Introduction

Abstract

American social and political discussions about marriage derive from long-standing norms of family and kinship structures that are based on deeply rooted concepts of gender roles and power differentiation. Young highlights conversations about and developments in marriage equality as the background for current ethical discourse on the family. She explains how Black Queer Ethics interrogates the moral norms of family and kinship that foreground race, gender, and sexuality norms in the US context. Young also introduces the book’s thesis: black queer people are moral agents who enact family in ways that are simultaneously disruptive to current familial norms in society, creatively resistant to the disciplinary powers at work in those norms, and subversively generative and imaginative in relation to establishing new ways of being in relationship.