Books by E. Patrick Johnson

In this engaging and moving book, E. Patrick Johnson combines magical realism, poetry, and performative writing to bear witness to the real-life stories of black southern queer women in ways that reveal the complexity of identity and the challenges these women face.

Drawn from the life narratives of more than seventy African American queer women who were born, raised, and continue to reside in the American South, this book powerfully reveals the way these women experience and express racial, sexual, gender, and class identities - all linked by a place where such identities have generally placed them on the margins of society.

Examines the various ways that blackness is appropriated and performed - toward widely divergent ends - both within and outside African American culture. This title develops from the contention that blackness in the United States is necessarily a politicized identity trope - avowed and disavowed, attractive and repellant, fixed and malleable.