Making the plantation fertile plot for “black-queer people”: notes from a black-queer native anthropologist

Abstract

This work is based on a childhood experience involving a skirt I used to wear. The unstitching of the skirt becomes the guiding thread of a narrative -- a reflexive return to childhood, marked by exclusions, dehumanizing violence and fantasies of (r)existence. The lines generate a network interwoven by conflicting “knots” that have marked and built the social body of the black queer anthropologist who is writing to you. Thus, the metaphor of un(re)sewing the skirt articulates autobiographical and analytical elements of the normative devices that regulate which bodies matter, based on racial, gender and sexuality markers. Based on the composition-plantation, I reflect on the way in which this structure, institutionalized since slavery, still influences the (de)legitimization of certain knowledge and experiences. Queer anthropology, therefore, proposes an approach capable of transforming subalternizing predicates granted to black queers into creative possibilities that challenge the norms of the anthropological canon, masculinity and the hegemonic “human”. The central idea is to put into practice epistemologies and afro-queer-topias that emerge from the radical refusal of the limits imposed by coloniality. In this sense, the queer perspective, occupying a frontier location, is capable of accessing a multiple consciousness of worlds and thus proposing the reconfiguration of norms of (re)knowledge and traditionally rigid and marginalizing academic practices.