Oct 15
Fall Lefler Lecture - Dr. Jennifer Dominique Jones
Title: An Ambivalent History: Blackness and Homosexuality in the Post-World War II Political Imaginary
In the summer of 1976, Maynard Jackson, the first Black mayor of Atlanta, found himself embroiled in controversy when he formally recognized the city’s Gay Pride Celebration. While this moment reflected particular political faultlines in the metropolitan landscape among Evangelical Protestants, corporate business interests, Black political elites and the city’s gay and lesbian community, it also illustrates how binaries of race and sexuality continued to be mutually referential during the second half of the twentieth century, in sometimes surprising ways. Using this moment of tension as an entry point, this talk returns to a familiar history — the history of the Post-War Black Freedom Struggle and opposition to it — illuminating one genealogy for the simultaneous distancing and tethering of “Blackness” and “Homosexuality” in American political discourse. Furthermore, the talk will consider how ambivalence might function as a generative affect in historical narratives and historical analysis.
Jennifer Dominique Jones is an Associate Professor of History and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan. Her areas of research and teaching expertise are Black Queer History, Black Feminist History, African American History after 1877, with a focus on politics and social life and the History of Gender and Sexuality in the United States in the Twentieth Century with a focus on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ+) politics and community life. She is the author of Ambivalent Affinities: A Political History of Blackness and Homosexuality After World War II (University of North Carolina Press, 2023). Ambivalent Affinities was a finalist for the 2024 LGBTQ+ Studies Prize from the Lambda Literary Foundation (for the best academic book in LGBTQ+ Studies) and received an honorable mention for the 2024 James A. Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians (for the best book in the history of race relations).
from History