A Blackqueer Sexual Ethics: Embodiment, Possibility, and Living Archive
Ebook
In A Blackqueer Sexual Ethics: Embodiment, Possibility, and Living Archive Elyse Ambrose looks to an archive of blackqueerness as an authoritative source for religious ethical reflection. This approach counters the disintegrative norms of anti-black and anti-body traditionalism in Christian sexual ethics, even those that strive to be liberative. It builds upon a tradition of black queer and LGBTQ+-centered critique at the intersections of race, sexuality, gender, and religion through exploring the moral imagination of sexual and gender non-conformist communities in 1920's Harlem (their rent parties, blues environments, and Hamilton Lodge Ball); ethics and theology blackqueering the disciplines; and contemporary oral histories (including photographs of the subjects by the scholar-artist) of those doing ethics in their blackqueerness. These serve as integrative sites that signal blackqueer ethical counter-patterns of communal belonging, individual and collective becoming, goodness, embodied spirit/inspirited bodies, and shared thriving. Emphases on both personal and social right-relatedness mark a shift from Christian sexual ethics based on rules, toward a communal relations-based transreligious ethics of sexuality.
Examines an ethic of sexuality rooted in black queerness, including ethnographic interviews that help to trace the development of black queer ethics and sexual ethics.
Introduces students to different sexual ethic methodologies thorough its willingness to disrupt locations of moral authority through through a sexual ethic that directly and unapologetically mines black queerness
Discusses a new constructive, applied sexual ethics through its trans disciplinary approach to ethics of sexuality that de-centres binary thinking of sexual acts
Follows a trajectory of black queer discourse in theology and ethics, beginning in the early 1990s
Introduction
Toward Blackqueer Possibility in/through Living Archive
Chapter 1
Examining the Integrative in Blackqueer Harlem
Chapter 2
Blackqueering of Ethical and Theological Discourse
Chapter 3
Spirit in the Dark Body - Blackqueer Expressions of the Im/material
Chapter 4
Constructing a Blackqueer Ethics of Sexuality
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index
Elyse Ambrose takes the reader on a journey through Harlem in the 1920's and 30's to what are referred to as living archives, pictures and interviews with blackqueer folk today. This journey is about the expansion of ethics in relation to black bodies, moving them from bodies that have been alienated and problematized to the centre of the creation of ethics coming from the blackqueer communities. Along the way Ambrose dismantles patriarchy, white centric thinking and calls to account the black churches and theologians who have not been as inclusive as they should have been. At its heart it is a book that declares love to be political and ethics to be a process set in multiple communities.
It is a book that celebrates the divine within blackness, blackqueerness, a work to be embraced not just read.
In this hopeful and wise book Elyse Ambrose argues what might happen if ethicists take seriously blackqueer experience. They observe that such consideration would lead people to see the communal consequences for sexual lives and to measure our commons by how people are doing rather than what they are doing. This is a proposal of better sex for a better society. Now more than ever students and scholars need to hear this clarion call.
A Blackqueer Sexual Ethics sets aside the usual tired, yet ongoing, demeaning and defensive sexuality debates. Instead, it demonstrates the capaciousness that blackqueer sexual ethics produces whether through artistic expressions or everyday, lived histories of communal life. With a rich cornucopia of creative insights, it provides a refreshing, cutting-edge vision for developing sexual ethics.
- Title: A Blackqueer Sexual Ethics: Embodiment, Possibility, and Living Archive
- Author: Elyse Ambrose
- Publisher: T&T Clark
- Print Publication Date: 2024
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9780567707949, 9780567707925, 056770792X, 0567707946
- Resource ID: LLS:9780567707949
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-05-12T04:30:39Z
Elyse Ambrose is Assistant Professor of the Study of Religion and Black Study at the University of California, Riverside, USA.