Black Queer Freedom: Spaces of Injury and Paths of Desires

Gershun Avilez's Black Queer Freedom positions space as central to engagements of queer possibilities, freedom, and futures. With holistic review of queerness space, injury, and desire, Avilez theorizes about the multidimensionality of injuries experienced by and constituting queer living. Avilez operationalizes path to queer desires as methodic way of teaching, understanding, and responding to hegemonic articulations of normativity and theorizes space-making as strategic and necessary transformative act to counter heteronormative ideologies and assumptions of space. Avilez does these in two parts of four chapters where the body and its ownership—private and public—privacy and control are all complexly theorized. As Black Queer Studies scholar reading from both in-and-out of the West, Avilez's stylistic simplicity with diverse, yet reconcilable citations and critical lenses at viewing extra/ordinary daily experiences of bodies and institutionally sanctioned injuries and critical analyses of multimediated arts and artists stand out significantly. Here, I present chapter overviews and unpack Avilez's notions of space, injury, and desire in the bid to articulate theoretical implications about embodiment, spatialization, outsideness, and dynamics of desire fleshed out through Avilez's multidimensional approach to queer futures and worldmaking. I conclude with recognition of collective efforts both within and without minoritarian communities in resisting longstanding excesses of heteronormativity.With an introduction title “Freedom in Restrictions,” Avilez explores the complexities of queer living in the experiences of the bounce artist, Big Freedia. Avilez pointed out that Big Freedia's artistic clout did not provide security against the incessant violence—both emotional and physical—that constitute being queer in contemporary US. The introduction examines how heteronormative/hegemonic ideologies react to any deviation from norms that have hitherto guaranteed their perspectival security. These reactions can often be violent yet still reproduce threats as if the victims are, one, victims of themselves and, two, the actual threat. Hence, one of the dominant group membership affordances are its ability to reproduce normativities that both physically and rhetorically construct victims of normative threats as the actual villains society must be weary of. Drawing from Avilez, Black queer living is a consistent and acute awareness to threats of injury that can be caused at any space because of the infinite nature of the threat loop. Avilez provides an avenue for readers to see both the limitless serialization of injuries on queer lives and, also, exposes the ingenuous heterosexist social construction of vulnerability that compares and totalizes minoritarian collective pains.By introducing Black queer analytical strategy, Avilez foregrounds a holistic approach to understanding the relationship among bodies, space, and pleasure, their contextual implications, the desires they bring, and the injuries they cause through media aggression, bullying, or denial. The injury-bound subject “is a spatial subject” (p. 7), however, to say “being injury-bound can create a longing to move away from injury” (p. 7) is to expose notions of (im)mobility at once, that while mobility creates a reactive movement to certain space, immobility creates spatio-temporal coping strategies that conceal queer desires. I subscribe to the idea, therefore, that “space is not self-evident, empty of meaning or homogenous.” (9)In chapter 1, Avilez extends the injury-bound subject as one that must know its place in the iterations of Blackness, queerness, and the boundaries of desires. The nuance of queerness in social realms can neither be oversimplified nor deemphasized in Black discourses because of the injurious implications married with being queer in many locally demonstrable and often unprecedented terms. Better put, the streets do not also resemble orphanages for Black queer bodies, even as the private closet does. Among Black communities, heteronormative privileges are strategic, and they compromise, if not deny Queer agency. This positions spatial justice as significant philosophical and artistic project in theorizing, analyzing, performing, and revolutionizing injurious social realms. As a cismale transnational Black African reader, the multiple iterations of my body in space puts me, sometimes, right in front of injuries. It displaces and reconfigures the extent of my normativity but still affords me certain privileges in my embodied compliance to norms. In other words, my body, although injury-bound, still amasses his cis-privileges that, in most cases, complicates the spaces of queer embodiments. It brings bodies closer to injuries for many different reasons, including nonconformity and the assumed threat and anxiety that it throws at the faces of heteronormative gatekeepers. Heteronormative gatekeepers are bodies through whom injuries are justified: bodies whom in equal fights for justice, deemphasized queer struggles; bodies whose intersectional approaches are restrictive to race, economic relations, political affiliations, but gender and sexuality. To keep the gates is, therefore, not only about parading heteronormative monstrosities but also the slight denial of queer pleasure. This is the extent to which we can query selective desegregation ideologies.Chapter 2 explores the geographies of risks in migratory experiences and the multidimensional uncertainties of migration. This chapter centers the experiences of Hyacinth, a St. Lucian migrant in Canada and her experiences with a molesting and abusive employer. Migration constrains Hyacinth to the politically and economically sanctioned invasiveness of her employer. In the end, the Black body consistently contends with spaces marked by constraints on desires and agency, rife with enduring injuries. Migrant experiences are socially and politically sanctioned through rhetoric and policies that constitute how we see and talk about immigration in totality. Through threat of deportation, privileged bodies control (and have senses of ownership over) the migrant body. In queer life, migration extends the contrasting excesses of heteronormativity thereby constituting serial homophobic anxieties and persistent silences. Migration, almost permanently, throws migrant subjects in public with risks, mauling threats, and finding and protecting one's space at the center of queer living. At best, it is living in fear and enclosure to the private that is piercingly public. Not all movements are possible, the same movements do not always determine active placemaking. There is a need to think outside the West to center experiences of diverse queer bodies that are largely immobile due to conditions of space that are persistently oppressive, exposing them to threats and injuries associated with queerness. This is when the holistic project of navigating and centering queer freedom become possible.Chapter 3, “Uneven Vulnerability,” explores institutionally sanctioned vulnerabilities—spaces in which movements are “necessarily limited” (p. 87). Through Poems from Prison, Black Heart 2, and Memoir: Delaware County Jail, issues around incarcerated hypervisibility was discussed primarily to articulate the dynamics of vulnerability, desires, threats, and constraints in enclosed spaces. The heats following Ronald Reagan's political strategies and notions of the inseparability of politics and morality brings back the subjective nuances of social gatekeeping that reinvigorates disdain towards queer interruptions. The fear circulated through failures of heteronormative social order that continues to revolve around the hypervisibilities entrenched in social order anxiety, overall, complicates and deviate from the norm, posing challenges to the secure existence of queer individuals.Chapter 4, “The Shadows of Institutions,” sees diagnosis as tool for social exposure and explores medical institutions as spaces of visibility where medical authoritative excesses are extended beyond “physical parameters of treatment” (p. 119). Avilez notes that institutions are reflections of the social norms that create them, and their representatives reflect these realities and often mix it with their personal correctness potentials based on legitimized power and control. This chapter opens numerous conversations relating to how health-care systems are spaces of injuries and risks that threatens queer lives mostly because of the ways they reflect normative ideas of society.Overall, Black Queer Freedom borrows from reach art traditions and successful artistic works to theorize about space, place, injuries, risks, movements, and nuances of being Black in contemporary society. Black Queer Freedom puts queer worldmaking at the center, employing a more intersectional, analytic lens into the discourses about minoritarian identities. It is a hugely recommended text for scholars interested in Black queer living, multimodality, movement, and theorizations of space, and intersectional being.

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