For Estrangement: Queerness, Blackness, and Unintelligibility

Abstract

This paper describes the stakes of ongoing conversations in areas of queer theory and black studies on the epistemological, ethical, and political role of unintelligibility. In line with longstanding philosophical questions about the value of aporia as gap or absence in or understanding, thinkers like Lee Edelman and Frank Wilderson III have articulated how black and queer people have regularly fallen into spaces of unintelligibility as they have run against given formations of the social world. These thinkers have theorized what this unintelligibility -what they will call this queerness or blackness -is other than an impetus for integration. The paper describes the dichotomy between two key positions in this conversation, resistance and refusal, suggesting these positions offer challenges better addressed through a conception of estrangement.