Jennifer Dominique Jones

Jennifer Dominique Jones is a member of the inaugural cohort of LSA Collegiate Fellows at the University of Michigan and affiliated the Department of History. She completed her doctoral degree in the Department of History at Princeton University in 2014.  Before her appointment at to the University of Michigan, she was an assistant professor in the Department of Gender & Race Studies and the Department of American Studies at the University of Alabama. Her areas of research and teaching expertise are African American history after 1877, with a focus on politics and social life and the history of gender and sexuality in the United States in the twentieth century with a focus on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) politics and community life. She teaches courses on LGBTQ History and Political life and Black Sexual Histories. She has also taught Introduction to African American Studies, Black Feminism, and Southern Black Women’s History.

Current Work:

Her book monograph, Queering An American Dilemma: Sexuality, Gender, and Race Relations in the United States, 1945-1988 (under contract with University of North Carolina Press), examines how discrimination against LGBTQ Americans (and contestations of such inequality) substantively shaped black liberal political strategies and black-white race relations during the last half of the twentieth century. As black liberals pursued equality of opportunity and outcome, members of this political vanguard increasingly encountered, contributed to, or challenged these sexual/gender inequities. During the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, these encounters took various forms that included denigrating narratives about gay men/lesbians as sexual predators and political subversives as well as contesting specific forms of sexual discrimination. During the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, however, gay and lesbian political organizations pursued alliances with African American organizations around key issues such as police brutality, combatting anti-black and anti-gay conservatives, and stemming the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Over time, these political encounters revealed an increasing dissonance within black politics — activists and politicians worked to portray black intimate and familial life as heteronormative and non-pathological even as coalitions with LGBTQ communities became increasingly desirable and necessary. Queering An American Dilemma reveals a crucial relationship between understandings of race (blackness) and sexuality (queerness) in American life that continues to reverberate in present-day politics.

Research Area Keyword(s):

African American history; LGBT history; twentieth century United States history; histories of gender and sexuality (US)