Abstract
In Toni Morrison’s second novel, the relationship at the center of its narrative is not only phenomenologically queer, but that in so being, it misshapes the form of the novel itself. The novel extends our understanding of Black Queer Studies as having begun with Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic” back at least a decade earlier to Sula's publication in the early 1970s. Close reading the novel reveals how it queers relationality, gender, and form. While Beloved is often the focus of Morrison scholarship on ghostliness and spectrality, the fur ball that haunts Nel for the latter part of Sula is read here as a ghost of Morrison’s oeuvre in its own right. In Sula, Morrison is experimenting with form and content before her career as an author has been substantively lauded with the publication, a few years later, of Song of Solomon.