Approximately 180 people gathered in the Kenmore Classroom Building Tuesday evening to listen to Cathy Cohen, the former chair of the political science department at the University of Chicago, give a lecture on “From Combahee to Black Lives Matter: Black Queer Politics, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.”
Carrie Preston, the director of the Boston University Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, wrote to The Daily Free Press before the lecture that the department hopes to bring attention to the applicability of former BU professor Eve Sedgwick’s work to other fields of discussion.
“This lecture puts black queer politics and current social movements like Black Lives Matter front and center, and it uses Sedgwick’s work to help us understand our time,” Preston wrote.
At the beginning of the lecture, Cohen referred to Sedgwick’s work, “Epistemology of the Closet,” to apply her insights about structure and consistency with gay culture to black queer politics.
“Specifically, I want to suggest that the modern history of black people, or maybe we can even limit it to the modern history of black activism or black politics, has been similarly structured by the trope and the work of the civil rights movement,” Cohen said.
Cohen said, however, that the current formation of black activism is less of an extension of the civil rights movement, and more of a product of the black queer organizing of the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s.
She said it was crucial to make distinctions about lineage because it enables people to understand movements in a new way.
“In the case of the movement for black lives, understanding lineage tells us something about the political commitments, the ideologies and the praxis that structures a movement, in particular a movement at this moment,” Cohen said.
After the lecture, several students and audience members said they gained a greater perspective from Cohen’s lecture.
Tiffany Kung, a junior in CAS, said she was enlightened by Cohen’s lecture because she had not heard the Black Lives Matter movement be discussed in the context of black queer politics before.
“It’s really good that she brought up the topic of the Black Lives Matter movement,” Kung said. “I was new to this topic and I found it very inspiring.”
Brianna Suslovic, 22, of Somerville, said she attended the lecture to hear more about the frameworks Cohen has created in her books.
“Today I started getting excited about the ways that Cathy Cohen has been really instrumental in organizing frameworks for people to make sense of what’s going on now,” Suslovic said. “This talk did a really good job of clarifying what connections can be drawn to the past and which ones are actually not helpful.”
Zhening Zhang, a sophomore in CAS, said Cohen taught him the difference between the civil rights movement and racial equality movements.
“The distinction about the civil rights movement and today’s movements as social movements was actually an important aspiration because I always think of them as the same,” Zhang said. “I couldn’t see the difference until she talked about it today.”
