Stephanie Andrea Allen on “We Must Document Ourselves Now”

Join the Kinsey Institute and us in welcoming Stephanie Andrea Allen to discuss “We Must Document Ourselves Now”.
About this Event

A long-overdue analysis of how Black lesbians have asserted their lived experience through creative practice, pushing back against heteropatriarchal systems that deny them visibility.
“We Must Document Ourselves Now” examines the essential but oft-ignored importance of Black lesbian literature and film in queer literary and film histories, arguing that Black lesbian cultural texts reflect creators’ lived experiences and resist the heteropatriarchal systems that deny Black lesbians visibility in popular culture. Stephanie Andrea Allen contends that these texts have three goals: to lay bare the experiences of Black lesbians in a raced, gendered, classed, and homophobic society; to challenge the notion that claiming Black lesbian identity is marginal or forbidden; and to take care of Black lesbians by bearing witness to their experiences through creative practice.
Insisting that Black feminist creative practice is an integral form of self and community care, Allen weaves analysis of cultural output spanning key sociocultural moments from 1974 to 2020 with interviews with Black lesbian cultural workers. “We Must Document Ourselves Now”examines the Black Arts / Black Power movement, the “boom” in lesbian and gay publishing, the so-called golden era of Black film, and twenty-first-century visual media to demonstrate how representations of Black lesbians, or lack thereof, were vital to constructing a cultural canon that focused on illuminating Black lesbian experiences in the United States.

About the Author:

Stephanie Andrea Allen, Ph.D. is an interdisciplinary humanities scholar, creative writer, small press publisher, and Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at Indiana University. Her research centers Black lesbian cultural histories and Black feminisms through various expressions, including literature, film, and other print and visual media. Her most recent project “We Must Document Ourselves Now:” Black Lesbian Cultural Legacies and the Politics of Self-Representation, (Ohio State University Press, 2026), examines the essential, but oft-ignored importance of Black lesbian literature and visual media in queer literary and film histories. Her scholarly writing can be found in Women, Gender, and Families of Color, Archeion: Journal of Queer Archives, Feminists Talk Whiteness, Sinister Wisdom, and in other academic spaces.