Black Queer Ethics: Integrative Communality as Liberative Christian Sexual Ethics

“… embodied through sexuality and gender. Such hostility toward God's expansiveness limits the church’s witness and the potential reach of the Gospel. ”

Team Members/Contributors

Elyse Ambrose Drew University Contact Me

About this dissertation fellowship

Black queer persons, as sources for moral and ethical reflection, offer strategies and ways of being to Christian sexual ethics that counter the disintegrating norms of traditional Christian ethical framings. Disintegration refers to the internal fragmentation that occurs as persons who do not reflect prescribed gender and sexual religious norms are forced to compartmentalize their sexuality, repress their desire, and practice relational patterns that may be more reflective of culture and social standards than of God's desire for humanity. It also refers to the fracturing of communities that occurs when non-normative persons are harmed physically and mentally, ostracized or expelled from faith communities and homes, and even killed in the name of upholding Christian values. This dissertation utilizes the particular contexts of black queer communities in 1920s Harlem and present-day black queer Christian faith communities to point toward counter-patterns of integration for all: communal belonging, individual and collective becoming, goodness, and shared thriving. These black queer communities that embody such integrative ways of being are of particular import to this project because of the challenges they pose to restrictive and essentialized norms, both gendered and sexual, that have long disintegrated persons from themselves, their God, and their communities. The resistance strategies and technologies for flourishing found among the black queer communities I explore offer to Christian sexual ethics the space for reintegration within the individual and of communal bodies. Emphases on both personal and shared wellbeing mark a shift from traditional Christian sexual ethics, which are more acts-based, toward a communal relations-based ethics—a "communosexual" ethic. This Christian sexual ethic rooted in black queerness responds to the call of a God who invites humanity to liberative wholeness and being through the love of God, self, and community.