Black, Queer, and Sick: Amplifying Representation’s Noisiness
“The unresolved problematic at the center of Evelynn Hammonds’s “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality” is that of representation. The importance of representation, she argues, lies in its ability to highlight alternative modes of being and thinking. Though Hammonds is ambivalent about queer studies, it is the queerness of black lesbian sexualities that might offer the representational fullness and disruption to norms that she seeks. This essay takes the silence around the black, queer cancer patient to think about how to expand Hammonds’s ideas. It works toward considerations of erotic autonomy in the context of illness by way of thinking with Audre Lorde and masturbation.”
Published in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies (September 2024), Vol 35 (2):
