Following the movements of Black queer women on queer dance floors in Chicago, Kemi Adeyemi shows how race, feeling, and the geography of the neoliberal city are spatially entangled. Black queer women’s moves on the dance floor reveal, navigate, bend, and upset those entanglements that overdetermine their rights to feel, to belong, and to take place in the city. Black queer women do not dance to escape the realities of their everyday lives. Rather, they dance for moments where they can collectively reimagine, redefine, and reclaim their rights to feel good, their rights to take place in the neighborhoods where they are not “supposed to” take place, and ultimately, their rights to the city.
Articles by Naz Oktay
Naz Oktay is a PhD student in Gender Studies at UCLA. Her research interests include transnational feminisms, decolonial feminisms, and transformative possibilities of anger.