Queer Intimacy and Filmic Technologies in Black Women’s Fictions

• In Event: Queering Visual Culture: Imagining Identities' Radical Elsewheres

Abstract

Both Martha Southgate’s 2005 novel Third Girl from the Left and the 2014 film Dear White People (dir. Justin Simien) represent Black women using filmic technologies as a means not simply to tell a story but also as an element of erotic intimacy. The classic reading of Black women’s relationship to the camera is one of fetishization and/or erasure. These two fictional texts offer a vision of Black women entering a queer relationship with the camera which allows exploration of new forms of bodily connection. Black women’s bodies become extended and expanded through their intimate encounters with these non-human apparatuses.

Presenter

• J. Brendan Shaw, Central State University