Marlon Riggs’s emancipatory politics were not exclusively agape, but also erotic. Riggs advocated a black radical erotico-political aesthetic, in the vein of Audre Lorde. Across his work Riggs visually theorizes and articulates a capacious version of Black love as a liberating force that has the capacity to hold difference without diremption, and a capacious version of love that is not eschewing of the flesh, but rather, actualized through sensuous desire. Flesh in the sense that Hortense Spillers ascribes to it, as that of the captive versus the free subject — who lays a seemingly unproblematized claim a body. Riggs’s critical redemption of queer black flesh follows Toni Morrison’s exhortation and vocation – to love that which is hated – and the force of this love reverberates outwards. Black love in Riggs’s hands is a “revolutionary” force, that extends beyond the binary of life/death, and showed itself in the maternal, visitation and spirit.

Che Gossett is associate director of the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer and Trans Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to returning to Penn — where they received an MA in History — they were the Racial Justice Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia Law School from 2021-23, and an Animal Law and Policy fellow at Harvard Law School from 2022-2024. Gossett has published work in anthologies such as Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (MIT Press, 2018), and is co-editor, with Yale University African American Studies professor Tavia Nyong’o, of a forthcoming Social Text journal special issue on Sylvia Wynter, culture, and technics. They are the recipient of a 2024 Creative Capital Andy Warhol Writers Grant.