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Touching History to Find “a Kind of Truth”: Black Women’s Queer Desires in Post-Civil Rights Literature, Film, and Music

Shaw, John Brendan
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1468845503

Abstract Details

2016, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, English.
Drawing on Black feminist thought, queer theory, and queer of color critique, Touching History argues that Black women in the Post-Civil Rights era have employed diverse technologies in order to produce fictionalized narratives which counter the neoliberal imperative to forget the past. Black feminist and queer theorists have described the potential for artistic imaginings to address gaps in the historical record and Touching History follows this line of theory. Touching History examines an archive of Black women’s cultural productions since the 1970s which includes novels, short stories, essays, experimental video film, digital music videos and visual albums. Reading across these diverse media and genres, this project considers how Black women have made use of the affordances of specific technologies in order to tell stories which may be fictional yet reveal “a kind of truth” about the embodied and affective experiences of the past. These mediated images and narratives serve as extensions of their bodies that push against static ideas of the Black female body. Whether it’s the image in a film or video, or the digital avatar presented through social media, Touching History argues these representations are intimately linked to the corporeal presence of the Black female artist. Alongside technologies of the video camera and the digital camera, this project also considers other embodied technologies of expression including sadomasochism and the book and considers how these also provide a means for Black women to touch history. Examining the novels of Thulani Davis and Marci Blackman, the short fiction of Alice Walker, the experimental films of Cheryl Dunye, and music videos created by singers Erykah Badu and Beyonce, this project examines the expression of queer desires by Black women. In this project “queer” is not synonymous with gay and lesbian or same-sex desires, although it may at times be used to describe them. Queer desires in this project also include the desire to excavate and speak to the past in a society that prizes forward looking progress narratives, the desire to speak to the dead and not let them lapse into oblivion, the desire to center one’s marginalized self in a work of art, and the desire to resist labels (including that of “lesbian”). When this project describes Black women as touching history (a phrase taken up explicitly in chapter 1) this describes a queer relationship to personal and historical time. Black women’s queer relationship to time in these texts denies this normative desire to bury the past or claim it is something we have moved beyond (as in narratives of progress after the freedom struggles of the 1960s and 1970s).
Martin Joseph Ponce, PhD (Advisor)
294 p.
African American Studies; Film Studies; Literature; Womens Studies
Black feminist thought; Queer Theory; African American Literature; African American Film; Queer of Color Critique; Black Music; Black cultural studies; Queer historiography; Music Videos; Black Cultural Studies;

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Shaw, J. B. (2016). Touching History to Find “a Kind of Truth”: Black Women’s Queer Desires in Post-Civil Rights Literature, Film, and Music [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1468845503

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Shaw, John. Touching History to Find “a Kind of Truth”: Black Women’s Queer Desires in Post-Civil Rights Literature, Film, and Music . 2016. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1468845503.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Shaw, John. "Touching History to Find “a Kind of Truth”: Black Women’s Queer Desires in Post-Civil Rights Literature, Film, and Music ." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1468845503

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1468845503
574
© 2016, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.