Welcome
Discover the UT Libraries’ Black Queer Studies Collection (BQSC) of over 1,000 African and African Diasporic Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies materials. Books and media from the collection are held by various library branches, including the Perry-Castañeda Library, the Benson Latin American Collection, the Fine Arts Library as well as digital materials.
Go to the UT Libraries Catalog Keyword Search.
Using the quotation marks, enter:
“Black Queer Studies Collection”
To search within the collection, add keyword terms such as:
“Black Queer Studies Collection” and music
Or:
“Black Queer Studies Collection” and feminism
Or:
“Black Queer Studies Collection” and (femini* or wom?n or girl)
Wait, what's with those parentheses? Click the links below to learn more about advanced search techniques and finding books in the library.
The BQSC and this guide were created because traditional library organizational structures can often reinforce oppressive hierarchical systems that bury underserved communities’ voices and make their stories difficult to find. Intersectional identities, as with those of the Black Diasporic LGBTQ+ people, do not fit neatly into any one subject. Recognizing this can help you understanding your search results as you browse the collection.
Tips for getting started
Look at the item’s record to check for:
Check out a few of the search results on these sample topics in the collection:
We want to hear from you! Send us your book suggestions and requests through the Libraries' Suggest a Purchase form, and add a note that it's for the Black Queer Studies Collection!
Longer Views
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Song in a Weary Throat
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A prophetic memoir by the activist who "articulated the intellectual foundations" (The New Yorker) of the civil rights and women's rights movements. First published posthumously in 1987, Pauli Murray's Song in a Weary Throat was critically lauded, winning the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and the Lillian Smith Book Award among other distinctions. Yet Murray's name and extraordinary influence receded from view in the intervening years; now they are once again entering the public discourse. At last, with the republication of this "beautifully crafted" memoir, Song in a Weary Throat takes its rightful place among the great civil rights autobiographies of the twentieth century. In a voice that is energetic, wry, and direct, Murray tells of a childhood dramatically altered by the sudden loss of her spirited, hard-working parents. Orphaned at age four, she was sent from Baltimore to segregated Durham, North Carolina, to live with her unflappable Aunt Pauline, who, while strict, was liberal-minded in accepting the tomboy Pauli as "my little boy-girl." In fact, throughout her life, Murray would struggle with feelings of sexual "in-betweenness"--she tried unsuccessfully to get her doctors to give her testosterone--that today we would recognize as a transgendered identity. We then follow Murray north at the age of seventeen to New York City's Hunter College, to her embrace of Gandhi's Satyagraha--nonviolent resistance--and south again, where she experienced Jim Crow firsthand. An early Freedom Rider, she was arrested in 1940, fifteen years before Rosa Parks' disobedience, for sitting in the whites-only section of a Virginia bus. Murray's activism led to relationships with Thurgood Marshall and Eleanor Roosevelt--who respectfully referred to Murray as a "firebrand"--and propelled her to a Howard University law degree and a lifelong fight against "Jane Crow" sexism. We also read Betty Friedan's enthusiastic response to Murray's call for an NAACP for Women--the origins of NOW. Murray sets these thrilling high-water marks against the backdrop of uncertain finances, chronic fatigue, and tragic losses both private and public, as Patricia Bell-Scott's engaging introduction brings to life. Now, more than thirty years after her death in 1985, Murray--poet, memoirist, lawyer, activist, and Episcopal priest--gains long-deserved recognition through a rediscovered memoir that serves as a "powerful witness" (Brittney Cooper) to a pivotal era in the American twentieth century.
Nick Cave: Meet Me at the Center of the Earth
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Spill
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In Spill, self-described queer Black troublemaker and Black feminist love evangelist Alexis Pauline Gumbs presents a commanding collection of scenes depicting fugitive Black women and girls seeking freedom from gendered violence and racism. In this poetic work inspired by Hortense Spillers, Gumbs offers an alternative approach to Black feminist literary criticism, historiography, and the interactive practice of relating to the words of Black feminist thinkers. Gumbs not only speaks to the spiritual, bodily, and otherworldly experience of Black women but also allows readers to imagine new possibilities for poetry as a portal for understanding and deepening feminist theory.
Frottage
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A new understanding of freedom in the black diaspora grounded in the erotic In Frottage, Keguro Macharia weaves together histories and theories of blackness and sexuality to generate a fundamentally new understanding of both the black diaspora and queer studies. Macharia maintains that to reach this understanding, we must start from the black diaspora, which requires re-thinking not only the historical and theoretical utility of identity categories such as gay, lesbian, and bisexual, but also more foundational categories such as normative and non-normative, human and non-human. Simultaneously, Frottage questions the heteronormative tropes through which the black diaspora has been imagined. Between Frantz Fanon, René Maran, Jomo Kenyatta, and Claude McKay, Machariamoves through genres--psychoanalysis, fiction, anthropology, poetry--as well as regional geohistories across Africa and Afro-diaspora to map the centrality of sex, gender, desire, and eroticism to black freedom struggles. In lyrical, meditative prose, Macharia invigorates frottage as both metaphor and method with which to rethink diaspora by reading, and reading against, discomfort, vulnerability, and pleasure.
Disidentifications
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