The Complications of Choosing a Cis-Hetero Marriage as a Queer Black Feminist Scholar

So I got engaged. More on the story of why that is ironic and how it came to be. But first I want to journey through and into some thangs. I understand love and the politics of Black marriage through a lineage: Grandma Babe, the aunts who whispered advice across kitchen counters, my own mother disillusioned by the loyalties of my father as she would tell me as a child she is "married" to one man. Love is a communal inheritance and marriage and its role and desire is a social construction. I never and I do mean never envisioned myself married. To choose love in public, as a Black woman, is already political. To choose this love—a cisgender, heterosexual marriage—while knowing myself as a queer Black feminist scholar, is both a contradiction and a complexity. It is indeed a tension. A choreography of freedom and constraint. A messy journey that calls me to be authentic to the one thing I feel, a strong love and peace for this person.

I know that Black love is not just romance—it is epistemology, method, memory, and survival. So when I, a queer Black feminist, a scholar of liberation, a woman who has organized her life around dismantling patriarchal logics—say yes to partnership with a cisgender Black man, I am not “returning to tradition,” nor am I abandoning my queer identity. What I am doing is negotiating the real conditions under which Black women love.

Let us back up a little bit. I want to be clear that I am not saving myself here but working through some things. Live and in action. When I say that Black love is not just romance, I am intentionally refusing the narrow, Western, sentimentalized understanding of love as purely emotional or private. For Black people—especially Black women and femmes—love has always been something more. Love has been a way of knowing, a way of teaching and learning, a way of remembering who and whose we are, and a way of enduring and transforming the world’s attempts to annihilate us.

Audre Lorde teaches that the erotic, the deep, ungovernable inner yes—functions as a source of knowledge that Western rationality cannot access (Lorde 1984). And despite the discomforts and the contradictions, my soul says yes. That I am sure of. This means that love, desire, and intimacy are theoretical sites; they are ways we learn what we are capable of, what we need, what we refuse. I never had this desire as a child but now through life's lifing, I have faced a new sun with the illumination that just maybe, we can create something that is good for both of us. In spite of my knowings around the social construction of marriage and the gender politics further amplified by racial identity.

Patricia Hill Collins similarly argues that Black women’s knowledge traditions are grounded in lived experience, care, ethics of connectedness, and the labor of sustaining others (Collins 2000).If Black knowledge is relational, then Black love is a form of philosophical inquiry. When he takes the time to understand the pace of my life, mothering, teaching, studying, organizing and adjusts himself instead of asking me to shrink, that is relational ethics in practice. When he takes transportation to Queens after an eleven-hour shift sometimes just to hold me for twenty minutes until we sleep because he knows my body needs presence more than words, that is memory, that is lineage, that is the love that raised us seperately now bringing us together. These are not just romantic gestures.These are other Black feminist intellectual traditions made flesh. When he shows up weekly to sit with Sage Ali so I can teach and be a scholar, that is theorizing care as survival. Our love is not passive at all and it requires labor, attendance, attunement, and study.

bell hooks writes that love is an action, a practice of freedom, and a discipline that requires courage, accountability, and mutual care (hooks 2000). For Black people, love has historically required:

• Collective caretaking

• Choosing one another against the state

• Refusing disposability and domination

And maybe this seems like a lot of work, well because it is. This is methodological and it is a practice that must be repeated, sustained, learned, and revised. I believe that this man, that I am choosing and that has chosen me will commit to do the work and transform each other for the better. Christina Sharpe argues that Black life is lived “in the wake”—in the ongoing afterlife of slavery, where the past is not past but continually present (Sharpe 2016). Prayfully, we are healing bloodlines and opening up the gates for something new and sustaining. Our love, then, must account for those who did not survive, those who endured, those who mothered whole lineages under impossible conditions. Yet, here we are.

Historically, the heteronormative marriage has functioned as the state’s favorite institution: to regulate desire, police gender roles, stabilize labor, reproduce property, and maintain racial control. Marriage has served as a mechanism for determining what forms of intimacy are legitimate and which are deviant. Heterosexuality is not simply a “natural” orientation—it has been institutionalized as the norm (Rich 1980). Which means there are so many things that uphold this norm if we are a particular proximity to its status quo performance. But we are also Black! Black feminist scholars remind us that this norm rewards heterosexual coupling and punishes queer desire, produces shame around sexual expression outside patriarchal control while also keeping sexuality tied to reproduction and not pleasure or liberation (Lorde 1984). Thus, marriage historically says: this is how you are allowed to love, and anything else is dangerous.

Marriage has long been built on the hierarchy of man over woman (Patriarchy).Under coverture in the U.S. and Britain, a wife was legally absorbed into her husband, she could not own property, sign contracts, or control her own labor (Hartman 1997). Now there is me a person who has inherited a house from her great-grandmother, a person who has a career, a basically fully autonomous human being. “Wife” has never been a neutral role for Black women, it has often meant mule, caretaker, soldier, afterthought instead of partner and muse. Even today, the “good wife” is imagined as: soft but not weak, supportive but not dominant and strong but not threatening. EXHAUSTING BALANCES! Black women have been excluded from that ideal while still subjected to its judgement (Collins 2000).So marriage becomes a training ground for gender discipline. Marriage also stabilizes a labor system in which women work for free inside the home so men are freed to work for wages outside of it (Federici 2004). Black women have always been compelled to labor inside and outside the home. Again, Black women have always been compelled to labor inside and outside the home. Black women have always been compelled to labor inside and outside the home. Enslaved as both field laborers and domestic caretakers and then later pushed into domestic work, caregiving, and teaching (hey Shapel, you fit these roles before 30 years old.) Even now disproportionately represented in “helping” and service professions. ( Am I dragging myself now?)

Marriage has acted as a labor-management system, positioning women, especially Black women, as the backbone of emotional, reproductive, and social labor. Marriage historically controlled inheritance, lineage, and wealth. It was never just about two people; it was about which families deserve to continue, and with what resources (Spillers 1987). For white families, marriage ensured property stayed white. For Black people during slavery, legal marriage was denied to prevent us from forming kinship networks that the state could not control (Hartman 2007). This means: White marriage built wealth. Black marriage had to be built against the state. So when Black people marry, we are not just participating in tradition—we are participating in a contested site of power. The state has always cared very much about who Black people love, form households with, and raise children with because Black family structures are a site of political power. For example, Adoption regulations separating Black children from Black kin and welfare policies punishing Black single mothers (Roberts 1997). Marriage law has been used to police race...to choose a hetero marriage as a queer Black feminist is to enter into an institution with a violent history, but not necessarily with violent intentions in the present.

And yes, I am STILL suspicious of the idea that marriage is simply “love and commitment.”I know marriage is also a structure. And I know that structures can harm. I talk about and live this reality on the daily. But I am truly structuring myself to believe and give faith and breath in believing otherwise. Because I am choosing the man and our relationship, its authenticity, and the practices we commit for each other.

And for the highly confused, pertaining my identity as Queer, Queerness is not solely who I have sex with. It is how I love and How I make kin. How I reject the compulsory. How I dream outside state scripture. Always all ways forevermore. I bring my queer Black feminist self into this marriage, I do not disappear, shrink, play small to make the relationship work, exchange my freedom for belonging or unlearn my politcis to be loved.

If anything—I am loved because of the fullness of who I am.Because I refuse to perform the “good wife.”Because I do not do submission as silence.Because my love has theory behind it. Because I am accountable to liberation even in the kitchen, the bedroom, and the everyday. My marriage will not be a retreat from my queer identity.It is an expansion of it into new relational forms.

To be a Black woman who is loved, publicly, tenderly, intentionally and who is not required to erase herself is still revolutionary. My marriage will be the reconstruction phase.

And also… let the record show: he still gets on my nerves.Like, do not let all this theory fool you, I am absolutely still side-eyeing him when he keeps nagging me, asking me the same question 50 times and too loud, forgets the grocery list while holding the grocery list( doesn't happen but felt like I should state it for when it does), and acts shocked and so awfully tired every time I ask him to do the same thing I’ve asked 47 times.

Yet, here we are. And here some uncomfortable truths to further digest, although I acknowledged marriage as a state apparatus that regulates gender, sexuality, labor, kinship, and lineage, my acknowledgment does not exempt me from its grip. Naming the structure doesn’t remove me from the structure. Also it is not said yet that my fiance has matched my labor even though he loves. Only time will tell if the labor is equitable, sustainable, and accountable over time. If queerness is a practice of imagining life outside state-sanctioned scripts, how will I maintain that practice inside the state’s favorite institution? Will our kinship networks remain non-normative? Will our marriage make room for chosen family? Will our household resist reproductive scripts?

I have no interests in becoming the example or the proof that“See? Marriage can be feminist after all!” Baby, I am not about to become the poster child for anything. My marriage is not a theory, it’s a practice.It is allowed to be messy, evolving, nonlinear, imperfect.

And in the end of it all and throughout, I shall remain free.

References

Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2000.

hooks, bell. All About Love: New Visions. William Morrow, 2000.

Lorde, Audre. “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, The Crossing Press, 1984, pp. 53‑58.

Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Existence.” (1980)

Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” (1987)

Federici, Silvia. Wages Against Housework. 1975.

Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self‑Making in Nineteenth‑Century America. Oxford U Press, 1997.

Roberts, Dorothy. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. Vintage, 1997.

Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press, 2016.