On Black Queer Freedom

​Black Queer Freedom: Spaces of Inquiry and Paths of Desire is as much a detailed dive into art and artists relationship to social justice, as it is a call to reimagine Black queer freedom and the parameters we’ve allowed ourselves to confine it to. Black queer individuals live with being perceived as a threat while simultaneously being subjected to the threat of physical, psychological, and social injury. Becoming attuned to and coming up against these threats has become the defining element in queer artists’ work throughout the black diaspora. Author Gershun Avilez analyzes the work of artists across the diaspora who, denied government protections, have used art to create spaces for justice.
Avilez divides the book into two parts, the first focusing on the denial and restriction of movement and spatial injustice through acts of interruption, how the state seeks to inhibit the movement of black queer bodies through public spaces, whether across the street or across borders. The second focuses on institutions –specifically prisons and hospitals- reliant on processes of exposure; seeking to make the minority body visible to public view and control the movement and meaning of the body through this exposure. All along the way, he uses diaspora as a way to draw out the subtleties of place and space, relating to different locations and communities and their individual complex and social histories, rather than simply joining all experiences together under a single banner of Blackness.
With this book, Avilez does the work of making it plain: art is part of the fight for freedom. Not just in the escapist, recreational, or pleasure seeking lens through which many of us were taught to view it; but as a tool to be used to reimagine our political, social, and legal lives and systems. Art opens our eyes not only to what is, but what could be. Avilez discusses how desire and art introduce pathways to black queer freedom when racism, homophobia and legalized violence threaten physical safety, civil rights, and social mobility. With this, Avilez introduces the conflict between injury and desire.
 
Artists use their art to explain and define or leave a record of what they saw around them. In creating, they also take on the task of addressing racial and sexual violence and injustices in the absence of legal recourse. Queer artists like the Queen Diva Big Freedia walk the tightrope of expressing their desires, while being under constant threat of injury; of which physical violence is an ever-present piece. The book opens with an exploration of Big Freedia’s autobiography, God Save the Queen Diva! Freedia’s “embrace of gender indeterminacy, which manifests in her use of feminine pronouns to refer to herself though she is male identified, alongside her same-sex desire has put her in danger many a time. Her insistence that “throwing game at another boy could get you a beat down” is a succinct read of the situation at hand. Queer desire endangers those who express it. (2) Freedia’s reluctance to openly express same sex desire, and (as a recent side note) to call out the blatant and violent homophobia of fellow Louisiana artist Lil Boosie, points to not only an avoidance of physical violence, but of an excommunication from the (Black) community. Addressing threats or simply expressing distress becomes an affront to the sensibilities of cisheterosexual White male oriented societies; calling attention to one’s plight as queer Black individuals becomes a call to action for majority groups to continue to bogart public spaces with renewed vigor.  As Avilez writes, “the Black queer body is immersed in a veritable threat feedback loop. This loop characterizes a situation in which a majority group feels threatened by the presence of a minority group, and this feeling encourages material and symbolic violence against the perceived threat of the minority group, which ironically strengthens (through discriminatory logic) the social perception of the minority population as menacing and troublemaking. This threat loop— that minority bodies are assumed to be threatening whether or not they pose an actual threat—constitutes the space of injury and creates the conditions for Black queer vulnerability.”
 
The concept of space is the bedrock upon which Avilez anchors his book. The study of queer bodies alone is not enough, context and meaning don’t exist inside a vacuum. We need an understanding of space—consisting of social elements, including laws, public opinion, built environments, family, and employers— to inform our understanding of the bodies they surround. (6) The author also tackles the personal versus private space, where space is a material good that can be owned, controlled, and manipulated. The commodification of space is directly linked to the racist and sexist politics born out of slavery; property belonged to and was managed solely by White men, who created and sustained the societal norms by which we are still bound. Minoritized bodies existing in spaces “owned” by the majority were to follow their rules, or be subjected to harm. We see this reflected in legal statutes such as those dictating physical use of spaces (loitering) and in societal attitudes towards queer desires (relegating displays of affection to private spaces, unfit for public view).
Avilez cautions his audience, caught in the struggle for civil recognition and rights, to not lose sight of the power of the creative. Our close reading and focus on freedom as a political process leads us down an ill-fated path. The state, a system founded and predicated on the premise of racialized and sexual supremacy, is not and cannot be all that we seek. It becomes the legitimator of desire and in that moment the killer of possibility. This leads us only to disappointment.
Note that this book is not a call for abandoning the fight for civil recognition and rights, but a plea to reimagine queer Black freedom as an ideal that also incorporates the temporary, the fleeting, the physical, the carnal, and the emotional. The author uses Black art and aesthetics as a touch point for what this new freedom could be, and along the way highlights the resiliency Black peoples have developed as method for creating a life often marked by constraint and the threat of injury.
 
Questions:
Both my questions were related to the internet and it’s use as a space within which queer black bodies are subjected to injury. I see the idea of reclaiming space reflected in queer Black creators refusal to go unnoticed. Fighting for trend and choreography credit on apps like TikTok; how can we create an online future that does not subject queer black bodies to not only the ever present violence of physical and emotional injury, but the harm caused by erasure?
Again using the internet as space, I ask, where do we see the demarcations of public versus private spaces for queer Black people in such a public sphere as social media, and how can a protection of this lead to a collective reimagining of freedom or formation of queer identity among Black youth?