The Smear: Vibrational Flesh and the Calculus of Black Queer Becoming in Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight

dionte harris is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Virginia and current Provost Predoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. His dissertation project, “Black Boyhood and the Queer Practices of Impossibility in African American Literary and Cultural Productions,” examines the ways writers and artists mobilize queer Black boyhoods—and the figure of the queer Black boy—to engage and complicate discourses on Black and queer life and being, Black queer masculinities, and Black childhoods. His analysis is grounded in a framework he calls Black queer becoming—a mode of Black and queer theorizing that interrogates the relationship between anti-Blackness and queerphobia to understand how queer Black boys experience race, gender, and sexuality as a lived reality, social identification, and relation to power structures. His research has been supported by a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship, a Yale lgbt Studies Research Fellowship, a uva Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship, as well as the University of Pennsylvania’s Provost’s Predoctoral Fellowship.