Bem-Estar Negra: Lésbicas Negras’ Beautiful Experiments of Worth

Chapter 5 responds to the existential and ethical question: What comprises the Brazilian Black lesbian experience and centers on the ancestral inner energy reminding us that Black queer women's lives are radical. I conclude the book with ethnographic storytelling “beautiful experiments” (Hartman 2019) to frame my theorization of bem-estar Negra through the lens of the Black lesbian's most intimate ideas, places, relationships, struggles, and dreams. Through an anthropological lens of Black lesbian worth-making, Black lesbians' past, present, and future together become an African diasporic trajectory of possibilities, creativity, reimaginations, and erotic playfulness about what truly matters: their collective wellbeing. All the chapters work together to analyze one primary goal: how nonnormative bodies move about in the world, in and out of violent spaces, and zealously reimagine to recreate a different world.