Disrespectability and Deviance: Re-Visualizing The Black Queer Archive

• In Event: Revisiting and Reclaiming Queer History and Activism

Abstract

My work seeks to raise up deviance and disrespectability (which I define as a disruption of social standards of respectability to unearth new possibilities of existing and being) and casts these concepts anew as abolitionist praxis. I utilize alternative collection practices, like communal oral histories, and self-portraits of the individuals who make up community to revisit the past, reclaim Black Queer Representation and reimagine gender holistically through visual and embodied storytelling. I document and explore the lives and embodied knowledges of Black gender nonconforming and trans folks, as they live and thrive within the presumed fugitivity of the South.

Presenter

• Jacora Johnson, Texas Christian University