UC Riverside

“Blackness and the Queer Epistemes of White Sexual Economies” argues that the interplay between performances of mastery and the enjoyment of property under slavery installed a paradigm within white homosocial discourses that derive pleasure from the proprietary conditions of enslavement. Put simply, I identify the sexual abuses of white, queer, slaveholding men as often-overlooked contributions to gay male social and sexual formations in the United States. To bear out this claim, my project traces an evidentiary archive of white queer sexual abuse from nineteenth-century literary and legal materials to twentieth-century memoirs, novels, and court cases, analyzing texts. I’m developing a theory to make legible the existence of Black enslaved people whose lives are obscured to protect queer American life from knowledge of its genealogy in the practices of antebellum slavery. The proprietorial bindings of enslavement contribute to the petri dish of queer sexual discourse the necessary ideological fragments needed to buttress functioning economies that hold stock in clandestine racialized corporeal markets. I use “clandestine” to note the illegibility of existing archival materials holding these non-normative sexual economies in the 19th and 20th century, and to highlight ways in which failing to identify these moments plainly undermines efforts to fully understand the history of contemporary queer sexual discourses.