We were in a sunlit room. Soft music was playing on the iPod dock, and incense burned in the windowsill when Indigo, one of my research participants, shared her ideas and experiences of family with me. 1 Indigo is a black lesbian in her early 30s. Because of instability in her biological family, she was mostly raised by a foster family. This long-term foster family was a model family, according to Indigo. The beautiful black couple had been married for more than 15 years; they were comfortably middle class and were pillars in their predominantly African American Pentecostal Christian community. They provided Indigo a home, opportunities for her future, and a strong sense of self that was grounded in Christian moral teachings. She described her foster parents as her âGod parents,â as in parents sent by God. When she came out as a lesbian to her foster mother, their relationship changed. Indigo was ridiculed, kicked out of their home, and denied further financial support for college. In the following excerpt of our conversation, Indigo describes a significant turning point in her relationship with her foster parents. It took place a few months after she disclosed her sexuality to them:
I remember that her facial expressions during the story were dramatic, and I could see that the drama was in the denouement of the story: she survivedâand would survive again, if ever in a similar situationâwithout pimping herself out. Later in the interview, she described this point in her life as a time when her own values of unconditional care and mutually beneficial relationships, overrode the dynamic of economic dominance and conditional care that was trying to play out between her and her foster parents. She draws on a resource provided through the practice of her Christian faithâfastingâin order to resist that dynamic. And when she realized that she would be âokay,â she drew on another sacred resource: a vision for new possibilities.I returned to Madison that summer to do my internship. It was really hard. I barely had enough gas to get there. I had no money, nothing. I lived in a hotel. I didnât have food. And so, I decided that I would call my parents. I called, and they were like, âWe ainât gonâ send you no money, but weâll come up there and take you grocery shopping.â They was only 4 hours away. So when they get there, she refused to come in my room. Then she said, âBefore we leave, letâs sit and talk.â So we sat down in the lobby and then she goes on with her rant, saying, âYou owe God. You owe God.â She brought up scriptures about hell and abomination. Iâm sitting there in tears. My âfatherâ is there, sitting, looking sorry for me, but obviously caught in between. And then something [happened] in me. I said, âYou know what? If I havenât learned nothing else about my life, I know what itâs like to not eat. I know what itâs like to eat. I know what itâs like to not have. I can survive all of that. I said, you know what? I am NOT that hungry. If Christianity has taught me anything, I know how to fast. So I will be ok. I said, I will not do this. Iâm not going to pimp myself out to your verbal abuse for a meal. Thank you, but no thank you. Thank you for driving up here, but Iâm not gonna do this anymore.â So that really changed my perception of family. Like, dang, I thought this normal shit was like the best stuff. This stuff was supposed last. You know, mom and dad âŠ
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Black queer experiences and articulations serve as the foundation for Black Queer Ethics, Family, and Philosophical Imagination. This book offers an ethical perspective and method that challenges the static, removed-from-experience approach normative in theological and philosophical ethical discourse. Throughout the book, I locate and explore black queer moral agency in my research participantsâ experiences and stories, highlighting the values and practices that they shared through interview excerpts like the one above. I use these stories, along with critical textual analysis, to illustrate black queer moral practices of confronting and destabilizing norms, creatively resisting the disciplinary technologies of race, gender, and sexuality in families, and subverting normative ideas of family through the imagination of new relational possibilities.
The American Context and Christian Ethics
In 1996, Congress passed and President Bill Clinton signed into law the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). This law essentially has two effects. First, no State is legally obligated to treat a relationship between persons of the same sex as a marriage, even if the marriage is legal in another State. Second, the federal government defines marriage as a union between one man and one woman. 2 For Christian ethicists concerned with âgay marriage,â the discourse surrounding the issue has evoked new academic inquiries and summoned a more attentive and hands-on approach to Christian social ethics. Christian ethicists simply cannot deny the consistent presence of (Western) Christian influences in the conversation about sexualities and marriage since it has provided modes of discourse, sources for moral discernment, solicited and unsolicited social accountability, and common language for understanding social agreements, secular ritual, and even public and private sphere regulation. 3 Such Christian ethical discourse (and the hegemonic power of Christianity) ought to be of great interest to any scholar of politics, religion, sociology, and social and critical theory in American society, especially those who are concerned with âfamilyâ as a subject. 4 The federal legalization of same-sex marriage in 2015 does not eliminate the need for such investigation. Instead, it calls for our attention to the institutions, social mores, and religious discourses that contribute to the normalization of American society. Moreover, as Christian ethicists and Americans invested in sound ethical dialogue, we must all concern ourselves with how universal notions of social justice and democracy collude with relative norms of fairness, difference, and equalityâespecially as they are mediated through a Christian ethical lens.
Our concern for social justice and democratic living requires from Christian ethics a plurality of approaches to moral reasoning. It is time for normative Christian ethical discourse to more purposefully contend with persons and ethical perspectives that have traditionally been marginalized, including but not limited to womanist and feminist theological perspectives, queer theories, and black queer people. Contemporary progressive Christian ethics has matriculated through a liberation theology stream, spanning latino/a, black, white, feminist, Asian, and womanist theo-ethical perspectives. The liberation theology tradition makes the experiences and social realities as well as the theoretical traditions of those who are marginalized a starting point for reflection and inquiry. New and emerging discourse on social realities and human experience must take into account the discourses that are being used to explain and interrogate those realities that exist in the subaltern. Since American society will continue to be informed by Christian ethical discourse, we must vigorously challenge norms within Christian ethics by providing even more experiential sources for ethical reflection and diligently deepening the relationships among conversing communities. Christian ethics must not only acknowledge the reality of diversity and pluralism, but it must also envisage and consistently work to create a just and loving community because of that reality. I suggest that some of this work may be accomplished by disrupting the power dynamics that perpetuate hierarchies within a diverse and plural environment; resisting those powers in macro and micro ways; and imagining new relationships that subvert the very norms that propel them.
Rather than a direct contribution to the conversation on gay marriage, my work in this book interrogates one of the sub-layers of the issue: moral norms of family and kinship that foreground the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality. American social and political discussions about marriage derive from long-standing norms of family and kinship structures that are based on deeply rooted concepts of gender roles and power differentiation. These concepts propagate dominant social narratives that hierarchically arrange categories of identity. Socially constructed categories of race, gender, and sexuality inform teleological notions of goodness, thereby expanding or limiting visions of how we ought to interact. This reflexive relationship among race, gender, and sexuality and moral discourse on family necessitates that weâas ethicists and moral agents in generalâlook beyond the question of whether all citizens should have the same rights regarding marriage to consider, instead, how socially constructed categories of personhood (as well as the relational qualities that inform them) shape norms of morality, notions of kinship, and hopes for a just society.
Scholars, activists, communities, and individuals have struggled publicly and privately with the concept of family and the moral âstuffâ that surrounds it. 5 Underlying these conversations, I see a basic ethical interest: how can we BE together? And, how does being together affect or influence our common context? In this book, I am particularly interested in the ways that womanism, feminism, queer theories, and black queer people have taken on these questions and engaged in public discourse on concepts of family and kinship. Each discourse has something distinctive to say about how diverse family experiences reflect different needs from society and thus contribute critical reflection on moral narratives of family life in our context. I offer a brief survey of the foundational norms of these perspectives along with what they potentially add to the conversation in the next section.
While I agree that there is brokenness evident in the ways we are thinking and making policy about family, I contend that instead of a crisis in the family, we are simply witnessing further development in the landscape of American relationships. The religious and political outcries of discomfort with diverse familiesâ expectations to be recognized and treated fairly are responses to the destabilizing impact of those developments. However, this changing landscape is and always has been important in a society made of people whose relationships and/or family makeups reflect more complicated circumstances and identities than the stereotype of the white heterosexual family with two children and a dog could begin to describe. America comprises households led by same-sex partners, interracial families, interreligious families, immigrant and transnational families, single-parent households, multigenerational households, co-parenting units due to separation or divorce, and more. The American family is a queer family. The idea, therefore, of queer family life relative to black queer subjectivity and sexuality/gender is consistent with these social trends. 6
We may find it fairly easy to trace the dividing lines in the debate about sexual queerness and family between the ĂŒber-conservative DOMA supporters and the most radical marriage abolitionists. What proves more difficult, I find, is interrogating the queer nature (and subsequent complications) with which âblacknessâ operates in our common notions of family. In this work, I have found myself asking an ongoing question: what difference has race played in queering our norms of family, and how have black people, in particular, responded to this self- or other-imposed queerness? Throughout this book, I build on the assumption that the family is a key site for individual and community development. In particular, I recognize that the black family has always been a site for moral learning and practical survival for people in the black community. 7 Because I am interested in tracing the development of moral agency and relationality among black queers, I recognize that the black family is a significant departure point for my analysis.
As I mentioned in the Preface, our countryâs practice of chattel slavery had as much impact on ongoing norms of black and white families as it did on the specific reality of enslaved blacks. Of particular import is the legal sanction of âbreeding slaves.â That is, once the identities that most often comprised the group from which enslaved persons came transitioned to the natural slave, then personhood for black people shifted outside the realm that ought to govern such civil social organizing as family. In short, chattel slavery made black people into economic objects who, by definition, did not have kinship. Therefore, black families generally could not participate in the developing trends of ânormativeâ US family life.
The difficulties for black people to access normative family status were continued and perpetuated by the second-class citizenship that black people have experienced in this country since emancipation. Specifically, during the 100 years between emancipation and the Civil Rights Movement black people carefully traversed the space between establishing selfhoods/communities that celebrated black life and the self-policing that emerged as a way to assimilate as successfully as possible into American society. 8 Shaped by a Cartesian/Pauline separation of âspiritâ and âflesh,â Augustinian sexual ethics, Victorian ideals about proper inter-gender behavior, and white American middle-class notions of ânuclearâ families, black norms, and practices of kinship established a politics of respectability that would act as the foundation for black moral subjectivity. 9
The role of black churches in continuing this politics of respectability has been vast, multipurposed, and multifaceted. On one hand, black churches have named the ways in which âthe black communityâ has suffered emotionally, economically, and even physically from existing within kinship structures that are nonnormative. Single-parent households, âdead-beat dads,â and HIV/AIDS-spreading sodomites have represented, in many black churches, evidence of a crisis in the black family that contributes to poverty and violence within the community. On the other hand, black churches have noted that even if they were to eliminate the taboos within black family life, the realities of intergenerational households, large progeny, and economic instability still placed black families outside of the norm. The responses of many black churches to this conundrum have been to work within a politics of respectability in order to gain as much social and moral stock as possible. 10
Through the proliferation of prosperity gospels, âSave the Black Familyâ campaigns, mandates against homosexuality from the pulpit, bible studies on premarital sex, the development of âsinglesâ and âcouplesâ ministries, and more, black churches have worked diligently to establish and protect the ideal black family. This work, unfortunately, has been an attempt to eliminate all signs of queerness, even if that meant publicly and repeatedly denouncing the moral subjectivity of many within their own community. Black (sexually) queer people are among those who have been rendered morally abject in this enterprise. As heteronormative black churches gain moral ground by exercising these politics, many black queers find ourselves exhibiting distinctive moral qualities and living in disruptive, creative, resistant relation to the families and family values that our heteronormative relatives employ for religious, social, and political access to normativity.
Purpose of the Book
The development of...