The Worlds of Queer Black Aesthetics within the HNIC of P-Valley

Uncle Clifford and the Queer Black body as a canvas

Tylyn K. Johnson

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justfemmeanddandy

9 min readMay 28, 2023

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There is something to be said for how queer Black aesthetics rest on the outskirts of our society’s norms around the presentation of the self. It is often through experimentation that we find out how we are meant to manifest the spirit unto the body and make a concept into a realized style or aesthetic or fashion. To live a queer Black aesthetic is to always — in some way, shape, or form, regardless of intent — be close enough to those very norms that we flow in and around to be damned for deviation. And yet, it is also an existence distanced enough from said norms that the body becomes a site for the innovation of being.

(1) Photo of actor Nico Annan in bathrobe. Courtesy of Damu Malik. Via Hollywood Reporter.

One way in which we witness this is in Nicco Annan’s role as Uncle Clifford in the deservedly-praised series P-Valley. Not only did Annan make Uncle Clifford the boss bitch she is in the TV show, but he did the same in the play that the show was adapted from, Pussy Valley (both play and show are created by Katori Hall). Annan’s magic as Uncle Clifford shows the sheer range of being that can be birthed when our [Black, queer] bodies are given the freedom to do so. Or rather, when that freedom is claimed by us and the bodies we carry.

For those who don’t know P-Valley, Uncle Clifford is the gender-nonconforming proprietor of The Pynk, a strip club in the fictional city of Chucalissa in the Mississippi Delta. Whether in the club, at a cash advance, running errands, or doing things around the house, Uncle Clifford is displaying how fluid one person’s presentation can be.

In public, Uncle Clifford’s presentation tended towards what some might consider more “drag-y,” an artistic interpretation of the gendered roles Uncle Clifford plays even as she bucks gender norms by the way in which she exists. And naturally, there is a certain storytelling that is done with this fashion, wherein this strip club owner shows the many roles she is willing to play in her life. Examples of this include the following looks:

(2) Uncle Clifford serving Southern churchwoman in a red top with bell sleeves and a red parasol, and light-colored gloves, standing outside among trees. Via Essence.

Here, while making an impromptu visit to stir things to protect The Pynk and the girls thereof, Uncle Clifford dresses in the style of a Southern churchwoman, gloves and parasol and formalwear and all. In presenting this look, Uncle Clifford demonstrates that not only does she possess the power of information networks that is often expected of the established women of [Black] churches, but that she can and will disrupt said networks as needed. And to that point, the deep red of this outfit offers the vibrancy of Black people working to show have they’ve progressed from struggle. It also provides a reflection of the many forms of violence that surrounds her in this space — historical, moment-to-moment, physical, sexual, ideological — and how Uncle Clifford learned to participate in it to survive, as many oppressed people do.

(3) Uncle Clifford giving something for the Pynk girls in a sequined light-colored top with a shredded shoulder on the right, multi-colored hair in a braid. Via Purchase College.

In this scene, Uncle Clifford shows herself as being willing to get down and dirty with the girls she leads as their HNIC. The outfit is not so prim or glamorous or stunt-y as she tries to make typical for her. And yet, even here, Uncle Clifford plays with how accessories can make a day of physical labor [with a certain lustful element to it] into a place where Black, queer, non-thin bodies are a sight to behold. She may not be in the bra and panties of The Pynk’s dancers, she makes herself desirable, if for no one else but herself. And to that point, Uncle Clifford uses her body to display her power, as the leader of a space that sells sexual fantasies.

(4) Uncle Clifford as a vision in bright green, with synchronized hair. Credit: Erika Doss/STARZ. Via Entertainment Weekly.

Even in a suit, an outfit usually worn to project power, professionalism, or polish — all things that tend to be based more in evoking masculinity — Uncle Clifford jushes it up to be proudly femme. The lace, the very-untraditional color, the hair, even the bag that reads so “regular” compared to what is brought together in this look, it is all toying with items that we usually see through a gendered lens. It is not very different from the butch or stud girls wearing tuxes to prom, but this brings the budget and imagination had by an adult who rests in the comforts and difficulties of her fluidity.

(5) Uncle Clifford in another suit, navy, with a matching fedora. STARZ. Via DIgital Spy.

With all of the explicitly-feminine experimentation we witness in the presentation of Uncle Clifford, she still shows how fluidity is not an easily-tracked thing, despite how we often trace it. Uncle Clifford was assigned male at birth, and shows little apprehension with presenting her style in a “drag-y” masculinity, as can be seen by her outing to take care of some money handling for the strip club of Chucalissa. Given how Uncle Clifford’s looks tend to be thoughtfully coordinated, one could read this presentation as both reflecting an internal alignment with a more masculine aesthetic. And with this, we could potentially see it as serving the added purpose of reinforcing her voice using the masculinity that is given to this look, especially because this is where Uncle Clifford is having to operate in a space where her body is only Black and underresourced, where her role as the owner of The Pynk is given no power.

(6) Uncle Clifford getting her nails checked, wearing a violet button-down shirt with a multi-colored design, and a green patterned headscarf. Via IMDB.

In thinking about how Uncle Clifford’s fashions reflect Queer Black aesthetics, it is also important to consider the day-to-day aesthetic experiences of being Black and Queer and other in our world. Here, The Pynk’s HNIC exists in the kind of easy fashion that you might see in your average catalogue; headscarf, denim top with intricate design on it, accessories. Were it not for the ways in which others may read various gender expectations in her appearance, there would be nothing all that notable about Uncle Clifford here. In this moment, she’s just another person. She may be a boss, a survivor, a source of intrigue, and/or many other things. But here? She is one more person living in the world, one of those people in the background of most of our lives, who we only know exist because we pass by them at the store or in the car or at the park or wherever we happen to be. And ultimately, we forget them, because they don’t necessarily need to affect our world.

(7) The HNIC of The Pynk, bedazzled, wearing a red face mask, a bedazzled headpiece, red fur stole, and a bedazzled corset. Via Elle.

In looking for yet one more show of Uncle Clifford’s public fashions, it cannot be neglected that her presentation is far grander than the conceptions of “masculine” and “feminine” that we are taught. The strip club owner in P-Valley mixes and matches things in and outside of this binary to achieve whatever aesthetic she desires. This look here is an example of this, where she forgoes her usual foray of wigs for a jeweled headpiece, and wears a face mask (in reflection of P-Valley’s own Covid-affected world) that may serve to obscure her face. Here, I think Uncle Clifford’s fashion surprises me most because her neatly-maintained facial hair is not visible, which has been on display for so much of the show it’s hard to imagine her nonconforming fashion without it. And yet in this look, I think the mask serves to show what her particular queer Black aesthetic looks like at its “purest,” where it relies little on any norms to work with or against, but in which the person creating the aesthetic simply exists.

(8) Uncle Clifford with hands up in purple lipstick and matching durag. Via STARZ YouTube channel.

(9) Uncle Clifford looking pensive in a lighter purple durag. Via STARZ YouTube channel.

In these final two images of Uncle Clifford in P-Valley, we see a queer Black body in a different kind of vulnerable state. Where many of the previously-shown aesthetics carry vulnerability from being presented in public, where violence is at its highest risk, this is a different kind of vulnerability. It is the person, the body, in a more bare state, sans any conceived aesthetic. It is durag and beater and shirt and gap teeth and dark skin — all things that can be seen in public. But pictured here, the canvas we make ourselves into, we are bare. It is in these private moments where the canvas that we paint our queer Black aesthetics onto are deeply shaped, from prayer to reflection to silence to fury and happiness. And as much as the glamour of a publicly-presented aesthetic allures us, this right here, Uncle Clifford when she is momentarily free of the need to consciously present herself to the world, I think best represents the unlimited worlds of queer Black aesthetics.

Uncle Clifford is the kind of character that young queer Black people might reference in building their own aesthetics, especially because of the range of references and worlds that The HNIC of The Pynk displays in P-Valley. It is how the oppressed learn to draw an aesthetic from each other; from culture and sex and faith and violence and more. And here, this HNIC becomes an allegory of the concept of the body as a canvas, something that we see in how queer Black people shape their bodies, in more ways than one, in order to do what they need to survive — whatever that may look like. And I think the aesthetics crafted here also show how what we do for ourselves ends up being for everybody.

We see this in the Black queer ancestors who held themselves in the myriad of fashions that our humanity has divined, going beyond confines policed with blood. We see this in the living, who rediscover artful ways of being that were so nearly lost to colonially-constructed histories and reinterpret themselves into galleries. And we see this in the ways we exist in stories by, for, around, and including us — unexplainable works of art that can be in the background one moment, and center stage the next. To be Black and queer, unapologetically, confusingly, from the stars to the gutters, is to occupy a space and aesthetic where we turn the mundane into a main event.

Uncle Clifford showed this with sheer range of looks she gave, from waking up to a lover’s breakfast to dreams of stunting on the pole to keeping six feet of distance between us with bedazzled masks. She cannot be the totality of how Black queer folks cultivate such varied aesthetics birthed from similarly-themed origins, but she do be a damn good representation of that. And this cultivation shows in our history and our modernity, for we be a great deal of grandness, a part of the margins that define the pages of history we live in, allowing us to expand our conception of being in this world along too many planes of existence to name but which all might shake the cosmos with a tight thigh high.

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The Worlds of Queer Black Aesthetics within the HNIC of P-Valley

Uncle Clifford and the Queer Black body as a canvas

Written by Tylyn K. Johnson