by Shoniqua Roach, Assistant Professor, Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Feminist and queer sexual liberation epistemologies map a linear pathway to sexual citizenship. Indeed, these epistemologies presume that a sexual subject comes to erotic consciousness, battles one’s internalized and external phobias to affirm that consciousness, flees one’s phobic environment to claim erotic visibility, and stakes claim to mainstream forms of state-sanctioned sexual citizenship (e.g., marriage equality rights). That is, feminist and queer theorists often predicate sexual citizenship and erotic freedom on liberal recognition and the public acquisition of sexual rights. However, this pathway to sexual citizenship is often foreclosed to racialized sexual subjects, particularly black women. As black feminist scholars such as Saidiya Hartman and Simone Browne have articulated, the state continues to pathologize black female sexualities and reproductive capacities, fetishize and exploit black female bodies, and produce insidious tropes of black femininity (in social policy and popular culture) that adversely affect black communities. If sexual citizenship is predicated on liberal recognition, and thus tied to erotic visibility, and the public sphere continues to function as a site of discursive and material violence for black women, how do black women imagine, rehearse, and enact sexual citizenship? What are the stakes of black women turning inward—psychically and materially—to locate possibilities for sexual citizenship and erotic freedom? And what possibilities for black sexual citizenship and erotic freedom exist within domains that feminist and queer sexual liberation epistemologies have overlooked, dismissed, or flat out castigated?

My book, Black Sexual Sanctuaries, explores the possibilities for black women’s sexual citizenship that exist within domains often overlooked or dismissed, including privacy and domesticity. Rethinking black feminist and queer engagements with privacy and domesticity, this manuscript proposes a conceptual framework of Black Sexual Sanctuaries, which describes the immaterial and material spaces—e.g., silence, interiority, quietness, privacy, and domesticity—through which black feminine subjects have conjured counterintuitive possibilities for black sexual citizenship in the face of state-sanctioned infringements on black erotic life.

Utilizing archival, close-reading, and performance studies methods, Black Sexual Sanctuaries assembles an urgent black sexuality studies archive of post-emancipation black women’s struggles for black sexual citizenship, including the role of early twentieth century black women’s friendship in constructing silent erotic spheres for the articulation of same-sex desire between middle-class black women; working-class black women’s quilting as a quiet repository for articulations of black autoeroticism; private formations of black maternal desire within black women’s civil rights era literary cultures; and black domesticity as a ripe site for black collective erotic possibility in the popular musical repertoires of neo-soul women. By focusing on the productive interplay and tensions between black sexuality, state power, and privacy, Black Sexual Sanctuaries illuminates the ways that race, class, gender, and sexuality intersect to both shape and circumscribe enactments of sexual citizenship and erotic freedom. In the process, Black Sexual Sanctuaries enriches critical theories of sexual citizenship, erotic freedom, and sexual liberation in post-emancipation societies.

By centering black women’s transhistorical attempts at erotic freedom in the face of state-sanctioned racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia, Black Sexual Sanctuaries queries what it means and looks like to carve out spaces of erotic freedom in spaces that are always already restrictive. It interrogates what black women have been willing to both cultivate and forgo for erotic freedom. In the process, Black Sexual Sanctuaries conceptually and materially redefines how we can understand what “sanctuary” and “freedom” can look like. For example, each of my chapters historicizes post-emancipation era state-sanctioned infringements on black erotic life in relation to performances of black women’s sexuality that both illuminate and challenge such infringements. Analyzing the specific material conditions and political structures under which black women enact sexual citizenship and erotic freedom enables a fresh approach to performances of black female sexuality that other scholars have historically written off as sexually repressive or respectable. For instance, one of my chapters analyzes late nineteenth century sociopolitical policies and practices that inhibited black women’s political participation in the public sphere, circumscribing them to the domestic sphere. Rather than reading black women’s engagements in the domestic sphere as mere capitulations to dominant discourses of respectable femininity and true womanhood, I consider the ways in which black women mobilized friendship scrapbooks to articulate the domestic sphere as a site of sexual citizenship and erotic freedom, particularly in the face of a racist and sexually violent public sphere. In so doing, I challenge historical (black) feminist approaches to sites such as the domestic sphere and friendship scrapbooks as too respectable to be sexually transgressive, as well as feminist and queer theory’s historical castigation of privacy and domesticity. In so doing, I reveal the historical and ongoing utility of privacy and domesticity for racialized sexual subjects who, in the face of racism, economic exploitation, and state-sanctioned sexual violence, have historically articulated a radically different relationship to their private spaces.

This is but one example of how Black Sexual Sanctuaries contributes to black feminist and queer studies literature to address the ways in which we might mine and leverage heretofore untapped (im)material spaces such as “the quiet,” and discursive spaces such as “the erotic,” in ongoing attempts at black nominal freedom. Tapping into these discursive and material spaces contributes to broader black feminist sexuality studies efforts to theorize and enact alternative possibilities for black sexual citizenship and erotic freedom.

My book contributes to black feminist, queer, and performance studies by theorizing the connections among race, class, gender, and sexuality within material spaces. By looking at black women’s embodied articulations of erotic freedom in the private sphere, I argue that despite feminist and queer efforts to castigate the private sphere as a site of sexual repression, it functions as an important site of erotic freedom for racialized, gendered, and economically marginalized subjects who do not have the privilege to circulate freely in public spaces or the racialized, classed, and gendered authority to claim liberal recognition of sexual citizenship.

Calling attention to the racialized, gendered, and classed assumptions of feminist and queer sexual liberation epistemologies compels a rethinking of epistemologies of sexual citizenship and illuminates how race, class, gender, and sexuality shape and foreclose access to and articulations of sexual citizenship and erotic freedom. In the process, it introduces a new archive, and therefore new ways of considering, possibilities for sexual citizenship and erotic freedom in various spatiotemporal locations.

Indeed, in the context of unprecedented gains in LGBTQ rights, it is crucial to continue to interrogate the ways that race, class, gender and sexuality: 1) shape dominant perceptions of what constitutes sexual citizenship and erotic freedom; 2) open up and foreclose access to dominant articulations of sexual citizenship and erotic freedom; and 3) inhibit our ability to conceptualize and enact alternative ways of articulating sexual citizenship and erotic freedom.

This manuscript is based on a comparative case study. Four case studies of performances of black women’s sexuality in the private sphere illuminate my conception of black sexual sanctuaries. The book relies on extensive archival research of black women’s critical and cultural productions, including the black women’s friendship scrapbook archives at the Library Company of Philadelphia, Faith Ringgold’s quilting archives at the Yale Beinecke Library, and the Audre Lorde archives at Spelman College. The feminist and queer scholarship on sexual liberation tends to privilege exclusionary public sites, thereby dismissing the private sphere as a salient site of sexual citizenship and erotic freedom. My research will expand this existing work through a black sexuality studies archive that provides an in-depth analysis of how race, class, gender, sexuality, and space coalesce to produce and foreclose possibilities for sexual citizenship and erotic freedom. These sites are productive terrains for locating possibilities for black sexual freedom.

— Shoniqua Roach received a 2018 CSWS Faculty Research Grant in support of research for this book. An assistant professor in the UO Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Professor Roach holds a B.A. in English Literature from Pennsylvania State University, an M.A. in English Literature from the University of Florida, and a Ph.D. in Performance Studies with certificates in African American and Diaspora Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Critical Theory from Northwestern University. She joined the faculty at the University of Oregon in 2017. She is one of the co-organizers of the upcoming speaker series New Directions in Black Feminist Studies, which is being supported by funding from CSWS and a multitude of other campus units.