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While both Black and Queer studies have frequently theorized the domestic and its interiors (e.g., the closet) as paradigmatic spaces from which (Black) queer subjects should flee, Black feminist critical and creative archives have historically reimagined the Black home as a crucial locus of gender and sexual freedom in the face of state-sanctioned surveillance of, and incursions into, Black life. Extending this Black feminist conceptualization of the possibilities of the Black domestic, this talk theorizes the Black home—specifically, the Black bedroom therein–as a dense and luscious site of polymorphous play, erotic experimentation, and unrelenting vitality.
Dr. Shoniqua Roach is a queer Black feminist writer and Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University. An American Council of Learned Societies and Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, her peer-reviewed work appears in venues such as Signs: journal of women in culture and society, differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies, and American Quarterly, among others. Roach is currently at work on her book manuscript, Black Dwelling: Home-Making and Erotic Freedom, an intellectual and cultural history of Black domestic spaces as tragic sites of state invasion and Black feminist enactments of erotic freedom. She sits on the editorial board of Signs: a journal of Women in Culture and Society.
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