Ambivalent Affinities: A Political History of Blackness and Homosexuality after World War II

Le résumé fourni par la source

In a 2015 manifesto, Patrisse Cullors and Alicia Garza—both identified as queer women of color—wrote that they originally envisioned the Black Lives Matter movement to be at the interstices of race, sexuality, and gender identity. They wrote that queer people of color “are at the table, on the stage, [and] in the protests” but this has “not been without its challenges, and the movement has had to deal with queer and trans antagonism both from the broader public and within movement spaces” (Patrisse Cullors and Alicia Garza, “About Black Lives Matter,” 2015, blacklivesmatter.com). Jennifer Dominique Jones argues in Ambivalent Affinities that we can locate contemporary U.S. intersectionality in a post–World War II era that imbricated anti-Black racism, homophobia, and transphobia but also constellated Black liberation movements and queer movements. These imbrications and constellations, however, were never easily managed and, in fact, were quite messy. Jones tells the story of the postwar relationship between Blackness and queerness through a multitude of agents—from civil rights organizations, queer activists, and Black political officials to white supremacists, political conservatives, and governmental bodies. Outlining “how ideas about same-sex intimacy and gender nonconformity … emerged within political contests over white supremacy and Black racial equality,” she engages case studies that discuss the often-contradictory discourses of prejudice and liberation, sometimes from within Black and queer movements themselves (p. 4). These cases range internally from National Association for the Advancement of Colored People efforts to confront homophobia and transphobia during the 1950s lavender scare and the National Urban League's use of antiqueer moral panic to the external rhetorics of White Citizens' Councils and the American Nazi party that vilified both Black and queer lifeways, conflating both with a nonnormativeness that demanded estrangement, if not a cruel social death. Jones's final cases also illustrate a late twentieth-century effort by Black activists to slowly and steadily build coalitions with queer communities through Gay Pride Day deliberations and Hiv/Aids (human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immune deficiency syndrome) educational activism. From the many episodes examined in the volume, readers will gain a sense of the complications that have led us to what might be called our contemporary “intersectional presents/presence.”

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