Bearing Witness to Unseen Flesh

Abstract

The introduction foregrounds the book's main framework, unseen flesh, to understand the layered ways that Brazilian Black lesbians produce knowledge about race, gender, sexuality, class, and medical approaches through their gynecologic visits. The introduction opens with an ethnographic story that looks through windows into Black lesbian invisibility and the emotional labor attached to it. The author also delineates how her intersecting identities as Black, queer, medical clinician, physician assistant, seminarian, and anthropologist together functioned to bear witness to Brazilian Black lesbians' emotions, knowledge production, activism, and caretaking. The author explores methodological questions such as storytelling, radical data, analysis of discourses and social platforms, and a humanities approach to anthropological and Black feminist queer thought.