Waking Up Queer and Black: A conversation with Dr. Jenn M. Jackson S3E1

Dr. Jenn M. Jackson (who uses the pronouns they/them) is a queer genderflux, androgynous Black woman, an abolitionist, a lover of all Black people, and an Assistant Professor at Syracuse University in the Department of Political Science. Jackson’s primary research is on Black Politics with a focus on group threat, gender and sexuality, political behavior, and social movements. Jackson also holds affiliate positions in African American Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and LGBT Studies. Jackson is the author of the forthcoming book Black Women Taught Us (Random House Press 2022). The book is an intellectual and political history of Black women’s activism, movement organizing, and philosophical work. It explores how women from Harriet Jacobs to Audre Lorde and the members of the Combahee River Collective (among others) have taught us how to fight for justice and radically reimagine a more just world for us all. In this episode, Christen Smith and Jackson dive into what it means to be queer and Black. We police our bodies and genders in ways that hinder our goals of dismantling systems of gender/sexuality/race oppression. In this podcast, dr. Jackson articulates the ways in which blackness is inherently queer and how queerness gives us the vocabulary to speak our truth. Genderflux embodies what it means to love the people who are deviant, wayward, and criminal. Jackson’s articulation of abolition is intertwined with their definition of genderflux. As they articulate, “how we move in our bodies and how we choose to show up, matters just as much as how we fight for folk in our communities.” Black people's sensation of threat and fear is a deeply rooted lived experience. Jackson is currently completing two book projects: Black Women Taught Us, (Random House, 2022) and Policing Blackness: How Intersectional Threat Shapes Politics ( 2023).

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