Making Black Queer Home

When I sat down to start my book Black Dwelling: Home-Making and Erotic Freedom in the summer of 2020, in the wake of massive personal shifts—having just moved across the country for a new position, bought a home in a predominantly white Boston suburb, and rooted into newly “gay” married life—a pandemic hit, the state locked down, Black Lives Matter was mattering (again), and my white neighbors were glaring at me and my family every time we stepped outside for a breath of fresh air. There were more Trump than BLM signs decorating neighborhood lawns, so we did not have to do much guesswork about the community's political standpoints. And it was terrifyingly easy to imagine how those standpoints might translate into forms of extralegal anti-Black, anti-queer, and anti-trans terror. So when I began to outfit my home with security cameras to countersurveil my neighbors, I had no illusions about Black queer home space as a site of unmitigated sanctuary, though I yearned for that.

I enter into this conversation on domesticity from a queer Black feminist place, one that acknowledges the violence of colonial and cisheteronormative constructions of home as well as the power, pleasure, and possibility of home for minoritized subjects and community formations. I recognize the affordances and constraints of queer identity politics: if I do not name myself for myself, I risk subjection to external definitions, projections, and standards that could never wholly define me (Lorde 1984). I am also fundamentally invested in a Black queer feminist politic that holds space for the Blackness of queerness, or the “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens” (Cohen 1997) who enflesh and embody the nonheteronormativity of Black being and becoming. These punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens—and their queer homemaking practices—inhabit the center of Black Dwelling.

Black Dwelling asks what happens when Black women claim and cultivate home in the United States, a space that has historically denied, and continues to deny, Black women—trans and nontrans—access to privacy and safety. This deceptively simple question emerged from deep, sustained engagement with (queer) Black feminist critical and creative thought: Sylvia Wynter's (2003) meticulous geographies of the human; Hortense Spillers's (1987) theoretical excavations of “the black woman”; Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley's (2008) sensuous writing on the mati work in the slave ship's hold; Angela Davis's (1971) respatialization of the slave quarters as a countergeography of Black freedom-making; Saidiya Hartman's (2019) tender portrait of the wayward lives of Black migrant girls and women in US urban centers; Audre Lorde's (1982) biomythographical pursuit of (Black) lesbian community in New York City from the late 1950s onward; Alice Walker's (1983) search for her mother's garden in the US South; bell hooks's (2015) construction of homeplace as a site of Black feminist resistance; Letisha West's Black living room lessons in imperial San Diego, California (Roach 2022); and so on.

From Wynter to West, Black feminism and Black women's lived experiences complicate easy understandings of the question of what it means for Black (queer) women to claim and cultivate home in the United States. The question of Black women's homemaking necessarily starts with the question: what (or who) is a Black woman? An “ungendered” (female) social subject whose symbolic and material body constructs the boundaries of what it means to be human (and therefore a citizen, a member of gendered civil society, a laborer, and so on) (Spillers 1987) and whose vestibular position in relation to human (and national) culture(s) renders her the “belly of the world” (Hartman 2016: 166). Black female flesh catalyzed a new world. And this so-called new world was predicated, in part, on centuries of Black dispossession and dislocation from any semblance of home—geopolitical territory, land, nation, culture, community, family, household, self. We find ourselves in queer places when we try to make sense of what these histories might mean for a Black sense of place (Spillers 1987: 68). Do we imagine home as geopolitical territory, and if so, might that be somewhere along the Gold Coast, where millions of African people-cum-captives were snatched and stolen? Would we have to lose our mothers to get (back) there (Hartman 2007)? Is Black queer home the now theoretically revered slave ship? Is it the Black (queer) Atlantic? The sand? The slave quarters? The “post”-colony?

If normative conceptions of home are defined as “a dwelling place; a person's house or abode; the fixed residence of a family or household; the seat of domestic life and interests” then Black (queer) home is defined, at least in part, by dispossession and dislocation from place, self, and normative understandings of kinship and community.¹ Historically and symbolically, then, the Black home is and remains a queer home. Saidiya Hartman (1997: 160) observes how, in the wake of slavery, the Black domestic became “the ultimate scene of surveillance” wherein state agents policed what they perceived as the queerness of Black being and householding. In Wayward Lives, Hartman (2019: 251) centers the ways in which early twentieth-century state authorities marked Black domestic spaces as promiscuous, illegal, and criminal, enabling “great latitude in the surveillance and arrest of black women and tenement residents.” The same Black women and tenement residents who were arrested in Harlem probably “quit the south” (Hine 1989: 914)—and the “domestic carceral regimes” (Haley 2016: 55) that defined and delineated Black women's experiences of dwelling and labor (exploitation), only to find themselves on the Bronx slave market. Fifteen years after Ella Baker and Marvel Jackson Cooke documented the relegation of Black women laborers to violent, exploitative white New York City households, the United States Department of Labor commissioned and published a report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” that would scapegoat Black women and their “nonheteronormative” domestic arrangements for the “Black community's” alleged failure to “achieve” social, political, and economic parity with whites, codifying the Black household as a paradigmatic object of state violence, surveillance, and scrutiny (Ferguson 2004).

In 2017, the Institute for Women's Policy Research partnered with the National Domestic Workers alliance to publish the first comprehensive report on “The Status of Black Women in the United States” (DuMonthier, Childers, and Milli 2017). Given the aforementioned history that shapes present-day conditions, it was perhaps unsurprising to encounter statistics demonstrating the mass houselessness crisis affecting Black women throughout the diaspora (a social issue that is now part of public consciousness due to the organizing efforts of Black collectives such as Moms4Housing in the Bay Area) and the overrepresentation of Black women in the (domestic) service economy. The report predicted the “negative public health implications” for (housing-insecure) Black women public-service-sector workers, who are forced to have “frequent contact with the public” without access to basic protections like safe, affordable housing, comprehensive health coverage, and access to sick days.

If we go—or rather, stay—with the hold, we find, in Spillers's words (1987: 72), a critical “counter-narrative” to notions of American domesticity, defined by the “fundamental effacement and remission of African family and proper names.” Black domesticity is queer domesticity in relation to colonial-cum-state power, yes. But, as I have learned from Black queer dwelling and Black Dwelling, there are (and have always been) polymorphous traditions of Black queer domesticity, of making Black queer home. These traditions encompass feeling with and feeling for each other in the hold (Tinsley 2008); negotiating the sumptuous silence around queer Black life on porches in the Caribbean (Silvera 1992); grappling with the polymorphous meanings of quareness and racialized sexuality on our grandmothers’ southern porches (Johnson 2000); reclaiming our gardens as sites of beauty, creativity, and Black maternal power (Walker 1983); preparing hot cups of tea in our kitchens as precursors to (hopefully even hotter) lesbian sex (Musser 2015); and designing beautiful Black living rooms that challenge state-sponsored narratives about the value of Black women and our homemaking efforts (Roach 2022). In my work, Black queer domesticity offers a way of holding not only the long and ongoing Black (geo)political struggles to (re)claim space and homemake in the context of white heteronormative supremacist imperial terror and violence; it is also a quotidian freedom practice through which we unmake imperial geographies by intentionally cultivating Black queer home in ways that rehearse, imagine, and enact free worlds that have yet to be embodied, inhabited, and made.

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