Sensing History’s Hold: Touch and Black Queer Representation after Moynihan

Abstract

Abstract:This essay explores moments of touch and haptic sensation in Barry Jenkins’s film Moonlight (2016) and Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play Choir Boy (2012) to refigure the relations between black maternity and black masculinity under modernity. Drawing from contemporary black feminist theory, I analyze moments of touching and holding in the film and play as generative of alternative sensations of history. I demonstrate how black queer performances of touch exceed the captive representational logics theorized by Hortense Spillers in the wake of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report on the black family.