Marginal and forbidden : Black lesbians, contemporary American culture, and the politics of representation

This dissertation argues that Black lesbian literature, as well as film and other new media, is a direct response to the marginalization and exclusion of Black lesbians and their cultural texts in literary, scholarly, and public discourses. I argue that Black lesbian literature and other cultural products mirror Black lesbians’ social, political, and cultural statuses, in that they are marginalized and often excluded from both Black and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) communities. I contend that Black lesbian cultural texts have two main goals: 1) to lay bare the experiences of Black lesbians in a raced, gendered, classed, and homophobic society; and 2) to challenge the notion that the claiming of a Black lesbian identity is “marginal and forbidden.” In reading these black lesbian cultural texts, I purposefully take a Black lesbian feminist approach to reading their work, as I believe that queer theory has relegated into theoretical abstractions significant material realities that impact the cultural productions of same-sex desiring Black women in the United States