Looking for Black Lesbian Life in the Archives: Reclaiming My Story Through Critical Fabulation

• In Event: “We are not a monolith”: Expanding Blackness Through the Intersections

Abstract

The absence of Black lesbian life in a doctoral course on 20th-century cultural politics prompted me to go to the archives in search of myself. This project explores a story from my youth, one where the chance to know myself was denied. Using critical fabulation (Hartman, 2008) and drawing from visits to the Lesbian Herstory Archives, the Kinsey Institute, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in spring 2025, I retell my story, drawing not only on what I found but also on how it felt. Guided by queer Black feminism (Hammonds, 1994; Harris, 1996), I sit with the presence and absence of Black lesbian life in the archive. This work is about unforgetting and reclaiming, indeed.

Author

• Kristina Johnson-Yates, Indiana University - Indianapolis