Narrative Activism: Writing Desire For Injury-Bound Individuals Available to Purchase

In her autobiography, God Save the Queen Diva!, Big Freedia, a Black, gender-bending “bounce” artist, describes being targeted with violence by family members and strangers, at home and in the streets, for expressing queerness and femininity while inhabiting a male body. Despite her capacity to push boundaries with her music and performance art, Big Freedia's experiences of violence speak to the constant risk that Black queer individuals face in their day-to-day lives and in both public and seemingly private places. In Black Queer Freedom: Spaces of Injury and Paths of Desire (which begins with a discussion of God Save the Queen Diva!) GerShun Avilez highlights the impact of injury's threat to Black queer life throughout the diaspora. His focus, however, settles on how writers working in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries craft narratives of queer desire that elicit freedom from within the space of injury. He...