Drawn from the life narratives of more than seventy African
American queer women who were born, raised, and continue to reside
in the American South, this book powerfully reveals the way these
women experience and express racial, sexual, gender, and class
identities--all linked by a place where such identities have
generally placed them on the margins of society. Using methods of
oral history and performance ethnography, E. Patrick Johnson's work
vividly enriches the historical record of racialized sexual
minorities in the South and brings to light the realities of the
region's thriving black lesbian communities.
At once transcendent and grounded in place and time, these
narratives raise important questions about queer identity
formation, community building, and power relations as they are
negotiated within the context of southern history. Johnson uses
individual stories to reveal the embedded political and cultural
ideologies of the self but also of the listener and society as a
whole. These breathtakingly rich life histories show afresh how
black female sexuality is and always has been an integral part of
the patchwork quilt that is southern culture.