Play Aunties and Dyke Bitches: Gender, Generation, and the Ethics of Black Queer Kinship (original) (raw)

Through ethnographic engagement with queer kids of color coming of age in the San Francisco Bay Area, this essay explores the co-production of Black queer common sense across gender and generation. A social justice themed alternative high school allows us to examine schools as not just hostile territories to queer teachers or students in isolation, but also potentially as sites of the collaborative, contested production of queer communities of color. Drawing on the work of Riley Snorton (2017), Kara Keeling (2007), Kaila Story (2017) and Mel Michelle Lewis (2017), I critically engage stud-femme sociality as a contested site of Black queer kinship. Struggling through conflict and collaboration, the young women of Frisco teach us to engage girlhood as a coalitional space of queer possibility.