A song for the rural South: a collaborative quare autoethnography

Abstract

Responding to appeals in autoethnographic inquiry for the critical interrogation of geography and region as facets of intersectionality, we utilize gathering as a Black queer collaborative/relational, embodied, and performative approach to autoethnography to demonstrate how regionality is a significant part of Black queer identity. As an approach that allows us to know ourselves and each other better and strengthen our burgeoning connection, our narrative performance of gathering addresses the evanescence that surrounds the lived experiences of Black queer U.S. Southerners in autoethnographic inquiry by positioning the rural South as a complicated geographical formation wherein Black queer identity is crafted, cultivated, celebrated, challenged, and contested. As such, our narrative performance of gathering permits the rural South to flourish as a site of Black queer social, cultural, and political possibilities.