‘I think it’s very much placed on us’: Black queer men laboring to forge community at a predominantly White and (hetero)cisnormative research institution

Abstract

The sociopolitical conditions in which Black queer college men exist in often marginalize them from fully participating in and engaging with the entire campus community. Some researchers suggest that Black queer men (BQM) create counterspaces on-campus to contend with their marginalization as racial, gender, and sexual minorities. This study explores the collegiate experiences of BQM who forged community and strong interpersonal relationships through a peer-support group. Using intersectionality and queer theoretical frameworks, this study interrogates heteronormativity, cisnormativity, and racism that BQM experiences within postsecondary settings.

Keywords:

• Forging community
• critcal ethnography
• Black queer men
• intersectionality

Notes

1. The term queer shows up in various contexts throughout this paper. Queer works as an identity marker to destabilize normative conceptions of gender and sexuality. Deployed as a politic, queer moves beyond the boundaries of an identity marker, making the term useful in examining one’s social location to power and key state interest. As an analytic, queer centers non-normative sexual and gendered behaviors, expressions, and discourses from the margins, giving the term potential to deconstruct heteronormativity. Conversely, queer works to destabilize homonormativity by disrupting fixed ideologies of non-heterosexual subjects as a monolithic entity. The term is used in this paper to describe both sexual and gender subjectivities typically deemed deviant by society.