Heterexpectations: Jumping the Broom, Marriage, Democracy, and Entanglement Theory

Chapter 4 takes up marriage as a site for Black sexual expression and engages the vindicationist voice of Frances Cress Welsing. This chapter explores the fluidity of entanglements that characterized the lives of enslaved people of African descent in the United States alongside entanglement as an aspect of theoretical physics. The impossibility of marriage for so many—including the ritualized reductions of marriage to broom jumping during slavery—is evaluated as a parallel to the impossibility of (full) democratic citizenship for people of African descent historically and in the present. The institution of marriage is evaluated as a “heterexpectation” that serves as a problematic foundation of the nation-state. Entanglement theory gives spring, bounce, and direction to the possibilities of jumping justice. Culling some gems that surface in Welsing's approach, a tethered jumping presents another way to theorize justice.