Living and Loving in the Brackish: A Black Feminist Perspective

When salt and freshwater meet, they create brackish environments marked by turbulence, adaptation, and complex ecological conditions. These waters often cannot sustain species that can survive only in purely fresh or purely saltwater spaces. The term brackish traces back to the Dutch word “brac/k” (noun), meaning opening, break, defect, or worthless. Drawing on Black and Caribbean feminist geographical and ecological theorizing, I use brackish as a framework to examine how Black women’s intimacies have been cast as devalued or deviant within Western societies. These same intimacies, however, have generated crucial openings and breaches through which Black women cultivate alternative possibilities for living, belonging, and finding worth. Thinking with brackish as metaphor reveals Black women’s intimate and interior lives as sites of creativity, care, and survival that unsettle normative models of intimacy, including cis-heteronormative and even dominant queer formations. Doing so centers the generative potential of mixing difference, showing how connection and relationality emerge within and through harshness. I ask: What might brackish offer as a way of theorizing Black feminist intimacies, and envisioning the kinds of life and love made possible not despite breaks, but because of them, even in their vulnerability?