a generative imaginative collective imperative.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs
During his last public speech Black Gay writer and scholar Melvin Dixon was already dying from complications related to HIV/AIDS. In his moving keynote “Somewhere Listening for My Name” at the OUTWRITE conference he sang the traditional hymn. And he said “You are charged, by the broadness of your vision and the possibility of your good health, to remember us.” This panel takes place in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Black Queer Studies Conference on UNC’s campus and also in the light of countless named and unnamed ancestors. Each of the writers here does ancestor accountable work. Work that links generations and opens portals. The questions I will be focusing on are inspired by the position paragraphs of the authors and will include:
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To whom would you like to dedicate your presence here on this panel? Please choose an individual person or being who is not (that you know of) attending the BQS25 gathering.
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For you, what is queer about your practice as a writer and thinker? What is black about it? The fact that I consider this to be one question says something about my approach, but what are the queerness and blackness of your approach?
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Inspired by Zelda How specifically are the practices of your writing and scholarship intergenerational? Can you share a story that teaches us something about the power and complexity of an intergenerational approach?
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Inspired by Mecca What does the practice of imagination within our practice and beyond our lifetimes offer to this moment in particular? What water, medicine, shelter or food would you like to offer the imaginations of the people gathered here today?
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Inspired by Briona What is the potential of our sedition, non-compliance and queer danger at this time? How does this show up in your writing and the writing of the ancestors who accompany you?
Briona Simone Jones
1. How have you engaged Black queer literary traditions in your creative practices?
Right now, I’m working with Stuart Hall, thinking about insurgent aesthetics and accessibility. I have been examining history and how it shapes and governs the episteme of black study and the archive of black life. Drawing from Hall’s assertion that, “the moment of the archive represents the end of a certain kind of creative innocence, and the beginning of a new stage of self-consciousness, of self-reflexivity in an artistic movement,” I posit that those of us who are constituting the archive must extend our lens to those situated at the underside of modernity, especially if we are to map the real stakes of the fall of empire. During the 2023-2024 academic year, I spent time at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture studying black queer theorists’ Cheryl Clarke and Alexis De Veaux’s archives, examining their registers of war and their marking of pleasure. This deep study later manifested as an exhibition entitled, The Pleasure of Rebellion, which attended to Clarke and De Veaux’s contributions to Black Queer Studies, underscoring how their respective archives teach us how to scrutinize and map the contours of freedom.
2. What themes, topics, and aesthetic strategies are helping you abide in this moment? What if, anything, do you feel an urge to write about?
At this moment, I’m studying how the black queer archive lays bare how to move beyond the theorization of freedom and towards the material conditions of sedition. Turning to the black queer archive, and sitting with Lorde, De Veaux, Grimké, and also No Language Is Neutral, Yabo, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, M: Archive, Becoming Human, and M. Jacqui Alexander have aided my countenance.
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan
The poet Ntozake Shange, in her 1978 essay “takin’ a solo/ a poetic possibility/ a poetic imperative,” reminds us that our writing is only as powerful as the breadth and multiplicity of the futures it imagines. She tells us that to escape “sequester... in the monolith” of representation, Black writers must tap the full expressive music of our literary voices, and let ourselves feel free to be as complex and contradictory as our myriad artforms allow. Meanwhile, poet Audre Lorde tells us in her 1977 essay, “Poetry is Not a Luxury” that our creative expression is a source of power precisely because of the complex feeling it conjures. She shows us how the poet’s power—and the novelist’s/playwright’s/screenwriter’s/emcee’s power—lies not only in chapter, verse, and stanza, but also in our ability to turn feeling into language that births new ideas and
makes action possible. For me, as a Black queer feminist scholar and novelist, these women exemplify what a Black queer creative practice can be and do. Writing across genres, they show us how the rigid distinctions between critical theorizing and creative expression are institutional, not intellectual. These writers demonstrate the radical possibility and anti-normative, anti-oppressive imperatives of Black queer and feminist creative expression— which, for me, is a sustaining approach to Black queer intellectual life built not on hegemonic models of discursive mastery but on radical visions of collaborative creation. Through our Black queer feminist artistic practices, we do not stop at the critical takedown; we make, we create, we collab, we build. This vision of creative-theoretical possibility has been a vital part of my fiction and scholarship, and it is all the more urgent in the present moment as we work to imagine our survival in the terror of our current unknown. Black queer feminist creative theorizing shows us that “imagination” is not a metaphor. It is key and compass, medicine and big bang. It is what we have available—what we must always have available—hot and sharp and ardent enough to see us through and blaze new futures into being.
Question: How are we acting on/in/through “imagination,” specifically, as a radical creative
practice in our lives and work right now?
Destiny Hemphill
When I call upon my lineage of writers, Nikky Finney, June Jordan, and James Baldwin are among the many names I include in the litany. Also woven at the seams of my heart are the names of those who, in the homes and sanctuaries I dwelled in throughout the U.S. South, first instructed me in language: Pastor Hines, Mother Webb, Elder Raymond, and those of my reverend mother and philosopher father. Among many gifts, one gift that this lineage has offered me is how to sustain relationship with Spirit. This sustaining (of) relationship involves practicing the power of repetition and improvisation, tending to anguish in all of its psychic and structural dimensions, feeling into other realms, tracing the often-imperceptible seam between the material and immaterial, and what Ashon Crawley calls “refusing to be done seeking otherwise.” All of this—the repetition, the improvisation, the tending, the feeling, the tracing, the refusing—consistently guide my orientation to my work, an orientation that I think aligns with Denise Ferreira da Silva’s notion of a “Black feminist poethic.” In her article “Toward a Black Feminist Poethic: The Quest(ion) of Blackness Toward the End of the World,” Ferreira da Silva posits that a Black feminist poethic intention, grounded in Black feminist poetics, might be one that, “instead of the betterment of the World as we know it, aims at its end.” In my practice of repetition and improvisation, tending to anguish, feeling into other realms, and refusing to be done seeking otherwise, I hold sacredly this intention to end this world that is sutured together by empire, capitalism, anti-Blackness, trans- and queer-phobia, patriarchy, and ableism. Simultaneously, I hold this Black feminist poethic intention to end this world as an intrinsically Black queer directive. Evidence of this intention alongside my practices can be found in my debut poetry collection motherworld: a devotional for the alter-life, where I am writing toward the end of the world as an ethical commitment to and communion with Spirit, the earth, and each other.
Question: What Black queer directives do you hold sacred as an ethical commitment to the earth and each other?
Zelda Lockhart
Essex Hemphill, Nikki Giovanni, and Jewelle Gomez influenced my work by teaching me to edit out fear and bring forward the truths that need to be told. These truths are sometimes bold, flamboyant, or sassy, sometimes tender and vulnerable parts of my soul, but all of my truths are needed so that my Queer Black voice claims its place in the ecology of human truths. Similarly, my characters hold their heads up as Black Queer individuals who always assume that the seat in the front of the literary room is for them. Like myself, my characters take to nature and expressive arts to maintain their mental health and seek joy in a violent world. My characters fish at the creek, garden, and walk the shores of their ancestral comings and goings. They dance, sing, draw, journal and write poetry to express and understand their inextricably beautiful place in this life. I am currently writing a novel about a young woman who against all colonial odds is shaping our future with her example of generational healing. I am also writing my memoir which holds the same central theme. I write because I need reminders of my own survival and joy seeking- footprints, and I reckon others might benefit from those footfall patterns in this shifting life dance.
I would like to know from other Black Queer writers: How has the writing of a previous generation of Queer Black authors influenced your work and what are some ways (that you have not yet explored) that you can use your writing to pass this on to the next generation?
Examples of bold truth-telling against all social odds is in my character Ella Mae in my novel Fifth Born II: The Hundredth Turtle, in my character Lottie Rebecca Lee in my novel Trinity, and in the soulful writing directives in my book The Soul of the Full-Length Manuscript: Turning Life’s Wounds into the Gift of Literary Fiction, Memoir or Poetry.
Black Queer Identities: Sex & the Future of Queerness
The writers in the Black queer literary tradition are creators of queer worlds and audacious possibilities that black queer scholars, activists and community builders hold close. These panelists demonstrate how Black queer writing has transformed the thinkable moving Black Queer Studies beyond critique into a generative imaginative collective imperative.
Marlon M Bailey
Black Gay Radical Sex and the HIV/AIDS Epidemic
Black queers, particularly Black gay men, who are sexually stratified, living with or considered at high risk for HIV, have been left out of and marginalized within Black queer studies. Black queer studies has not adequately examined, affirmed, and learned from the radical sex practices of Black gay men and what we can tell our communities about how to prioritize sexual pleasure and satisfaction in an epidemic. Black gay men, and Black people in general, are overrepresented in the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the U.S. Black communities comprise 14% of the U.S. population but nearly 45% of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Black gay men, and Black women, both cis and trans, bear a disproportionate burden of HIV/AIDS in this country, and we are still dying from it. For Black gay men, HIV continues to haunt our lives, particularly our sex. It is the haunting and stigma, which are often experienced within our own communities, as well as outside of it, that shape our experiences. How do we make sense of this in this current moment?
HIV/AIDS is used as a means of and justification for the sexual regulation of Black gay men.
HIV status is a social category, a vector of power, and one that is constructed through racialized sexual discourses. As a retrovirus and a social category, HIV status determines who has access to social and material resources; who is desirable; who should experience sexual pleasure and satisfaction, and whose life is valuable and worth saving. Thus, joined with race, gender, sexuality, and class, HIV status forms the basis of a hierarchy of human value. Contrary to popular believe, Black gay men’s disproportionate representation in the HIV epidemic is not primarily due to our sexual behavior; rather, it is due to our experiences with overlapping structural vulnerabilities, such as homelessness/housing instability, food insecurity, poverty, undiagnosed and untreated substance abuse disorders, and structural racism, and homophobia/transphobia. HIV is a socio/cultural actor that is a means of racialized sexual control of Black gay men. Despite all this, Black gay men who pursue and center pleasure in their sexual practices engage a radical sex practice as harm reduction. Black queer studies should be interested in how.
Questions:
If Black queer studies is a liberatory site of knowledge production, what is the role of sexual pleasure and satisfaction as a liberatory knowledge and practice?
How has the HIV/AIDS epidemic contributed to our squeamishness about Black gay sex? What role does age/generation play in how we think about sex and how we study and talk about it?
L.H. Stallings
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Today, Black queerness remains an anti-normative model for difference that insists upon improvisation on gender and sexual identity and kinship. In regards to the future of sex and queerness, Black queer studies should function as a form of post-oppositional knowledge that challenges the inevitability and compulsion of our humanness, which prolongs our disempowerment. With this objective in mind, CRT’s focus on temporality in its critical realism and Black Studies interventions on the human highlight the importance of post-oppositional thinking (ALKeating) to queer futures in our current moment. Derrick Bell’s concept of racial realism critiqued racial equity ideology and emphasized the permanence of racism. Additionally, queer legal scholar Francisco Valdes followed up on Bell asking“...does it make sense to speak of patriarchy’s permanence in the same, or similar, ways in which...Bell spoke of white supremacy’s permanence...does it make sense to speak of heterosexism’s permanence along these lines.” These branches of critical realism share commonalities with critiques recently taken up in the Rinaldo Walcott’s The Long Emancipation, in which he notes “I understand emancipation as always embedded in the juridical and thus as always orienting and delimiting freedom. Freedom resists guarantee of comportment.” Equity may not be possible due to the permanence of racism, heterosexism, cisnormativity, but freedom is. Being real about the permeance of each of these isms shape strategies for our living, for our study of life, and our embodiment of being. During this long emancipation, there are two interdisciplinary fields that Black queer studies could draw on more (and vice versa): psychedelic studies and space law. Psychedelic studies engage somatic healing, alternative spiritual practices and ceremonies, and uses of entheogens, plant medicine, & synthetic psychedelics to reach extra-ordinary states of consciousness and heal racial and sexual trauma (see Monnica T. Williams). While the juridic may not result in equity or emancipation, queering space law & meta law can become a novel form of post-oppositional knowledge and thinking that sustains future identities, sociality, and resistance where compulsory humanness does not dominate practices of resistance; in addition to highlighting how theorizing the future of gender and sexuality outside of normative jurisprudence becomes a practice of freedom. As Walcott insists, Black freedom means a new human experience for everyone, and these fields provide a breadth of strategies for Black queer studies to strategize around the permanence of racism, heterosexism, cisnormativity, and sexism and attend to freedom.
Julian Glover
1. How have you engaged Black queer literary traditions in your creative practices?
Right now, I’m working with Stuart Hall, thinking about insurgent aesthetics and accessibility. I have been examining history and how it shapes and governs the episteme of black study and the archive of black life. Drawing from Hall’s assertion that, “the moment of the archive represents the end of a certain kind of creative innocence, and the beginning of a new stage of self-consciousness, of self-reflexivity in an artistic movement,” I posit that those of us who are constituting the archive must extend our lens to those situated at the underside of modernity, especially if we are to map the real stakes of the fall of empire. During the 2023-2024 academic year, I spent time at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture studying black queer theorists’ Cheryl Clarke and Alexis De Veaux’s archives, examining their registers of war and their marking of pleasure. This deep study later manifested as an exhibition entitled, The Pleasure of Rebellion, which attended to Clarke and De Veaux’s contributions to Black Queer Studies, underscoring how their respective archives teach us how to scrutinize and map the contours of freedom.
2. What themes, topics, and aesthetic strategies are helping you abide in this moment? What if, anything, do you feel an urge to write about?
At this moment, I’m studying how the black queer archive lays bare how to move beyond the theorization of freedom and towards the material conditions of sedition. Turning to the black queer archive, and sitting with Lorde, De Veaux, Grimké, and also No Language Is Neutral, Yabo, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, M: Archive, Becoming Human, and M. Jacqui Alexander have aided my countenance.