Overview

In A Blackqueer Sexual Ethics: Embodiment, Possibility, and Living Archive Elyse Ambrose looks to an archive of Blackqueerness as an authoritative source for religious ethical reflection. This approach counters the disintegrative norms of anti-Black and anti-body traditionalism in Christian sexual ethics, even those that strive to be liberative. It builds upon a tradition of Black queer and LGBTQ+-centered critique at the intersections of race, sexuality, gender, and religion through exploring the moral imagination of sexual and gender non-conformist communities in 1920’s Harlem (their rent parties, blues environments, and Hamilton Lodge Ball); ethics and theology blackqueering the disciplines; and contemporary oral histories (including photographs of the subjects by the scholar-artist) of those doing ethics in their Blackqueerness. These serve as integrative sites that signal Blackqueer ethical counter-patterns of communal belonging, individual and collective becoming, goodness, embodied spirit/inspirited bodies, and shared thriving. Emphases on both personal and social right-relatedness mark a shift from Christian sexual ethics based on rules, toward a communal relations-based transreligious ethics of sexuality.

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9780567707932

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Elyse Ambrose takes the reader on a journey through Harlem in the 1920's and 30's to what are referred to as living archives, pictures and interviews with blackqueer folk today. This journey is about the expansion of ethics in relation to black bodies, moving them from bodies that have been alienated and problematized to the centre of the creation of ethics coming from the blackqueer communities. Along the way Ambrose dismantles patriarchy, white centric thinking and calls to account the black churches and theologians who have not been as inclusive as they should have been. At its heart it is a book that declares love to be political and ethics to be a process set in multiple communities. It is a book that celebrates the divine within blackness, blackqueerness, a work to be embraced not just read. * Lisa Isherwood, The University of Wales Trinity Saint David, UK * In this hopeful and wise book Elyse Ambrose argues what might happen if ethicists take seriously blackqueer experience. She observes that such consideration would lead people to see the communal consequences for sexual lives and to measure our commons by how people are doing rather than what they are doing. This is a proposal of better sex for a better society. Now more than ever students and scholars need to hear this clarion call. * Kathryn Lofton, Yale University, USA *

In this hopeful and wise book Elyse Ambrose argues what might happen if ethicists take seriously blackqueer experience. She observes that such consideration would lead people to see the communal consequences for sexual lives and to measure our commons by how people are doing rather than what they are doing. This is a proposal of better sex for a better society. Now more than ever students and scholars need to hear this clarion call. * Kathryn Lofton, Yale University, USA *

Author Information

Elyse Ambrose is Assistant Professor of the Study of Religion and Black Study at the University of California, Riverside, USA.

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