"Writin’ is Fightin’: Black Lesbian Literary Beginnings"

"Writin’ is Fightin’: Black Lesbian Literary Beginnings"

Presented by the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society

This talk is drawn from an excerpt of my book project, We Must Document Ourselves Now: Black Lesbian Cultural Legacies and the Politics of Self-Representation. In it, I examine the essential, but oft-ignored importance of Black lesbian literature and film in queer literary and film histories. I argue that Black lesbian literature, film, and other visual media reflects the material realities of Black lesbian lived experiences and responds to and resists the heteropatriarchal systems that contribute to the invisibility of Black lesbians in popular and literary culture. Moreover, while Black feminist care work may take a variety of forms, this project insists that Black feminist creative practice is an integral form of self and community care. That is, Black lesbian creative and cultural work creates space for Black lesbians to explore their shared and discrete experiences through their creation of and engagement with others around said work.

In this particular section of chapter one, entitled “Writing is Fighting: Black Lesbian Literary Beginnings,” I focus on two writers, Stephanie Byrd and Anita Cornwell, both of whom are important figures in Black lesbian literary history, but who I believe deserve far more scholarly attention. This section argues that these writers are writing in response to Black Nationalist rhetoric that mimicked hegemonic and prescriptive notions of gender and sexuality, as well as the racism they experienced in white lesbian and feminist spaces at the time. Byrd and Cornwell cared deeply about Black women, and used their writing to not only share their particular experiences as Black lesbians, but also to build and create community through Black feminist creative praxis.