Queer Freedom

Ana-Maurine Lara

Theoretically wide-ranging and deeply personal and poetic, Queer Freedom: Black Sovereignty is based on more than three years of fieldwork in the Dominican Republic. Ana-Maurine Lara draws on her engagement in traditional ceremonies, observations of national Catholic celebrations, and interviews with activists from peasant, feminist, and LGBT communities to reframe contemporary conversations about queerness and blackness. The result is a rich ethnography of the ways criollo spiritual practices challenge gender and racial binaries and manifest what Lara characterizes as a shared desire for decolonization.Queer Freedom: Black Sovereignty is also a ceremonial ofrenda, or offering, in its own right. At its heart is a fundamental question: How can we enable queer: black life in all its forms, and what would it mean to be free: sovereign in the twenty-first century? Calling on the...