Blackqueer: Queering Cultural Memory and (Un)Making Citizenship

• In Event: Fashioning New Grammars: Black Survival, Critical Educative Spaces, and Knowledge Production

Abstract

This paper examines the contestation of belonging and care as experienced by Black denizens. Illuminating the entanglements of Blackness and queerness this paper explores questions into when, where, and to whom is mattering conferred. Mutually constitutive, the relationship of Blackness and queerness is overlooked and undertheorized with regards to understanding contemporary forms of anti-Black racism. Queerness has been and continues to remain foundational to understanding US racial formations and machinations. Underscoring the queerness of Blackness, this paper articulates Blackqueer as a frame to probe constructions of Blackness and to understand how forces of domination seek to degrade Black life and culture. Equally so, Blackqueerness provides a site of analysis in which to understand more than an identity as constructed through one’s race and sexuality, but rather as a means of analysis to understand how social designation, and thus citizenship is constructed through relationships of power.
Drawing upon Black queer theory (Cohen 1997) and performance theory (DeFrantz and Gonzalez, 2014), I analyze the very prominent cases of slain Baltimoreans Freddie Gray, Korryn Gaines, and Mya Hall. Advancing the framework Blackqueer, I demonstrate how Black lives and experiences are queered by the state and/or reflect having a queer relationship to the state. Each case broadens our understanding of queer subjectivities and how anti-Blackness and queerness serve as pedagogic markers transmitted through both formal and informal educative spaces. To interrogate the persistence and manifestation of these violences, I utilize critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2003) arguing that the queerness of Blackness forecloses possibilities of the cared for subject citizen and deploys a differently constituted memory un(making) citizenship. Ultimately, this paper demonstrates how US cultural memory mediated through a Blackqueer framework and (re)memory (Dillard 2012) produces knowledge which fashions citizenship (Pritchard 2016) as well as Black and queer communities survival.

Author

• Durell M. Callier, Miami University