Speaking Black Queer Grief(s): Toward Transformative Care for Black TLGBQIA2S+ Communities

While literature has spoken to the wealth of loss experienced by Black and queer communities separately, limited empirical literature has focused on how people living at the intersection of these identities grieve and make meaning of these losses. Moreover, when examined, these experiences overwhelmingly highlight physical death and exclude the pervasive impact of nondeath losses facilitated by confluent anti-Black and heterosexist systems. As such, the present work is guided by critical and Liberation frameworks to understand how structural violence shapes the way that Black queer communities diversely experience grief. Using semi-structured interviews, the present qualitative study explored how 10 Black queer adults (range 18–41) made meaning of their grief experiences through a critically conscious lens. An inductive thematic analysis revealed three main themes: Body, Mind, and Spirit—Naming and Claiming Grief as Disempowerment Across Dimension and Beyond Binaries , Severance—Grieving Separation as “the Other” within the Collective , and Defiant Reconstruction—World Building in the Aftermath of Loss through New Imaginings . Authors provide grief-informed considerations for transformative liberational practice with Black queer communities.