Black Queer Ethics, Family, and Philosophical Imagination

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xxvii

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2. Introduction

   • Thelathia Nikki Young

   Pages 1-29

3. Practicing Black Queer Ethics Through Stories and Narrative

   • Thelathia Nikki Young

   Pages 31-52

4. The Disciplinary Power of Norms

   • Thelathia Nikki Young

   Pages 53-84

5. The Moral Practice of Disrupting Norms

   • Thelathia Nikki Young

   Pages 85-105

6. From Norms to Values: Moral Agency and Creative Resistance

   • Thelathia Nikki Young

   Pages 107-149

7. Subversive–Generative Moral Imagination

   • Thelathia Nikki Young

   Pages 151-184

8. Conclusion: Reflections on Black Queer Morality and Family

   • Thelathia Nikki Young

   Pages 185-199

9. Back Matter

   Pages 201-224

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 This book acknowledges and highlights the moral excellence embedded in black queer practices of family. Taking the lives, narratives, and creative explorations of black queer people seriously, Thelathia Nikki Young brings readers on a journey of new, queer ethical methods that include confrontation, resistance, and imagination. Young asserts that family and its surrounding norms are both microcosms of and foundations for human relationships. She discusses how black queer people are moral subjects whose ethical reflection, lived experience, and embodied action demonstrate valuable moral agency for those of us thinking about liberating and life-giving ways to enact “family.” Young posits that black queer people enact moral agency in ways that ought to be understood qua moral agency. 


Refusing to recognize the examples from this (and any other) community, Young argues, denies us all the learning and moral growth that come from connectingwith diverse human experiences.  This book investigates how acknowledging and critically engaging with the moral agency within marginalized subjectivities allow us to consider and bear witness to the moral potential in us all.    

• Black
• Queer
• Family
• Kinship
• Norms
• Capitalism
• Resistance

• Bucknell University, Lewisburg, USA

  Thelathia Nikki Young

  Thelathia Nikki Young is Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Religion at Bucknell University, USA. She completed her doctoral studies in ethics and society in the Graduate Division of Religion at Emory University, USA. Her research in ethics focuses on race, gender, sexuality, and family. 

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