“Queer (Be)Longing: Glenn Ligon’s Million Man March Series and the Civil Rights Movement’s Legacy.”
Art Journal 79, no. 3 (December 2020): 44-61. LINK
Abstract: This essay explores Glenn Ligon’s 1996 paintings, which appropriate press photographs of the 1995 Million Man March. The event restaged the 1963 March on Washington, but it excluded women and gay men. My analysis articulates how Ligon’s untitled painting series ambivalently challenges the Million Man March organizers’ hetero-patriarchal interpretation of the civil rights movement. Using Queer of Color Critique, I demonstrate that Ligon’s series destabilizes the ways in which the Social Darwinism of the 1990s cast hetero-normative, masculine leadership as the fittest for reproducing and representing the movement. Ligon disintegrates this leadership model through his distorted replication of media images reminiscent of civil rights protest filled with Black male figures. The queer connotations that arise from Ligon’s repetitive appropriations of such imagery imply the potential of queer identifications to proliferate amid Black activism, thereby undercutting concurrent notions that deemed Black gay men a peril to Black Americans’ progress toward racial parity. Ultimately, I contend that through its engagement with repetition and hetero-normative masculine signifiers of the civil rights movement, Ligon’s march series queerly recodes so as to refute sexual logics of the 1990s that overdetermined how Black men should participate in the social reproduction of Black life. This argument further reveals that Ligon’s series puts Black masculinity at the center of 1990s discourses about reviving the civil rights movement for Black Americans and, by extension, about their collective long-term survival—their capacities to belong and be long.
