Feels Right: Black Queer Women, Sensorial Citizenship, and the Neoliberal City
Introduction
In 2013, the author observed racial dynamics in Logan Square, Chicago, when a black girl protested the use of the N-word at a party, highlighting the displacement of black communities due to gentrification.
Feels Right examines the intersection of race, feeling, and geography in the neoliberal city, focusing on black queer women's experiences in nightlife scenes in Logan Square, Hyde Park, and the South Loop.
The book explores how black queer women navigate and reshape these environments, addressing challenges in forging black queer life.
Each chapter explores different aspects: resisting acceleration at Slo ‘Mo, negotiating Black Joy at Party Noire, and addressing the uneventfulness of e n e r g y.
Feels Right complicates the idea of queer nightlife as simply "feeling good," emphasizing the importance of "feeling right"—a holistic sense of cohesion.
The book connects feeling right to the alignment of vibrations, relationships, and environments, viewing complex feeling as a right and a demonstration of black queer women's rights to the city.
Feeling Right(s) in the Neoliberal City
Neoliberalism prioritizes privatization and deregulation, favoring corporate investment and displacing marginalized communities.
Gentrification is a revenge plot against minoritarian subjects, undermining government responsibility and intensifying Chicago's segregation.
Black communities face numerous challenges, including police violence and housing crises, impacting their ability to feel right.
Black queer women assert their physical rights in contested zones, challenging the racism and discrimination in "safe spaces" like Boystown.
Implicit policies make it difficult for black queer women to take place and feel right in the neoliberal city.
Some places where black queer women might feel right, though
Black queer women strategically create spaces amidst the neoliberal city, such as Slo ‘Mo, Party Noire, and e n e r g y.
These parties provide spaces for self-discovery and community, allowing black queer women to express their rights to occupy landscapes of pleasure.
Despite conflicts and emotional labor, these parties are often the only places where black queer women feel right in their bodies and community.
Each chapter in Feels Right documents and contextualizes these conflicts:
Argues that black queer women express the ability to feel in complex ways, beyond the limited binary of pleasure and terror that has long circumscribed black queer life; their dance floor efforts are an important staging ground where they assert their effective rights to themselves.
The feeling part of rights TO the city
*Rights encompass the understanding that comes from desire.
*There's desire to see, desire to be accepted, and desire to fulfill or forget- such are the underpinnings of black queer women who come to parties like the ones discussed in this book.
The geographic scale of the conversation refocused to look toward the actions of the dance floor where feelings serve as the avenue black queer women conduct political work of negotiating their rights to the city every time they wield their entire sensorium as they directly implicate their own bodies and the bodies of those around them
Queer dance at nightclubs and parties is a chance to revel inside them, letting power, meaning, bodies, aesthetics, and affects collide
It happens in ways of moving and feeling the body: in feeling the city on their own terms. It is a struggle over their physical and affective rights to the city.
Rather than lodging a formal complaint and dismantling process is people's abilities to sense and respond
*It demands that those processes in the city are circumscribed by logics of race and feeling.
Black Queer Method(s)[ologies
It is a black feminist ethnography committed to the impossibility of our wholeness : the ongoing violence that delimits capacities with the aim of continually mining that existence in the face of violence.
dialogic performance shaped through how people discuss academic books
Methods root in the intimate space with them
Balancing at events and and constant observation
Formal and Informal interviews are conducted , followed after with the aid of social media for experiences outside of the time and space.
Use for collaboration gives the people their opportunity to give their time, and final choice with their own terms
My methods for the book are rooted in ethics of dialogue and dialogic performance
how dialogue moves in time, giving the interviewer not only a personal, human connection, but a vulnerable process of asking them questions
On terminology
The phrase "black queer women" is used throughout this book, while highly noting these terms are unstable that are not constrained to the lived experiences. While there is always opportunity for people shift and morph from gender to time.
The organizers can shift based on gender to reflect their attendees
Gender and sexuality are expanded depending on body how they want to feel and project such that their can be many self fashioning beyond strict gender
Pronouns, with awareness this also can change based on people
*The terms that go into black queer community can sometimes fail, so such that by documenting and including the challenges, this can become an experience, thus being useful.
All cases, visual logistics of black woman in the book is always a script within the author
and it all is connected and is based on the experience to adapt socially to contexts such that a person might describe themselves