Abstract
This essay introduces a spirited cross-disciplinary and intergenerational queer black feminist dialogue about what Evelynn Hammonds’s 1994
s essay “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality” has meant, and continues to mean, for queer black feminist knowledge production and (academic) subject formation within and beyond the United States. Across ten essays and one poem, contributors to this special issue of
s interrogate what it means for queer black feminists to labor in a field under constant erasure; to argue for the possibilities for queer and trans and sick black women’s erotic agency in the context of hostile institutional formations such as the academic and medical industrial complexes; and to analyze the relevance of empirical black holes for theorizing polymorphous black female sexualities and erotic freedoms. From inside the black (w)hole, contributors chart the history, present, and futurity of Hammonds’s “Black (W)holes,” and, by extension, the black diasporic feminist, lesbian, queer, and trans intellectual and sociopolitical life-worlds in its wake.