Les femmes noires qui aiment les femmes : résistances aux rapports de pouvoir enchevêtrés
"Black Women Who Love Women: Resisting Entangled Power Dynamics" addresses issues of survival from a queer and diasporic perspective. This thesis argues that the participants’ everyday practices and positioning are situated within the cracks of a system that criminalizes the very existence of Black people. Analysing these women’s living conditions allows to better understand of the complex landscape of power systems at the intersection of class, gender, race and heteropatriarchy. It also recognizes their ability to create an alternative space, a universe of possibilities that opposes normative and hegemonic categories.  The participants’ realities, thus, generate starting points where otherness becomes a tool for critical thinking, a means of resistance, and a foundation for a substantially different future infused with the hope of improvement. This research is based on autoethnography, an ethnography of participation, and semistructured interviews of 22 individuals who identify as female, Black, and have romantic and sexual relations with womens. This thesis, then, centers on desire and draws on multiple inputs, mostly from racialized female theorists, whether from the academic world or from my private circle. It is shaped by powerful narratives, but also by equally impactful silences, by a strong attention to what happen on the micro scale and to description, by an autoethnography of participation, and by a willingness to depict in a few pages even a snippet of these women’s flamboyance.
queer race diaspora Black women Intersectionality (homo)sexuality(ies) Ethnicity