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Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics,

Culture, and Society
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Black Gender and Sexuality: Spatial

Articulations
Shaka McGlotten , Dána-Ain Davis & Vanessa Agard-Jones
Published online: 14 Sep 2009.

To cite this article: Shaka McGlotten , Dána-Ain Davis & Vanessa Agard-Jones (2009): Black Gender
and Sexuality: Spatial Articulations, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society,
11:3, 225-229

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 Souls

Gender and Sexuality, II

Black Gender and Sexuality

Spatial Articulations
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na-Ain Davis, and Vanessa Agard-Jones

Shaka McGlotten, Da

How do Black gender and sexuality articulate spatially? At this

moment, where are the quotidian spaces occupied by Black gendered
and sexualized lives? We ask these questions in light of the years of
scholarship that have mapped Black gender and sexuality in terms
of emergent identities; scholars have talked about Black gender and
sexuality as always in a process of becoming. While this point of view
is intellectually and materially astute, there has been a concomitant,
if implicit, assumption, namely that Black gender and sexuality has
failed to actualize. In framing the essays included here in terms of
spatial articulation, we assume that racialized, gendered and sexua-
lized bodies have to some degree become concrete; they exist in spaces
and they have histories. That is to say, they are discovered and
known, not necessarily in process, but of processes. Black gender
and sexualities exist and have been shaped by urbanization, ghettoi-
zation, segregation, as well as the other ways communities of color
have realized and produced their own spaces, from squatting to mak-
ing concrete their middle-class aspirations in forms familiar to the
larger American Dream: home ownership, lawns, and even a few
picket fences. This volume elaborates important issues and critiques
of Black gender and sexuality in space—literally in places. In this, the
second volume of our exploration of the ‘‘special issue’’ of Black gender
and sexuality, the essays are thematically orchestrated around

Souls 11 (3): 225–229, 2009 / Copyright # 2009 The Trustees of Columbia University
in the City of New York / 1099-9949/02 / DOI: 10.1080/10999940903088119
 226 ^ Souls July^September 2009

spatial analyses of gender and sexuality, yet simultaneously forego

the fixity of either. In examining the quotidian spaces in which Black
gender and sexuality is lived, the essays work to situate sexuality and
gender somewhere.
Over the last five years academic inquiry has often sought to rescue
the Black body, gender, and sexuality from the pejorative, to shift
mediations of Black gender and sexuality away from the sphere of
pathology (Yancy 2008; Elder, Knopp, and Nast 2006; Johnson
2008). This revisionist impulse was motivated by historical construc-
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tions of a Black=gender=sexuality system that was strategically

deployed to engender fear and=or disgust and=or curiosity in particu-
lar places (we are thinking of Black men in elevators, the ‘‘wilding’’
boys in Central Park, the Jezebel in the American imaginary, and
Saartjie Baartman on display in Europe in the 1800s). More contem-
porarily, one can consider how social problems are ‘‘sewn’’ on the
Black body in spatial terms (consider poverty and teenage pregnancy
in inner cities) (Wilson 1990; Murray 1994). These examinations of
the spaces in which Black bodies live have rested on and perpetuated
tropes of danger and troubled negotiations of identity and anxiety.
But such rigid perspectives require more complex articulations about
sexuality and spatiality. More importantly, we want to contribute to
an intellectual trajectory that rests on other realities, that queers
assumptions about how and where Black people experience their
genders and sexualities.
Thus, the essays compiled here represent established and emergent
scholars who cross disciplinary boundaries in the ongoing process of
destabilizing Black gender and sexuality in the international,
national, local, and supralocal landscape. The authors interrogate
the significance of Black gender and sexuality as articulated and
actualized in particular places, as opposed to having come into exis-
tence as a result of being out of place (Mohanram 1999). They join
a growing cohort of geographers and literary critics who plumb the
deep connections between emplacement, Blackness, gender, and
sexuality (McKittrick 2006; McKittrick and Woods 2007). In their
work, the Black gendered and sexualized body is not rendered
expendable. Interiority—the private geography of experience and
meaning—intersects and interacts within and against public geogra-
phies and places. So here we are interested in a sort of intellectual
diaspora that attends to how the Black body ‘‘lives’’ in various loca-
tions. We are not so much concerned then about traditional iterations
of diaspora, about the movement of queered, gendered, and sexua-
lized bodies that have left one place and moved on to another. Rather,
we are interested in highlighting the possibilities and probabilities of
theorizing Black gender and sexuality in place-specific terms. The
 Gender and Sexuality, II ^ 227

authors examine spatial subjectivity that is constitutive of a number

of spheres: critical practices of survival in ballrooms; Black queer
communion in clubs; masculinities in prisons, South African mines,
and projects; meanings of Black gender and sexuality projected onto
the screen and on canvas, and in the production and expression of
interiority and exteriority of the self through literature.
Collectively, the intellectual mobility of the works mine the conflu-
ence between productions of self and experiments with practices of
sexuality and gender in ways that underscore the importance of space
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and place. As such they are geographically broad, considering such

locations as the American South; Detroit; South Africa and Chicago;
New York, the Caribbean, and Mozambique.
The first article, by Simone Drake, examines filmmaker Craig
Brewer’s and artist Kara Walker’s examination of the South. She
seeks to root experiences of U.S. racial melancholia that both artists
explore in a particularly southern sensibility. For Drake, memory
and place are organizing themes for both artists, and they gesture
toward a reconciliatory or recuperative vision for gender and racial
differences.
Through performance ethnographic work on Ballroom culture and
HIV=AIDS in Detroit, Michigan, Marlon M. Bailey argues that Ball-
room community members deploy forms of intravention, strategies
for HIV=AIDS prevention that are created by and emerge from within
the Ballroom community, a so-called ‘‘high risk community.’’ Moving
on to another location, Rashad Shabazz’s essay explores the ways in
which carceral or prison space and the techniques that make prison
punishment possible, shape Black living and working space and
how in turn they influence Black masculine performance. Using the
Robert Taylor Housing Projects and South Africa’s mining compounds
as case studies, he examines the carceral logic that underwrote these
spaces, specifically focusing on the practices that seek to fix Blacks
spatially.
Finally, historian Doreen Drury offers a critical biography of Pauli
Murray, who struggled with the threat that being a woman, her love
of other women, and her preference for masculine style posed to
her dreams of becoming a civil rights leader. This article considers
Murray’s efforts to resolve her conflicts through several means,
including the research and writing of her family history, Proud Shoes.
The narrative ‘‘First Person’’ by Jafari Allen develops an epistemol-
ogy to uncover the history of Black gay intimacies and the spaces
through which they move. Allen’s essay draws on his own experiences
in Black gay clubs to reflect on life and freedom for Black queers. At
the same time, he engages recent debates in queer studies about
politics and futurity, challenging ideas that queer politics are or
 228 ^ Souls July^September 2009

should be dead. Indeed, for Allen, even the melancholic nostalgia

that informs his memories of the Black queer clubs he frequented
are important ontological and political resources for contemporary
Black feminist and queer studies and other democratically or
utopian-minded political projects.
As in the last issue, we continue with the new category ‘‘Interven-
tions.’’ In this issue, two of the three shorter pieces relate findings
from research projects and one is a commentary on a conference.
Marshall and Maynard’s ‘‘Black Female Sexuality’’ shares findings
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from a questionnaire survey distributed to female university students

in Barbados and Jamaica to reveal diverse attitudes about female sex-
ualities in the Caribbean. Participants acknowledge that at the same
time that Caribbean societies are undergoing positive changes about
sexuality as a consequence of globalization and the mass media,
degrading notions that women are promiscuous and viewed as sex
objects, persist. McCoy’s research ‘‘Ain’t I a Man: Gender Meanings
among African American Men who have Sex with Men’’ illuminates
the meaning, identity, risks, and cultural beliefs of 20 African
American men who have sex with men (MSM) and the consequences
that labeling men as ‘‘gay’’ or on the ‘‘down low’’ has on HIV=AIDS
interventions. The last ‘‘Intervention,’’ by Matebeni, ‘‘Feminizing
Lesbians, De-gendering Transgender Men: A Model for Building
Lesbian Feminist Thinkers and Leaders in Africa?’’ examines the
2008 lesbian feminist leadership institute held in Mozambique. The
Institute sought to develop African lesbian feminist thinkers and
leaders and was attended by diverse participants, which facilitated
an interrogation of African feminism. At the same time it highlighted
issues around sexuality, particularly same-sex sexuality, as well as
contentious issues about gender. Reflecting on this institute fore-
grounds many of the challenges posed to a model of African feminism
used to negotiate sexual orientation, race, class, and gender.
Evidenced in this volume are the manifestations of powerful
political struggles and structures that shape Black gender and
sexuality as ideological, epistemological, and spatial articulations.

Works Cited
Elder, Glenn, Lawrence Knopp, & Heidi Nast. 2006. Sexuality and Space. In Gary L. Gaile, Cort
J. Willmott & Contributor Gilbert White, eds., Geography in America at the Dawn of the 21st Century.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Johnson, E. Patrick. 2008. Sweet Tea: Gay Black Men of the South. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press.
McKittrick, Katherine. 2006. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
McKittrick, Katherine & Clyde Woods. 2007. Black Geographies and the Politics of Place. Boston:
South End Press.
 Gender and Sexuality, II ^ 229

Monhanram, Radhika. 1999. Black Body: Women, Colonialism and Space. Minneapolis: Minnesota
University Press.
Murray, Charles. 1994. Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980. New York: Basic Books.
Wilson, William Julius. 1990. The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public
Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Yancy, George. 2008. Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race. Lanham,
Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.
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