“I’d Do Anything for You (in the Dark)”

Bibliographic Data

ID21665841
AuthorsZuri Arman (Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, United States, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume49
Pages76-97
Publication date2024-09-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueTOPIA Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1206-0143 • E-ISSN: 1916-0194
PublisherUniversity of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.3138/topia-2023-0064
OpenAlexW4409797082
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited19

Centrally drawing upon the work of Calvin Warren and Sylvia Wynter, I perform a meta-criticism of critical reviews of Barry Jenkins’ 2016 film Moonlight to explore two related concepts: the myth of being and the darkfaggot. I argue these reviews unwittingly adhere to the myth of being, an ideological structure instituting subjects as sovereign co-identifying beings contra the non-be-longing of the ontologically unsovereign black. These reviews by black critics inherit the myth of being’s differentiating imperative such that their assignment of a queer identity to Moonlight functions to reproduce an intramural structural position of otherness I term the “darkfaggot.” The darkfaggot is an idea of redoubled non-be-longing—that is, non-be-longing and non-existence—whose function is to mystify the black’s starvation of being that conditions the satiation of the human subject’s hunger to be-long. In the end, I decipher Moonlight’s non-answer of the “identity question” as an implicit argument about the impossibility of black be-longing, and thus black queerness as a mode of be-longing, within totalizing conditions of dispossessive violence

Astrophysics · Dark matter · Physics · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Political and Economic history of UK and US · Race, History, and American Society

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