Expressing Life Through Loss

This chapter examines the relationship between blackness, queer vulnerability, and the mechanics of movement and dance. It uses anecdotes to make an argument for downward movement and concaveness as movement techniques, responses to the physical threats intrinsic to black ontology. It examines the relationship between those movements and shapes in the black body to an emergent style of performance called “queer dance.” This relationship might be identified as a type of “freak technique”—and always already othered practice. The chapter also considers a more familiar relationship to gravity in terms of making interventions into dominant narrative arcs in dance as well as capitalist America. It argues that these interventions are made complete by their pairing with recovery—it is not only the get-down that steals movement away into blackness and potential queerness, but its coupling with the get-back-up.

Aesthetics · Argument (complex analysis) · Art · Computer security · Dance · Epistemology · FREAK · Literature · Movement (music) · Narrative · Psychological intervention · Queer · Sociology · Vulnerability (computing) · Computer Science · Gender Studies · Philosophy · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society