Marriage Mimesis

Abstract

This essay examines a series of advertisements supporting same-sex marriage, which circulated in the Baltimore Afro-American. The ads relied upon sedimented, superficial understandings of difference to position blackness as homophobic and black civil rights as a historically concluded political project. Drawing on intersectional analysis, postcolonial studies, and recent works in queer of color theory, this essay develops the term “communicative mimesis” to describe how the advertisements use repetition, substitution, and disavowal to construct blackness as a necessary scapegoat in the acquisition of same-sex marriage as a civil right.

Keywords:

• National Black Justice Coalition
• Same-Sex Marriage
• Communicative Mimesis
• Race
• Civil Rights

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Karma Chávez for her patience and incisive feedback throughout this process. I am honored to take part in this historic forum in the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication and privileged to have read my fellow collaborators' work while working on the final revisions. A great deal of thanks is also owed to readers of earlier versions of this essay, including my anonymous reviewers as well as Mecca Sullivan, Jasmine Cobb, John L. Jackson, Jr., and Fred Moten.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

C. Riley Snorton

C. Riley Snorton is at Northwestern University