Black Women-Loving Women's Socio-Sexual Narratives

Abstract

Following in the tradition of Afrocentricity, this project prioritizes and uplifts the voices of African Diasporic people by foregrounding Black women’s experiential knowledge. Using qualitative research methodologies situated in ethnography, such as participant observation, interviewing, and narrative storytelling, this project investigates how Black women-loving women (Black WLW) wield transformative power over their intimate lives. Specifically, this project examines how Black WLW “kweer” or transform identity, space, and sex in ways that are uniquely Black.

This study unveils how Black WLW across the Diasporas share the following unique commonalities: identifying as women-loving/kweer long after having heterosexual relationships and kweer childhood experiences; transforming generic place into age-mediated Black kweer space in Atlanta, Georgia; and heteronormalizing same-gender sexual behavior in their autoerotic and dyadic intimacies. How Black WLW “kweer” or transform identity formation, space, and sex helps us reimagine and reconfigure how we understand ethnicized notions of gender, placemaking, and sexuality. Forming identities, communities, and sexualities are not linear, generalizable processes that are universal to every community. Instead, my findings reveal distinct cross-cultural patterns in Black WLW’s socio-sexual behavior that are understudied.

Black women’s transformative power and mutability allows them to share more similarities than differences with one another across communities. Although the qualitative findings from this study stem primarily from Black American women living within the United States, participants with non-American nationalities and transnational upbringings offer perspectives that largely support the findings from Black American women located in the States. Since all participants in this study share common African ancestry, their widespread commonalities illuminate their identity formation, community establishment, and socio-sexual performativity. Overall, this study produces new knowledge about Black kweer socio-sexual culture that revolutionizes discourses around ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.