How a durag pulled me into everyday Black matter-ing

by Dr. Chaz Barracks

In the early 2000s, as a little Black boy with ‘two much sugar’, I received my first durag from my favorite cousin’s boyfriend. While babysitting me, just him and me in the house, it was a rare occasion to be alone without any other kids around; he gave me a fresh line-up and gently hand-brushed my curls-forward-into ocean waves. He then stood behind me, meeting my eyes in the mirror, explaining the function of the durag. When he tied that durag around my head, it marked my initiation into ritualized Black hair/care practices. History moved between Black man and femme-boy as his sacred yet everyday durag became mine—tied then knotted. That is how I knew.

I was welcomed in, by someone who loved me and saw me as a boy, into a sacred space of a Black male commons: collective care and adornment. It’s a legacy. 

This was not just about grooming and adorning self in connection to others and within sacred space–the Black home; it was an inheritance. A safe crossing into normative gender space/commons, that also helped prepare me to resist; a rigid gender binary that is often, sometimes blindly, enforced on Black kids in “safe spaces.” This memory work is an ode to Black femmes and fags who too: “make a way out of no way.” 

This is a spiritual thread of femme inheritance that I return to—a way to frame and attune the intervention of this essay. It seeks to preserve Black queer agency within the archive of memory on the homeplace, revealing how some of us, even as children, learn to trick, subvert, and outwit “the rules” in order to remain safe at home. The use of everyday materials—like the durag—to imagine queer possibility within the Black legacy of carving “ways out of no way” is, too, part of our shared history: a quiet refusal of the binary containers through the use of imagination and adornment in order to explore and express the fullness of our humanity. 

This story of “durag matter” serves as one the first moments in my Black life, where I felt the power in taking ownership of my Blackness while still remaining within the commons of shared aesthetic practices for survival, care, and pleasure. 

This is what José Esteban Muñoz calls “disidentification”—where survival becomes a way to explore queer self within Black portals of expression and material culture as wearable declaration.

In doing so, I begin to see a map of queer existence—one that helps shape my understanding of Black futures. These moments and material culture built from them, create a way to analyze and look close/r at both the sacred and the shared practices of joy, resistance, and refusal in Black lives. The durag and politics being worn/adorning it is part of legacies of everyday Black matter aka, durag matter.

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I knew I was going to take that durag— in its ritualistic use and make new meaning with it, Black queer matter. It is in this lineage of ‘making a way out of no way’ where much of my embodied expression stands; from then to now. A type of making that makes room for my most actualized self: femme fag in the Black home. This rich practice of making and becoming lives in our aesthetic expressions—plastic on the sofa, kitsch, vintage fusion, and the unequivocally pristine homes my mother and aunties kept through it all. 

A similar dynamic of the theoretical threads in everyday Black matter emerges in the photographs of Tyler Mitchell, particularly in I Can Make You Feel Good, also the title of a 1982 track by Shalamar. There, Black utopia resides in the everyday: images of living and leisure become quiet refusals of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy. Within the domestic sphere—where power often disciplines the Black queer body—leisure transforms into a politic, a luminous insistence on pleasure, softness, and the right to feel and look good. 

Using Tyler Mitchell’s image theory as analytic to enhance how the Black home is seen as a grounding space, I argue that Black queer life sustains an imaginative, psychic play with the fugitive future—for the culture. Such worldmaking does more than mirror familiar scripts of resistance. Fags, femmes, sissies, and punks often refuse the container altogether—rejecting respectability politics and other mammy media tropes. Instead, a long lineage of Black queer becoming leans into the urgency of the mundane, living beyond binary constraints from the outset and disrupting the narrow economies of image that offer only struggle or death, magical Negro or excellence. 

While I study– and actively refuse-the constraints of these forces, I choose to turn my gaze more toward the creativity and intellectuality in mundane Black life, toward a closer reading of what I been calling in my work: ‘everyday Black matter’, a physical, metaphysical, and analytic space where Black identity is not only fractured but lived; deep and unique approaches to freedom that prioritize the ordinary. It names both the tangible/material aliveness and salience of Black life and its ordinary textures—Black life matters—so often obscured by frameworks that privilege hypervisible suffering or spectacularized excellence. In this focus, on Black living, so much is seen and felt—that often goes unseen. 

Image: Potluck Detroit, Durag Matter shoot directed by Chaz Barracks, photography by, Terrell Groggins @myartmyrules

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Now, decades past from living in the homeplace with the femmes who raised me, living in my own homeplace, watching old ATL Housewives episodes, while seasoning meat in a durag, I see on the other side of the mirror; the high femme mother/s of my lineage, watching Wendy Williams or “The Bold and the Beautiful” while frying up wings in the suburbs. Not the same image but one album on femininity/femme culture and its currency as the foundation of so much of the Black home, nonetheless. The shared rituals, recipes, and everyday material culture passed among women and femmes operate as a feminine–queer transfer. This transfer collectively shapes the aesthetics and atmospheres of the gathering spaces many of us hold onto today—the ways of the spaces that sustain us and equip us with the tactics and strategies to nurture ourselves and others. 

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This visual imagination unfolds deeper meaning during a 2021 viral moment from legendary Black drag queen, when Symone, winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race (S13,EP4), strutted down the runway in a bright, glittering blue durag, reclaiming the item as something sacred and stylish—linking everyday Black cultural memory or “matter.” She posits a queer remix as an intersectional politics of adornment. Although the judges read the look through a narrow “hip hop” rhetoric, Symone’s rendering enacts a quare intervention: that shows a deviation from dominant or binary readings of Black lives and its relevant materials (the durag as Black matter). 

Performances by Black drag queens hold my gaze for how they redirect it—back to the homeplace, to what else was unfolding there. When I see (durag matter unfolding in Black queer lineage [like Symone on Drag Race]), I think: Black women maintained the home for their femme sons to, [in my case], try on and enter new worlds. It’s femmes holding down femmes for what is possible. 

Symone, winner of ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ season 13, walking the runway in a floor length durag| Photo: VH1

If Durags Could Talk…

I have been in this deep theorization with the durag and other forms of material culture passed down in the home because these items carry memory work about discipline and care and survival and agency. Black queer people do not simply inherit these social objects—we inhabit them. How quare reworks them to see alternative paths is a layer for reading Black oral history and collective memory and world-making, to learn the unique possibilities and histories that some of our shared objects hold as they remain prevalent in everyday use. 

In durag matter, the histories of femme and queer wearers—and of other widely circulated materials of Black adornment—show that the durag is not merely a tool of maintenance; it becomes style, signal, archive, and a form of refusal. Black people have long practiced a subversive use of domestic objects—stretching their meanings, pushing them beyond their assigned function—to carve out more space and more livable ways of being while Black. These gestures may seem small, but they are world-altering. They extend our story with rich material rooted in recognizing the speculative modes of Black lives, in the everyday. 

Durags and Black forms of adorning ourselves in the mundane is rich historical material for close readings of everyday Black lives and the fugitive aesthetics that femmes and queers bring to that living archive. I think of what ignited in me—what felt like Black queer matter coming into form—when my cousin gave me my first durag. It was an inheritance, yes, but also an invitation: to style myself into being.

Feature Image: Potluck Detroit, Durag Matter shoot directed by Chaz Barracks, photography by, Terrell Groggins @myartmyrules 

Dr. Chaz A. Barracks, PhD (he/they), is an interdisciplinary scholar, experimental filmmaker, and educator whose work explores Black popular culture, Black feminist theories, oral history, and the politics of the mundane + Black joy. They are the creator of Everyday Black Matter film (2020) and both write and teach courses on Black digital cultures and feminist knowledge/s, oral history, and media/communication arts. Follow him on Instagram at @everydayblackmatter.  Learn more at everydayblackmatter.com.