Black queer womanhood matters: searching for the queer herstory of Black Lives Matter in television dramas

Abstract

Although the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter (BLM) was created by three Black women, two of whom identify as queer, mainstream representations of the movement often erase the founders’ identities. This project works to counter the consistent and sustained erasure of Black (queer) women in the origin stories of social movements as well as in the larger cultural consciousness. We begin by locating the founders of BLM in a genealogy of (queer) Black women intellectuals who have repeatedly articulated the importance of analysis that acknowledges oppressions as multiple and interlocking. Then, using what we call a queer Black feminist critical lens, we analyze three drama television shows. Our analysis of episodes from Scandal and Orange is the New Black demonstrates how popular television dramas with majority-White audiences create a gender- and sexuality-neutral backstory for BLM, obscuring the movement’s innate queerness and original intentions around intersectionality. By contrast, Queen Sugar, a series on the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) which has a much smaller and more diverse audience, acknowledges BLM’s queer history and offers a more complex view of the movement as a whole.

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