Black (W)holes: A Problem for Feminist Thought

Ever since the publication of Evelynn Hammonds’s rejoinder to the evolving discussion of (white) queer studies (differences 1994), we have struggled to think about black female sexuality and how it matters to our understandings of prevailing tropes of feminism. The author of this essay writes across three registers: the first addresses what contemporary discoveries about black holes attempt to tell us about “matter,” or what matters; the second is what Hammonds sought to disrupt or prove impossible in her essay; and the third is a meditation on the place of “elementary particles” in the physics—the possible rupture of time and space—of Hammonds’s work and the work of the late Randall Kenan in his short experimental piece “Chinquapin: Elementary Particles.”