Black Lesbianism as a Way of Life: On the Ethics of Black, Queer, Feminist Experimentalism

Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

American Studies

First Advisor

Edwards, Erica

Abstract

Black Lesbianism as a Way of Life argues that since Barbara Smith presented “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism” at the Modern Language Association convention in 1977, Black lesbians have explicitly experimented with critical and aesthetic forms to articulate an ethic— a way of living a good life. This ethic, which I term “Black lesbianism” (distinct from the figure of the “Black lesbian”), is conveyed in terms of a tendency toward coalition-building, de-pathologizing embodied difference, and openly engaging with the contingencies of the past. I situate the ethic of Black lesbianism as a practice that re-shaped the course of political action in response to structural crises such as the HIV/AIDS pandemic of the 1980s and early 1990s and climate collapse to orient to collectively-minded approaches to sustainable life. I argue that Black lesbianism moves from a category of racial-gender-sexual identity (the “Black lesbian”) to an ethic through a series of formal experiments at the intersection of politics and culture. This move from identity to social theorizing is guided by the articulation of good living by Black lesbians-- like poet Cheryl Clarke and socialist activist, literary critic, and publisher Barbara Smith. Throughout, cultural texts across genres emerge as productive sites to reimagine with the possible modes of social relations beyond the violent conditions of the present because they allow radical experimentation with form.I trace the proliferation and interventions of Black lesbianism through defining moments of feminist political tension since 1977 through a mix of archival research and literary studies practices of close reading. I begin with a cultural historical account of the reception of Smith’s essay on Sula, arguing that criticisms from prominent Black feminists that her argument was “un-rigorous” point to the foundational disruptions that the Black lesbian position has posed for respectability and disciplinary knowledge. This is precisely because it began with the proposition that Black feminism ought to be an instruction for ways of living. Next, I take up sex as scene of for experimenting with interpersonal ethics. Chapter 2 analyzes Audre Lorde’s unpublished journals, where Lorde worked through ideas that would become “The Uses of the Erotic,” and reflected on dysfunctions that arose from her non-monogamous relationships. By taking up nonmonogamy as a key facet of what I term Black lesbianism’s erotic repertoire, I argue that ambivalence comes to be a crucial cognitive capacity for Black lesbianism’s approach to forging intimacy under contingent, and anti-normative conditions. The final chapter suggests that an ecological ethics responding to climate collapse is rooted in a Black, lesbian, feminist worldview. I analyze Alexis Pauline Gumbs's experimental prose-poem M Archive: After the End of the World to argue that the narrative, driven by Gumbs' methodological approach to her text (which she characterizes as being created “after and with” Caribbean lesbian theorist M Jacqui Alexander’s 2005 monograph Pedagogies of Crossing), furnishes a model for eco-ethics that draw upon the ethos of Black lesbianism's discursive ambiguity and plasticity as a strategic knowledge for living beyond "Human-ness" and its declining viability in relation to other forms of life on earth. Throughout, interludes examine how the critical frames of Black lesbianism as a way of life has informed our contemporary polycrisis with regard to the intimate scales of political organizing, the overlapping pandemics of COVID-19 and HIV/AIDS, and the emergence of the authoritarian university in the wake of student protest in 2024.

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