Public Intimacy: Digital Storytelling Among Queer Black Women

• In Event: A Diversity Taboo

Abstract

Coming-out stories are important sites in which individuals articulate and interpret processes and events connected to claiming and proclaiming one’s non-dominant sexual orientation and/or gender identity. As such, sexual storytelling in the form of coming-out stories has been a recurring interest among sociologists and gender studies scholars interested in sexual identity processes. Yet, much of what we know about coming-out stories is based on narratives elicited within research-based contexts and told in “real life” settings, with less attention given to queer storytelling in the virtual context. Turning our attention to digital storytelling is important because the advent of social media technologies has ushered in the proliferation of user-generated content made by queer individuals, communities, and organizations. Furthermore, extant empirical investigations have yet to explicitly center coming-out stories of people at the intersection of multiple oppressed identity groups. As a result, research on queer Black women’s sexual narratives remains scant. As “non-prototypical members of their constituent identity groups,” queer Black women experience “intersectional invisibility” within dominant historical and contemporary narratives about what it means to be queer, Black, and female (Purdie-Vaughns and Eibach 2008:378).

My paper aims to address these gaps by examining queer Black women’s coming-out stories on YouTube. As audiovisual texts, I examine the performative and rhetorical strategies that fifty women use in telling their coming-out stories on a highly-visible and widely-accessible platform. Preliminary findings reveal that queer Black women’s use of intimate candor—the performative and rhetorical mechanism of publicly revealing intimate, sometimes sexual, life details—is a means through which women (1) center desire and queerness, (2) articulate a vision of queer Black womanhood, and in doing so (3) complicate the coming-out formula story. Importantly, in examining queer Black women’s coming-out videos, this paper furthers our understanding of the social utility and implications of digital storytelling among actors who occupy the margins of multiple identity groups.

Author

• Dominique M Adams-Santos, Northwestern University