This special session explores the complex and often contradictory emotional, affective, and ontological landscapes of Black queer life. Focusing on Black queer attunement—a heightened sensory, emotional, and critical awareness—the papers collectively investigate how tenderness, intimacy, and care are policed, weaponized, and ultimately remade within hostile social environments. The treatment is interdisciplinary, drawing on Black queer studies, affect theory, performance studies, and literary/media criticism to develop a "critical common sense" that challenges dominant, white-centric notions of emotional life and subjectivity.

Rationale for Organizing:

The rationale for this session is urgent: to move beyond scholarly discussions that treat Black emotionality and intimacy as simply "pathologized" or "resilient" and instead activate a critical, political framework for Black queer affective experience. As scholars across the humanities increasingly engage with affect and emotion, there is a critical need for sessions that prioritize the theoretical interventions of Black queer thought, which fundamentally re-theorize foundational concepts like "care," "violence," and "subjectivity." This session provides a platform for concrete Black queer mandates for social and political change rooted in a reimagined ethics of tenderness and attunement.

Relation to Existing Scholarship:

This session directly engages with and expands upon existing scholarship in Black queer theory (e.g., Muñoz, Ferguson, Hansteen-Izora), Black performance and gender studies, and affect theory. It extends the work on Black sociality and precarity by centering the concept of "attunement" to violence and intimacy, building on arguments about the affective atmospheres of racialized trauma. Furthermore, by scrutinizing the "hegemonic common sense" of terms like "tenderness" and by "muddying" the relationship between Blackness and queerness, the papers perform a necessary critique of Queer Theory's inability to fully account for the complex fullness of Black ontological experience.

Session Operation:

The session is structured as a traditional panel featuring three papers, each allocated 15 minutes for presentation (45 minutes total). The remaining 30 minutes will be dedicated to discussion: 15 minutes for a brief, curated response/moderated dialogue between the panelists and 15 minutes for unstructured discussion and Q&A with the audience. This structure ensures that robust, generative conversation—a core goal of the session—is prioritized within the allotted time.

Brief Descriptions of Individual Presentations:

1. Will Mosley, "The Politics of Tenderness: A Black Queer Ideology-Critique of Commonsense" traces the etymology and critical function of "tenderness" to argue that it operates as "hegemonic common sense" that systematically pathologizes Black emotional life. By utilizing a Black queer affect framework, the paper deconstructs the problematic "tender-subject/tender-object" dyad and seeks to activate a "palliative tenderness" as a concrete mandate for social and political change.
2. Jeffrey McCune, "What the Toilet Knows: Terror, Discipline, and Attunement" reads Amiri Baraka’s The Toilet as a scene of anticipated violence. The paper introduces the concept of black queer attunement to describe the heightened sensory awareness produced by crowding and surveillance in the masculinist enclosure. It argues that the play performs a failed calculus of elimination, leaving a "charged proximity" that cannot be disciplined away, demanding a "disobedient reading" that stays with how violence gathers.
3. Ernest L. Gibson III, “Where You Gon’ Take Me?”: Black Intimacy and the Muddying of Queerness in P-Valley analyzes the intimacy between Uncle Clifford and Lil’ Murda in P-Valley. The paper uses their relationship to re-center Black male sexual ontologies and economies, arguing that their love moves against traditional grammars of being. It performs a meditation on how Black folk "love differently through differences," ultimately arguing for a focus on the muddy rather than the queer to account for the complex fullness of Black ontological subjects.

Diversity of Voices:

This selection of panelists incorporates a diversity of perspectives and specializations, representing three distinct and powerful voices in Black queer studies, all engaging with different media (affect theory, theater, television). The papers collectively provide a rich spectrum of analytical lenses—from ideological critique and affect theory to performance studies and ontology—to fully address the session’s themes. The panel ensures a robust and multifaceted engagement with Black queer theoretical concerns, moving from foundational conceptual critiques to material analyses of performance and media.