More About My Work

“I keep searching for home. When I’m in Black neighborhoods, I feel safe in my Blackness, but know that I’m seen as a queer and as a faggot. In White areas, I’m perceived as Black and therefore despicable. Where can I go where these large segments of self can come together and flourish?”
– Joseph Beam

My current research traces intimacies between the rise in mass incarceration and surveillance technologies, the HIV/AIDS crisis, and Black male writers and performance artists. The project focuses on the 1980s and early 90s and the havoc the AIDS crisis has wreaked on the Black diasporic world. “Locked In” focuses on the ways literal and metaphoric incarceration showed up in the lives of artists such as Beam, Essex Hemphill, and Marlon Riggs.