Circum-Religious Performance: Queer(ed) Black Bodies and the Black Church

Abstract

This essay addresses how the black body is the site of sacred and secular contention, how it can traverse, transcend and transgress normative ideologies through both the real and imagined performance of movement, through physical peregrinations across, through and around spatial planes. This essay utilizes both queer and performance theories as foundational for understanding the rhetorics of the institutional Black Church in the United States with regard to issues of queer(ed) sexualities and erotics. It discusses how the queer(ed) black body is a production of its movements from place to place, from the church to night club and back and how this instantiates both possibilities for flourishing as well as trauma concurrently. It also utilizes a sermon preached by Pastor Willie Wilson of Washington, DC to illustrate how the queer(ed) black body is produced through voyeurism, fetishism and erotic imagination.