Toward Black Lesbian Study

Among Black lesbian and queer women authors of recent decades, there has emerged a specific, inextricable link between the vanguard political action they have taken in response to the violence of institutions, like the university, and an approach to cultural work—especially in writing—that regards experimentalism as a value that facilitates living in right relationship. To describe this entanglement of political radicalism and experimentalism as a critical facet of a broader ethic that I term “Black lesbianism,” this short piece builds on the notion of Black study offered by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten to argue that now is a time to engage Black lesbian study, as opposed to pursuing field formation under the auspices of lesbian or Black lesbian “studies.” Black lesbian study is a social practice that experiments with cultivating our ethical attention to others, including human, nonhuman, and ancestral life. Black lesbian study is ambivalent to the academy and utilizes innovative forms of writing that beyond-genre authors Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Alexis DeVeaux practice as a tool that centers embodied knowledges, whether generally somatic or specifically sensual. As a brief to navigate the multiple precarities and violences of our time, Black lesbian study is one genealogy, one praxis for sustaining a life-giving set of relations.