Inside the Black (W)hole: A Queer Black Feminist Retrospective Free

Since black women’s forced migration to the New World, sexuality has been a discursive and material terrain of struggle. In the context of the Atlantic slave trade, white captors reduced black captive bodies to fleshy containers, rife with pansexual potential, for anyone and everyone’s desires, fantasies, and projections (Spillers). The fungibility of black (female) flesh concretized (the normativity of) white gender and sexuality by offering a visual-cum-discursive picture of difference through and against which to establish whiteness as the signifier of humanness. Black female captives toiled in the fields like and alongside “their men”; they tended to the intimate sphere of the slave quarters like “women”; and the systematic sexual exploitation of black (female) captives’ bodies reproduced the (human) capital that white captors exploited, raped, whipped, sold, and monetized to reproduce and sustain the master’s enclave and u.s. nation state (Davis).

We often start with this New World scene of subjection because the pornotropic objectification of black female flesh—this different kind of traffic in female bodies—was the condition of possibility for the New World and has continued to shape the terms of sexual subjectivity for everyone in slavery’s afterlife (Hartman, Scenes; Sharpe). Nineteenth-century notions of white female sexual purity, for example, were constructed in relation to black women’s imagined promiscuity and black men’s imagined sexual depravity (Welter). Consequently, countless black people were—and continue to be—lynched around the United States under the state-sanctioned guise of white female sexual protection and preservation (Wells-Barnett). The normativity of sexual violence against black women not only engendered the formation of early twentieth-century black feminist activist groups such as the National Association of Colored Women, a group that arose to combat the negative sexual stereotypes of black women used to justify rape and sexual violence, but also spurred the migrations of millions of black people to u.s. urban centers such as Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York City in search of sexual freedom (Hartman, Wayward; Higginbotham, Righteous; Hine; Roach). The subsequent policing of black women’s sexuality in urban centers produced carceral (domestic and labor) regimes that were inextricably linked to black women’s sexual exploitation on city streets, in jail cells, and in white households (Carby; Hartman, Wayward). This is but one part of the history of sexuality that is too often forgotten in the telling and retelling of white feminist and queer “stories” about the pleasures and dangers of sexuality (Hemmings).

In her 1994 differences essay, “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality,” queer black lesbian feminist theorist Evelynn Hammonds contends that such historical silences in white feminist and queer genealogies reproduced whiteness as the “normative state of [sexual] existence” and, in the process, scripted blackness as the paradigmatic site of sexual absence, difference, and negation (128). “Black (W)holes” first appeared in a 1994 special issue of differences titled “More Gender Trouble: Feminism Meets Queer Theory.” As the special issue title suggests, this project was self-consciously conceived and produced in the wake of now canonical white feminist publications such as Gayle Rubin’s “Thinking Sex” (1984) and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990). These feminist texts explored the theoretical utility of parsing sex, gender, and sexuality as distinctive analytical and experiential categories.

Alongside such white feminist critical productions, the interdisciplinary field(s) of Black Women’s History and Black Feminist Studies insisted on the co-constitutive links between and among race, gender, sex, and sexuality, among other symbolic and social formations. They also argued that such links were rooted in the histories and afterlives of colonialism, Atlantic slavery, and other racialized regimes (Spillers). Indeed, black feminist historians Darlene Clark Hine and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham mapped black women’s histories of erotic and sexual resistance to state-sanctioned rape in the antebellum and postbellum American South and North (Higginbotham, Righteous); black lesbian feminist activists Audre Lorde, Cheryl Clarke, and the Combahee River Collective publicly called for an end to state-sanctioned and intracommunal sexual violence against black lesbians; and black feminist legal studies scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw worked across two articles to posit and develop intersectionality as a provisional analytic framework capable of attuning us to the polymorphous, interlocking forms of structural power that delimited the scope and utility of antidiscrimination doctrine for black women (“Demarginalizing”; “Mapping”).

Notwithstanding the aforementioned historical silences, this is the interdisciplinary black feminist history that both informs “Black (W)holes” and animates the opening lines of the essay, wherein Hammonds states that she was “hesitant” to entertain the idea of writing on queer theory precisely because of the ways in which the discursive and material terrain of “queer” had been so thoroughly coded as and by whiteness (126). Nevertheless, Hammonds wrote, and she refused to dwell on the persistent exclusion of black women, specifically black lesbians, from feminist and queer theory as they had come to be articulated and canonized. Instead, Hammonds inhabited the interdisciplinary field of black feminist studies to see what, if anything, black feminists might offer to more capacious discourses about silence, violence, agency, pleasure, commoditization, queerness, and black sexual articulation.

In “Against Proper Objects,” their now canonical introduction to the differences special issue in which “Black (W)holes” first appeared, Butler interrogates queer theory’s appropriation of sex (as regime or practice) as the proper object of queer theory and relegation of sex, articulated and conflated as (anatomical identity as) gender, to the proper (and primary) object of feminist inquiry (8). In a complex and elegant recital of decidedly white feminist and queer genealogies of sex and sexuality, Butler demonstrates the heterogeneity of a feminist studies project that, to their mind, had been largely characterized by ambiguity, contestation, and debate about the critical terms and conditions of sex, gender, and sexuality. Butler argues that queer theory egregiously sidesteps feminist heterogeneity in service of claiming methodological/theoretical autonomy from feminist theory. In the process, Butler argues, queer theory limited the scope, power, and possibility of both feminist theory and queer studies. Butler ultimately “insist[s] that both feminist and queer studies [. . .] move beyond and against those methodological demands which force separations in the interests of canonization and provisional institutional legitimation” (21). Paradoxically, in the process, Butler reproduces the construction of a white feminist/queer studies project that, in Evelynn Hammonds’s words, presumes whiteness “as the normative state of existence” (128).

Indeed, Butler stages the queer split from feminism around a number of their own “proper objects,” namely, the (imagined as white) feminist sex wars, articulated as a battle between Catharine McKinnon and Gayle Rubin. In a by now familiar feminist story, the sex wars are imagined to have unfolded across the infamous 1982 Barnard Conference, and the Barnard Conference is imagined as the central site through which feminist debates about sexuality would be both staged and reimagined on more polymorphous erotic terms that refuse a pleasure/danger binary. This characterization of the Barnard Conference contextualizes Butler’s critique that queer theory had appropriated Rubin’s “Thinking Sex” (first presented at the conference) as a “founding piece in gay and lesbian studies” while erasing the material and feminist conditions of its theoretical production and emergence (8). While I do not disagree with this latter point, in this feminist story, all of the forefathers and foremothers of Butler’s imagined feminist queer studies project are notably white. Meanwhile, in “Against Proper Objects,” black and women of color feminists and their feminisms are restricted to their own proper objects—race, racialization, coloniality, and postcoloniality. Feminists of color and their proper objects serve the singular critical function of evincing and exemplifying Butler’s notion of a heterogeneous and infinitely complicated feminist project that should not necessarily be separable from queer studies. There are many buried, invisibilized, and silenced histories, geopolitical contexts, critical agents, and social actors here.

Where would one even start with a theorization of racialized sexual subjectivity when such feminist stories map feminist theory as a settled, though heterogeneous project, in which feminists of color emerge only to direct attention to the named yet unexplored links between coloniality, racialization, gender, and sexual subject formation, and, by extension, to exemplify the complexities of feminist thought (Butler 17). Notwithstanding women of color coalitional histories and future possibilities, there is no discussion of feminists of color as a strategic critical or social formation. This positioning enables Gayatri Spivak and Chandra Mohanty (whose bodies of work specifically focus on the white feminist construction of postcolonial women in India and throughout the proverbial “third world”) to be conflated with bell hooks and Hortense Spillers, both of whom have demonstrated a specific and thoroughgoing black feminist investment in theorizing historical and contemporary (anti-)black racial formations in the United States. Since neither hooks nor Spillers are actually cited in “Against Proper Objects,” one might be surprised to learn that Spillers also made an appearance at and critical contribution to the Barnard Conference, as well as to the celebrated Pleasure and Danger anthology edited by Carol Vance.

In “Interstices,” her landmark contribution to Pleasure and Danger that became a canonical essay in black female sexuality studies, Spillers problematizes the white feminist construction of black female sexuality as an irreparable absence and pushes for a more heterogeneous understanding of “women” as a category of analysis as part of a critical effort to unleash fresh possibilities for (black) women’s erotic freedom and agency. Of course, Spillers cites black lesbian feminist Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic,” which Lorde presented in 1978 at the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, the site of an earlier rehearsal of the feminist sex wars. From “Uses of the Erotic” to “Interstices” to “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” to “Black (W)holes,” black feminists had long been engaged in the critical production of black female sexualities and/in the (contested) project of queer theory. In this way, “Against Proper Objects” is but one and yet another example of the absence and erasure of black feminists as knowledge producers and black female sexuality as an object of inquiry within queer feminist scholarship.

“Against Proper Objects” serves to frame the special issue that contains Evelynn Hammonds’s “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality,” an essay that has since become canonized as one of the critical progenitors of black female sexuality studies. Given the terrain that Butler does and does not outline, it is no wonder that Hammonds begins “Black (W)holes” by lamenting her hesitation to write about queer theory, which she articulates as a critical project in which she—as a self-identified black lesbian, queer, feminist writer, scientist, activist—felt illegible (126). After assessing some of the founding texts of the fields of lesbian and gay and queer studies—an earlier issue of differences on queer theory and The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader—Hammonds argues that because whiteness had been presumed as the normative state of existence, people of color’s erotic and sexual experiences had either been imagined as additive to an already established norm or rendered in metaphors of absence, erasure, and speechlessness (128). This critical practice is problematic not only because it fails to conceptualize a theory of racialized sexuality but also because it misses the function of race as a “global sign” or, after historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, a metalanguage that structures the symbolic and social fields (“African”). If race and processes of racialization overdetermine conceptions of the human, then there is no fully realized notion of white sexual subjectivity in the Western world without native genocide and (anti)blackness. More than that, when white feminists and queer theorists scapegoat people of color for their sexual silence, they fail to acknowledge their own complicity in the very processes of racialization that have both buttressed white sexual subjectivity and violently exploited people of color. One of Hammonds’s central interventions into an emergent queer studies project, then, is to implore white feminist scholars to “refigure (white) female sexualities so that they are not theoretically dependent upon an absent yet-ever-present pathologized black female sexuality” (131). This is a critical provocation that, thirty years later, white feminist and queer studies critics have yet to respond to fully, if at all.

While Hammonds takes white feminist and queer studies scholars to task for their explicit and implicit racism, she also refuses to perform “that by now familiar act taken by black feminists and offer a critique of every white feminist for her failure to articulate a conception of a racialized sexuality” (127). Instead, she endeavors to understand how “[b]lack feminist theorists have almost universally described black women’s sexuality, when viewed from the vantage of the dominant discourses, as an absence” (131). For Hammonds, this reading and writing practice is predicated upon the reproduction of specific historical narratives that center institutionalized and extralegal forms of sexual violence against heterosexual black women, silencing alternative, particularly queer, narratives of black female sexuality.

Close-reading the black feminist theoretical archive—namely, Spillers’s “Interstices,” Hine’s “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women,” and Higginbotham’s Righteous Discontent—Hammonds asserts, “The restrictive, repressive, and dangerous aspects of black female sexuality have been emphasized by black feminist writers while pleasure, exploration, and agency have gone under-analyzed” (134). Hammonds goes on to suggest that at least part of the problem has to do with black feminist theorists’ commoditization and super-exploitation within the u.s. academy. Thinking alongside black feminist writers such as Ann duCille and Barbara Christian, Hammonds urges black feminists to reclaim the body and subjectivity as we work to produce theory (134). Hammonds also invites black feminist theorists to move beyond a heterosexist framing of black female sexuality that centers violence and to turn to a focus on “black lesbian sexualities” that might yield a more agential and pleasurable discourse.

Notably, Hammonds’s discussion of “differently located black women”—black lesbian sexual subjects—lubricates her turn to the infinitely and deliciously productive metaphor of the black (w)hole. Drawing on her training as a historian of science, and in conversation with Michele Wallace’s critical meditation on the conditions of possibility for black female creativity, Hammonds likens black female sexuality to a black hole: while the “observer outside of the hole sees it as a void, an empty place in space [. . .] it is not empty; it is a dense and full place in space” (138). To mine the density and fullness to the end not of visibility but, rather, of articulation, Hammonds encourages black feminists to “think in terms of a different geometry” (139). Which is to say, black feminists must “develop reading strategies that allow us to make visible the distorting and productive effects these sexualities produce in relation to more visible sexualities” (139). As Hammonds makes clear through a brief discussion of the hiv/aids epidemic and its particularly violent effects on black women, the stakes are very high.

If part of the critical promise of the black (w)hole metaphor is that it contests the limits of what is and what might be known, seen, felt, and discoursed, then the critical purchase of Hammonds’s “Black (W)holes” essay is that it introduces and initiates polymorphous and unapologetically queer black feminist metaphors, discourses, and provocations through which to think sex and sexuality on different terms and in ways that grapple with complexity, contradiction, pleasure, danger, violence, and agency. Hammonds’s “Black (W)holes” sits in a constellation of (queer) black feminist critical productions, including some of the ones Hammonds herself engages that have come to serve as foundational texts for black female sexuality studies as a critical enterprise and under the umbrella of which academic institutions make hires, academic publishers solicit and publish book manuscripts, and contemporary black feminist critics define their areas of expertise. Yet, “Black (W)holes,” as the contributors to this special issue demonstrate, is not simply or only foundational to the formation of both black queer and female sexuality studies (and queer black female sexuality studies); it continues to be generative for feminist and queer thinking around and beyond questions of sex, gender, sexuality, subjectivity, race, racialization, representation, (the commoditization of) intellectual genealogies, institutionality, agency, care, pleasure, intimacy, erotic freedom, and so on.

This special issue stages a cross-disciplinary and intergenerational queer black feminist dialogue about what “Black (W)holes” has meant, and continues to mean, for queer black feminist knowledge production and (academic) subject formation. While it would be easy to dismiss such an effort as commemorative in ways that render Hammonds’s essay problematically static and/or fixed in time and space, the goal of black feminist commemoration, of this specific retrospective, is to move beyond the positioning of black lesbian feminism produced before the twenty-first century as passé by acknowledging the ways in which queer black feminist knowledge production has been, and continues to be, generative of robust and varied intellectual debates, rife with continuities and discontinuities across time and space.

Indeed, Sharon Holland’s opening essay posits that since the publication of “Black (W)holes,” we have “struggled to think about Black female sexuality and how it matters to discussions of history, home, and for lack of a better word, homosexuality” and asks what it means for black feminist studies scholars to “labor in a field (figuratively and literally) under constant and reoccurring erasure” (13, 19–20). Thinking alongside Holland’s critical assessment of the (ever present) threat of institutional violence against, and erasure of, (queer) black feminist knowledge producers, Tiffany Willoughby-Herard offers a tender account of her own experiences of institutional violence. Willoughby-Herard’s experiences include contending with the violent force of heterosexism within black feminist discursive and material formations and she calls for the production of a counternarrative of black lesbian female sexuality that centers pleasure, desire, and agency. If part of the institutional violences that Holland and Willoughby-Herard articulate are bound up in processes of discursive and material illegibility to and within academic institutional formations, then V Varun Chaudhry offers a black queer transfeminist engagement with the medical industrial complex and the discourses it produces to “[mine] the possibilities of dysphoria to name the fraught, uncomfortable, and messy relationships between bodies and bodies of knowledge, that is, between the complexity and mystery of individual subjects’ embodied experiences and the language that we use (or that others might use) to classify or identify ourselves” (55). Chaudhry ultimately argues that dysphoria “names the simultaneously affective, psychic, and structural gap between institutional logics and individual subject formation (and possibilities for collectivity therein)” (56). Working within and against the medical industrial complex (literally and figuratively), Amber Jamilla Musser situates “Black (W)holes” in relation to a vibrant field of black lesbian/queer feminist/crip erotic studies, embodied most fully by Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals. Musser offers the figure of the masturbating cancer patient as one “possible erotic representation” that “tells us something about some of the silences and politics that surround Black queer sexuality more generally while also providing a method for this theorization to be felt in the broader world” (86). Julian Kevon Glover directs attention to televisual representation of black erotic freedom, asking how contemporary television shows such as Katori Hall’s P-Valley might point to black queer transfeminist methods of suturing the complexities and contradictions innate to the black (w)hole as part of a collective effort to articulate “idiosyncratic visions of erotic freedom that [. . .] can alter the basis upon which people bear witness, affirm, and relate to one another” (100). Kimberly Bain’s “hold: space” asks what it is like inside a black (w)hole and turns to the paradigmatic black hold of the Atlantic slave ship to ground conceptions of the black (w)hole—and the intimacies and erotic practices therein—within Atlantic histories of chattel slavery and its enduring afterlife in the Americas. Meanwhile, Petal Samuel’s essay (re)turns us to a different geography—the physics of spacetime—to map a diasporic black feminist genealogy in which the black (w)hole emerges as a fertile, transnational, polymorphous metaphor through which to think/map/feel the ways in which black female sexuality and subjectivity might disturb—through writing, thinking, being, and so on—the conditions of transnational empire. Megan Finch and Moya Bailey also think through alternative intellectual genealogies of the “black (w)hole.” Finch mobilizes the black (w)hole to consider the “distortions created by the sometimes crushing weight of being black and being a black woman on any enterprise we might term (black) study,” dwelling specifically on the black (w)hole that Afropessimism engenders for black feminist academics (157). Bailey’s piece autotheoretically charts the intimate ways in which “Black (W)holes” has animated her own academic and personal journeys and theorizes the ways in which the essay has propagated new possibilities for queer black feminist thought. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s essay asks what it might mean to fully consider the ways in which Hammonds’s disciplinary background as a historian of science might matter to our understandings of black holes and “Black (W)holes.” Prescod-Weinstein brings astrophysical theorizations of the heterogeneity of empirical black holes to bear on the analytical purchase/ utility of the metaphor for black female sexuality studies. Finally, Naima Lowe’s sensuous closing poem, “Black (W)hole,” enacts the polymorphous possibilities that Hammonds suggested that the black (w)hole might yield.

Together, the contributors insist that queer black feminist knowledge production has, marks, generates, and sustains lifeworlds that precede and supersede the conditions of an intellectual product’s emergence (that is, a publication date). From inside the black (w)hole, we chart the history, present, and futurity of “Black (W)holes,” and, by extension, the black diasporic feminist, lesbian, queer, and trans intellectual and political lifeworlds in its wake.

Works Cited