From Norms to Values: Moral Agency and Creative Resistance

Abstract

Black people have to be creatively responsive to the unjust and oppressive social and economic circumstances that sustain American life. In response to social and religious sanctions around heteronormativity as the moral standard for family life, many black queers expand these efforts to include nonnormative ways of enacting family. Young examines research participants’ praxis response to dynamics within families, the role of the family context in shaping subjectivity, and the moral products of a normativized concept of family. Many black queers disrupt relational norms and creatively resist them by establishing new ways to understand and enact family structures, incorporating values and exhibiting virtues that challenge the disciplinary powers of capitalism and heteropatriarchy. This resistance involves the creation of teleological goods, a process that illustrates black queer moral agency.