Evelyn Hammonds begins her essay by reflecting, as a black lesbian and feminist writer, on the "consistently exclusionary practices of lesbian and gay studies" that produce such problematic paucities as the presence of writers of color, articles written on black women’s sexuality by black women that complexly examine race in representations of gender, and the visibility of black lesbian experiences (Hammonds, 127). Hammonds articulates how whiteness defines the canonical "categories, identities, and subject positions" of lesbian and gay studies and depends on maintaining and presupposing patterns of black women and black lesbian sexualities' invisibility and absence (Hammonds, 128).