The Queer Visuality of Slavery and its Afterlives

Abstract:This manuscript examines the racial-sexual anxieties of slavery and its afterlives as they are articulated in contemporary Black queer visual culture. An engagement with cultural history, visual studies, and Black porn studies, the manuscript traces the (dis)appearance of Black queer sexuality within the colonial archive. Placing this scholarship in conversation with DePaul Vera's My Soul to Keep, it posits that white supremacy is intimately connected to expressions of sexual anti-Blackness in mainstream queer culture. The manuscript offers Black queer pleasure as a corrective to normative conceptualizations of Black sexuality, embracing the liberatory potential of our practices in intimacy and relationality.