ABSTRACT
African-American queer studies denotes the set of discourses that study issues of sexuality and gender identity as they relate to issues of race and ethnicity, in particular blackness and African-American identity. Sexuality is one of the most highly contested sites of identity construction in modern times-highly regulated by normative social, political, and cultural institutions, structures, and discourses. It is also one of the greatest sources of human expression and holds within it profound possibilities for liberation and transformation. Consider that even in situations of political and social oppressions at their most extreme, there exists the possibility of sexually based encounters with others or with oneself. American slavery enchained the bodies, physical and political, of Africans and people of African descent, but it could not take away the possibility of sexual expression, not even while regulating it, controlling it, and taking it for its own. It is no wonder that sexuality remains one of the strongest fields of personal power, that it resists efforts to explain it away as nothing more than the product of discourse, that it holds its dignity even as society strips us of ours. Yet it has been repressed, regulated, controlled, taken by others. Given its importance, its power, there is no wonder that when our sexuality is regulated, controlled, dictated, and taken from us we feel most deeply the loss of our selves, the violation of our souls, the degradation of our human spirit. Sexuality is one of the greatest sites of human liberation, just as it is one of the most dreaded sites of human oppression.
