Despite recent advances in Black trans studies, Black queer studies retains powerful investments in the binary logic of the criminal law. In search of order, the criminal law forms absolute conceptual barriers between “the victim” and “the criminal,” that are backed up by a range of cultural products, linguistic metaphors and even our embodied affective experience of “justice.” Similarly, as we recently learned by the controversy surrounding Jussie Smollett’s media practice, Black queer subjects’ structural vulnerability has encouraged Black queer politics to seek recognition from the criminal justice system as the primary means for warding off violence.

This strikes us as an understandable impulse, but we would like to offer an alternative. If we think about Foucauldian discourse, Lacanian language, or the detached subjectivity of gossip/rumor as means of theorizing meaning as emergent from interdependent ecologies, how might Black queer subjects seek “justice” for our structural vulnerabilities without relying upon the binaristic logic of the criminal law? Can there be a third (or fourth or 5th) conceptual zone between the criminal/victim binary that may fill out the dimensions of these discussions? This panel believes so, and each of our essays forms a way forward, by identifying those actors who refused innocence and recognition, while also claiming space for the legitimacy of Black queer life. Drawn from literary studies, archival history and social media/trauma studies, this panel takes up Black queer subjects who made space for our laughter, our cruelty, our virtue, our death wishes, our strivings (normative or not), our laziness and apathy, our desire, our isolation, our infirmity, our vitality and every other possible permutation of affective positions.

We seek to highlight Black queer subjects who were a lot to handle, whose excess found them skirting the boundaries between sympathetic and annoying as hell, who were engaged in political work, but who found it a chore, who understood the system was rigged, so why not make it all a game. This panel advances a notion of abolition that is as invested in liberation from the representational probation of sympathy as it is the undoing of mass incarceration. Indeed, we contend that the prison reform and abolition projects have not placed sufficient attention on the very categories of “innocence” and “victim,” an oversight which ignores the enormous pleasure we get from punishing the criminal and venerating “the victim.” By attending to, and gently holding, Black queer subjects who formed radical ethics, while strategizing around or openly defying “the law,” our panel will offer attendees new ways to think about how to follow their own path through the razor sharp right angles of a society obsessed with “law and order.”

In “Incorrigibility and Futurity in the Twentieth Century Urban Landscape,” JT Roane allows the panel to think through and around those discourses that suture together Black urban “failure” and “juvenile delinquency.” His work shows how Black women writers, particularly Gwendolyn Brooks and June Jordan, pushed the genre of “children's literature" to reformulate Black children outside simplistic binaries of victimhood or delinquency, innocence or expendability characteristic of the sociological and planning discourses driving Keynesian urban statecraft in the era.

In “Recognition and Radical Hospitality in Toni Morrison’s Paradise,”Emerald Rutledge makes it possible for us to imagine non-identitarian forms of alternative community, where belonging can emerge without creating a universal standard of recognizing legitimate subjects. Through a theoretical and conceptual framework largely informed by Emmanuel Levinas’ conceptualization of the “other” and José Esteban Muñoz’s notion of queer utopian potentiality, Rutledge argues that the Convent in Toni Morrison’s Paradisecontains a culture of radical hospitality, which facilitates a queered community formation that is non-identitarian.

In “Jussie Smollett Makes Me Hot,” Kwame Holmes, challenges us to imagine, “what if Jussie made it all up, and that is fine.” Working with David Marriott’s meditations on the traumatizing impact of lynching photography, and thinking through the metaphor of “the viral,” Holmes argues that the circulation of films documenting anti-Black police violence on social media infects the Black psyche, inspiring feverish reproduction and recirculation of traumatizing images. In turn, rather than exist in various states of terror (paralysis, humiliation, shame), and unable to fulfill the “fight” half of “fight or flight” response without risking exposure to state violence, Holmes contends Smollett exercised agency over those terrorizing representations of Black queer vulnerability, to create a pocket of reality where Black queer subjects could enact heroic violence against white heteronormative terrorism.

Each paper will not exceed twenty minutes, thus giving the audience time to offer their reactions, criticisms or silent, yielding approval.