African American Studies Commons^™

What Child Is This?: Closely Reading Collectivity And Queer Childrearing In Lackawanna Blues And Noah’S Arc, Vincent L. Stephens

Vincent L Stephens

Increasing hostilities toward intimate change are rooted in longstanding affective investments in a sexual normativity that oppresses multiple strands of intimacy, including African American kinship networks and same-sex coupling. Since homosexuality is always racialized sexuality and African American kinship patterns have always been marginal by U. S. heteronormative standards, the present essay unmasks the ways sexual normativity has obscured collectivity as a resistive strategy in the lives of two "alternative" intimate groups with important overlaps, black gay and lesbian communities and African American extended families. The essay interrogates sexual normativity by defining and affirming the relevance of black collectivity to …