Pub Date : 2022-02-01DOI: 10.14321/qed.9.issue-1.0007
I. Wooden
abstract:This article explores the ways the Academy Award-winning film Moonlight reveals and reflects a Black spatial imaginary that explicitly and inextricably links Blackness, queerness, and the outside. In sharpening focus on its central character’s journey from bullied kid to alienated high school student to hardened twenty-something, Moonlight, I argue, repudiates many of the anti-Black premises that vitalize the project of white supremacy and the white spatial imaginary, particularly those that cast Black people as always already unfit or unworthy—of freedom, of intimacy, of pleasure, of life. Simultaneously, the film draws attention to and invites viewers to grapple with the ways that Blackness always already indexes a waywardness, a transience, a queerness, a “movement in excess” that is itself an instantiation and expression of refusal, a being in and for the outside.
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Pub Date : 2022-02-01DOI: 10.14321/qed.9.issue-1.0075
G. Asante
In one of the most pivotal moments in Moonlight, the nowgrown Chiron visits his childhood friend, Kevin, who is now a chef. In this crucial reunion scene, two formerly incarcerated men, Kevin and Chiron, meet at a diner and reconcile through intimacy and touch. Knowing that Kevin was the cause of Chiron’s carceral past, we see a moment that stands contrary to hegemonic masculine expectations— as tenderness replaces anticipated revenge or animus. In this scene, the normative constructions of Black masculinity as decidedly violent and illustratively criminal are sharply contrasted to a relatively gentle, kind, and sensual Chiron. In as much as one can sense the pain, anguish, and perfidy in the weirdly, sometimes almost uncomfortable penetrating gaze between Chiron and Kevin, this scene illustrates something more commanding: the centrality of touch and touching between Black men. In this short article commemorating Moonlight, I want to reflect on the rhetorical force of “touch” between the Black men in Moonlight as a socially disorienting force against the backdrop of Black carceral animus. F O R U M
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Pub Date : 2022-02-01DOI: 10.14321/qed.9.issue-1.0043
M. Tracy
abstract:In this essay I look at Barry Jenkins’ film Moonlight and reflect upon how the film employs trauma and the anticipation of trauma to develop a complex depiction of Black cismale identity informed by Black queer masculinity rooted in tenderness, caring, and vulnerability.
{"title":"Moving through Trauma: Black Queer Vulnerability in Moonlight","authors":"M. Tracy","doi":"10.14321/qed.9.issue-1.0043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14321/qed.9.issue-1.0043","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:In this essay I look at Barry Jenkins’ film Moonlight and reflect upon how the film employs trauma and the anticipation of trauma to develop a complex depiction of Black cismale identity informed by Black queer masculinity rooted in tenderness, caring, and vulnerability.","PeriodicalId":43840,"journal":{"name":"QED-A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking","volume":"330 1","pages":"43 - 57"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88822715","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-01DOI: 10.14321/qed.9.issue-1.0023
Terrance Wooten
abstract:Contemporary movements against state-sanctioned violence have used rhetorical refrains to mark and practice dissent, as evidenced by the proliferation of “hands up, don’t shoot”; “#sayhername”; and “#blacklivesmatter.” These refrains provide a specific discourse through which critiques of violence, surveillance, and economic injustice are galvanized, connecting activists and demonstrators across geospatial and temporal landscapes. Political refrains are more than just rallying cries; they also function as edicts, as commands that often disrupt the very practices they name. In this article, I argue that Barry Jenkins’s use of the “Don’t look at me!” refrain in Moonlight, expressed by Little/Black’s mother, Paula, functions to name and obfuscate the racialized and gendered surveillance of Black deviance throughout the film. Set in the midst of the War on Drugs, culture of poverty thesis, and a post-Moynihan Report political culture that blamed the failure of the Black community on the Black matriarch, Moonlight offers an alternative reading strategy that instead of re-pathologizing Black motherhood and queer sociality actually renders visible and mutable the controlling images used to surveil and flatten Black subjectivity. Paula’s “Don’t look at me!” attempts to render her own body out of sight in order to ask viewers to look beyond her, to shift the pathologizing lens away from her to instead think of the various systems of power operating that inform her choices and epidermalize her body as a problem.
{"title":"“Don’t Look at Me!”: Deviance and the Uncontrollable Image of Black Motherhood in Moonlight","authors":"Terrance Wooten","doi":"10.14321/qed.9.issue-1.0023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14321/qed.9.issue-1.0023","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:Contemporary movements against state-sanctioned violence have used rhetorical refrains to mark and practice dissent, as evidenced by the proliferation of “hands up, don’t shoot”; “#sayhername”; and “#blacklivesmatter.” These refrains provide a specific discourse through which critiques of violence, surveillance, and economic injustice are galvanized, connecting activists and demonstrators across geospatial and temporal landscapes. Political refrains are more than just rallying cries; they also function as edicts, as commands that often disrupt the very practices they name. In this article, I argue that Barry Jenkins’s use of the “Don’t look at me!” refrain in Moonlight, expressed by Little/Black’s mother, Paula, functions to name and obfuscate the racialized and gendered surveillance of Black deviance throughout the film. Set in the midst of the War on Drugs, culture of poverty thesis, and a post-Moynihan Report political culture that blamed the failure of the Black community on the Black matriarch, Moonlight offers an alternative reading strategy that instead of re-pathologizing Black motherhood and queer sociality actually renders visible and mutable the controlling images used to surveil and flatten Black subjectivity. Paula’s “Don’t look at me!” attempts to render her own body out of sight in order to ask viewers to look beyond her, to shift the pathologizing lens away from her to instead think of the various systems of power operating that inform her choices and epidermalize her body as a problem.","PeriodicalId":43840,"journal":{"name":"QED-A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking","volume":"73 1","pages":"23 - 42"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86397378","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"DisclosureVisible: Out on Television","authors":"B. Banks","doi":"10.14321/qed.8.1.0206","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14321/qed.8.1.0206","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43840,"journal":{"name":"QED-A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73882423","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life","authors":"Greg Niedt","doi":"10.14321/qed.8.1.0185","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14321/qed.8.1.0185","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43840,"journal":{"name":"QED-A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking","volume":"145 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84174145","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The New Gay for Pay: The Sexual Politics of American Television Production","authors":"A. Miller","doi":"10.14321/qed.8.1.0195","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14321/qed.8.1.0195","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43840,"journal":{"name":"QED-A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73402724","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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