In this lecture, titled “The Beekeeper: Collecting Oral Histories of Black Southern Queer Women,” Johnson discussed some methodological challenges of being a man conducting research on women as well as addressing some topics that he found to be common among many of the women he interviewed. He also performed excerpts from the oral histories.
E. Patrick Johnson is Chair of the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University. He is the author of two award-winning books, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity, and Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South—An Oral History. He is the editor of Cultural Struggles: Performance, Ethnography, Praxis by Dwight Conquergood (Michigan UP, 2013) and co-editor (with Mae G. Henderson) of Black Queer Studies—A Critical Anthology and (with Ramon Rivera-Servera) of solo/black/woman: scripts, interviews, and essays and Blacktino Queer Performance (Duke UP, 2016).
This lecture was co-sponsored by the Department of Communication and the LGBTQ Center.