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Queer Black Women Writing Themselves into History
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Queer Black Women Writing Themselves into History BY BRIANA BARNER Yvonne Welbon and Alexandra Juhasz, eds., Sisters in the Life: A History of Out African American Lesbian Media-Making. Duke University Press, 2018. 296 pp. bibl. index. pap., $26.95, ISBN 978-0822370864. This groundbreaking collection of essays will be useful to anyone interested in alternate histories, cultural studies, issues of production, marginalized media, or queer cinema. The collected pieces document the history of Black lesbian filmmakers in their own words, from their own memories, and also through the reflections of others who are heavily invested in making sure these narratives become part of the larger history of queer media. In 2010, as a student at Bennett College, I had the pleasure of taking the Sisters in Cinema class that Welbon developed from her doctoral work on Black women filmmakers. Since this book did not yet exist, Welbon pieced together a course reader made up of articles and chapters about the subject. Almost a decade later, I had the pleasure of attending a panel for the book's debut, featuring a discussion among its coeditors and several contributors. The same intimacy and community one feels while reading the book were palpable among the participants and audience members. The same names appear frequently throughout the book and particularly in the first half. At first one might wonder if this is due solely to the close-knit nature of the intentionally built community. But it becomes painfully obvious that the same names appear over and over because the list of queer Black filmmakers is that limited. Yes, they were friends, but their community was built not only from the shared experience of wanting to preserve this very important history but also from their experience of exclusion. Many of the contributors discuss exclusion from both Black and queer filmmaking...