When it comes to the Black churchwoman’s identity her place in the Black church is highly prescribed and restrained. Black churchwomen are reduced to roles such as ushers, nurses, Sunday school teachers, hostesses, secretaries, clerks, deaconesses, first ladies and mothers of the church. However limited the roles and identities of Black women are thought to be it rarely includes a queer sexuality. It is within this context that the Black lesbian church member has been marginalized, spoken for and in many ways silenced.
Using Foucault's theory of pastoral power and obligational salvation, this paper demonstrates how the discourses that come out of the church combined with the secular and spiritual power of the church has enabled the Black church to continue to fulfill its traditional obligations to both the spiritual self - in which the goal is salvation - and to the social self - in which the goal is civil liberties and freedom, whilst also holding on to forms of homophobia which both damage the spiritual self of Christian lesbians and restrict their civil liberties and freedom.
Through the ethnographic study of four Black Christian lesbians this project begins to fill the profound gap in the knowledge, analysis and understanding of Black lesbian experiences within the Black church by unpacking: (1) Black Christian lesbians’ experiences in the Black church; (2) strategies they have developed for dealing with homophobia found in Black churches and (3) the spaces they find for themselves in the church in which they can create a sense of belonging.