Abstract
Both mainstream and academic critics responded warmly to black queer film director Dee Rees’s 2011 film, Pariah. New York Times reviewer Stephen Holden hailed it as a universal coming-of-age drama, and academic critics praised the film’s “universal appeal,” citing it as an important “cinematic contribution” to a wider genealogy of black lesbian image making and a complex depiction of black queer womanhood. Few critics mentioned the 2007 short film that Rees had made using the same title and basic story. Thus, they made no mention of the transformation of protagonist Alike’s mother, Audrey, between the two versions. Where Audrey is strict, religious, and overprotective but ultimately redeemable in the short, she is irreparably homophobic and the central impediment’s to Alike’s gender and sexual freedom in the feature. The addition of the homophobic black maternal figure raises salient questions about Pariah specifically and the terms and conditions of contemporary black queer women’s popular cultural visibility generally. What are some of the racialized sexual logics underpinning Pariah? What function does the homophobic black maternal figure serve in contemporary black queer critical and cultural productions? Is black queer women’s popular cultural visibility predicated on the condemnation of black maternal figures, or of black communities more broadly, as sexually regressive? This essay takes Pariah as a departure point from which to examine the homophobic black maternal figure as an emergent archetype within contemporary black queer coming-out narratives, specifically in novels and films. I mobilize black lesbian feminist methodologies to suggest that this archetype serves as the basis for an eminent literary and cinematic genre that I theorize as the black queer liberation plot: neatly packaged black queer liberation narratives that predicate their protagonist’s sexual freedom on her flight from a central black maternal figure who often functions as a stand-in for a black community.
