Is It Lonely (T)here? Intramurals, Black (W)holes, and Black Feminism

This essay employs the autotheoretical critique of the university and celestial cartography pioneered in Evelynn Hammonds’s “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality” to understand the dynamic relationship between the silencing of black academics and black women/feminists in various sites of the neoliberal university. Narrating two experiences at Ivy League institutions, this essay meditates on the voids created and inhabited when the gravity of black study’s insistence on blackness as essential to the construction of modernity collapsed into and under the name of Afropessimism. The essay interrogates how looking for the distortion of the academic spaces that surround and engage black thought—namely, American studies, ethnic studies, and women and gender studies—renders visible (presuming we have the right instruments) the production of black (w)holes. Finally, it is interested in how the black intramural’s gender dynamics and the heteropatriarchy of its surrounds continue to silence black feminists.