Black. Queer. Southern. Women.: An Oral History by E. Patrick Johnson (review)

A black queer woman asked E. Patrick Johnson, "When are you going to tell our story?!" (1) at a reading for his canonical text in oral history and performance studies Sweet Tea. His response is Black. Queer. Southern. Women. (BQSW), a timely text with over seventy women sharing their insights, heartbreaks, and joy. Johnson has four goals: "fill a void in the historical accounts of Black women's sexual history in the US South; highlight the richly complex communities of Black women who desire women; account for the ways that Black lesbians negotiate their sexual, gender, class, and racial identity with their Southern cultural identity; and highlight the ways in which Southern Black lesbians' lives diverge from those of Black gay male southerners" (5). He argues that BQSW is necessary because it works to account for "the current material history" (7) of black queer Southern women which is best achieved through oral history.

The theoretical and methodological choices Johnson makes as an oral historian and ethnographer are important to realizing the power dynamic and "outsider/within" (9) status he occupies. Following Judith Stacey's assertion that there is no completely feminist oral history, Johnson offers BQSW as a partially feminist text. He accounts for this by including a detailed account of their emotionality and an embodied description of their interviews; a clear representation of the black feminist theoretical framework this work is built on. This focus on the feelings and attitudes of the women he interviews, rather than the activities, facts and even the questions he planned to ask participants contribute to a process that, Kristina Minister contends, makes oral history components more feminist. Johnson's willingness to react emotionally and be vulnerable "was key to the empathetic connection" (12) he made with the narrators. Moreover, performance theory allowed Johnson to avoid analyzing the narratives offered, instead privileging the "ethnographic encounter—the sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch of the interview scene," describing the context and putting forward the narrator's memory, versus the "truth" (15).

BQSW is split into two parts—Part I, chapters 1–7, focuses on the experiences of growing up and living in the South as a black queer woman. Part II, chapters 8–13, centers on biographic profiles of six of these women whose life experiences are extraordinary. Each narrator is described with a short profile that precedes their interview in the text. Part I, "G.R.I.T.S.: Stories of Growing up Black, Female, and Queer," is focused on the bulk of the narrators. Johnson places the women's sexuality in the context of their lives, sharing stories of growing up, experiences with religion, sexual and gender identity, love, friendships, and engaging the activism and art of the narrators. This develops a well-rounded understanding of black queer women's experience in the South.

Johnson introduces chapters 2, 4, 5, 6, and 7 with a short analysis of black feminist works such as Sula, The Color Purple, and Their Eyes Were Watching God. Like Barbara Smith's reading of Sula, he employs a queer reading of these texts, which allows him to show the ways black lesbian women create intimate relationships with each other. "[B]eing a mother was not the same as desiring to be a mother. Like the character Eva in Toni Morrison's Sula, their mothering love was a 'love of necessity'" (78). Johnson's short interludes do not provide much analysis, which allows the narratives to stand on their own. This tactic allows the narratives to operate unimpeded and provide more of a collective narrative.

The structural violence of Southern gender mores and cultural expectations, such as segregation, racism, sexism, and homophobia, color the lives and experiences of these women. Most revelatory, Chapter 3 focuses on gender nonconformity, in particular detailing how the narrators' gender presentation, sexual expression, and sexual identities are not contingent upon one another. Although their choices...