Feels Right: Black Queer Women and the Politics of Partying in Chicago

by Kemi Adeyemi

Overview

In Feels Right Kemi Adeyemi presents an ethnography of how black queer women in Chicago use dance to assert their physical and affective rights to the city. Adeyemi stages the book in queer dance parties in gentrifying neighborhoods, where good feelings are good business. But feeling good is elusive for black queer women whose nightlives are undercut by white people, heterosexuality, neoliberal capitalism, burnout, and other buzzkills. Adeyemi documents how black queer women respond to these conditions: how they destroy DJ booths, argue with one another, dance slowly, and stop partying altogether. Their practices complicate our expectations that life at night, on the queer dance floor, or among black queer community simply feels good. Adeyemi’s framework of “feeling right” instead offers a closer, kinesthetic look at how black queer women adroitly manage feeling itself as a complex right they should be afforded in cities that violently structure their movements and energies. What emerges in Feels Right is a sensorial portrait of the critical, black queer geographies and collectivities that emerge in social dance settings and in the broader neoliberal city.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478016076
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	09/30/2022
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Kemi Adeyemi is Associate Professor of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington and coeditor of Queer Nightlife.

Table of Contents

Preface  ix
Acknowledgments  xiii
Introduction  1
1. Slo ‘Mo and the Pace of Black Queer Life  39
2. Where’s the Joy in Accountability? Black Joy at Its Limits  62
3. Ordinary E N E R G Y  96
Conclusion: An Oral History of the Future of Burnout  120
Notes  143
Bibliography  159
Index  171

What People are Saying About This

A Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queers - Jen Jack Gieseking

“In this incredibly beautiful and important work, Kemi Adeyemi addresses the erasure of Black queer women’s stories, histories, and spaces by recovering the complexity of their lived geographies. Feels Right is a fantastic read that transports readers into their world that was—and one yet to come.”

Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship - Aimee Meredith Cox

“Feels Right approaches the nexus of race, pleasure, geography, and capital in innovative and important ways. Kemi Adeyemi’s prose crackles with essential sensory details and the organics of life. Her argument is a necessary extension of work on Black life and death and the ways the tensions between the two find articulation in cities and neighborhoods, on streets, and in the spaces of everyday life.”

Editorial Reviews

Adeyemi’s rich ethnographic observations on Black queer women’s parties in Chicago demonstrate why the dance floor is much more than just a utopian promise of happiness within a hostile socio-political environment. . . . Through dancing and choreography, queerness is not only performed but also learned and experienced by people who may not have encountered it before.”—Yener Bayramoglu, Ethnic and Racial Studies

"What is innovative about Adeyemi’s text ... is that she carves out a scholarly field that reflects her interest in queer nightlife in the most expansive definition of the phrase. ... Feels Right is a political project that aims to drive many Black queer women to return to nightlife even if their pleasure is contested on the dance floor and in the city."  

—Marietta Kosma, European Journal of American Culture

“This book will be invaluable to anyone working in feminist studies, queer studies, performance studies, Black studies, and Black geographies.”—Naz Oktay, Lateral

"Scholars interested in topics of geography and space making, queer and Black politics, and queer theory will find Feels Right particularly appealing. . . . Throughout Feels Right, Adeyemi presents essential questions about queer nightlife, neoliberal politics, ordinary affects, mobility throughout city spaces (and academia), and experiences of burnout within radical politics and research."—Jordan C. Grasso, GLQ

"By refusing the primacy of the explanatory and explicit event in academic writing, Adeyemi masterfully uses the structure of “feeling right” in Feels Right in Chicago to situate the forms of affect and politics that shape Black queer life at the level of the body and in social space."—Brittnay L. Proctor, Theatre Journal

"Feels Right is an invigorating addition to the growing scholarship elucidating the labor Black queer women perform to sustain and create Black communities. It inserts Black queer women into the scholarship on queer nightlife that largely focuses on white queer men. As a dance studies text, it exemplifies how to dance alongside and do ethnography with care and respect for the people who invite us into their communities. I am thoroughly struck by how Adeyemi rigorously operationalizes the theories she creates to describe the strategies Black queer women deploy to party and navigate within the trappings of neoliberalism throughout Chicago."—Raquel Monroe, Dance Research Journal

From the Publisher

"What is innovative about Adeyemi’s text ... is that she carves out a scholarly field that reflects her interest in queer nightlife in the most expansive definition of the phrase. ... Feels Right is a political project that aims to drive many Black queer women to return to nightlife even if their pleasure is contested on the dance floor and in the city."  

European Journal of American Culture - Marietta Kosma

"Scholars interested in topics of geography and space making, queer and Black politics, and queer theory will find Feels Right particularly appealing. . . . Throughout Feels Right, Adeyemi presents essential questions about queer nightlife, neoliberal politics, ordinary affects, mobility throughout city spaces (and academia), and experiences of burnout within radical politics and research."

GLQ - Jordan C. Grasso

"By refusing the primacy of the explanatory and explicit event in academic writing, Adeyemi masterfully uses the structure of “feeling right” in Feels Right in Chicago to situate the forms of affect and politics that shape Black queer life at the level of the body and in social space."

Theatre Journal - Brittnay L. Proctor

Adeyemi’s rich ethnographic observations on Black queer women’s parties in Chicago demonstrate why the dance floor is much more than just a utopian promise of happiness within a hostile socio-political environment. . . . Through dancing and choreography, queerness is not only performed but also learned and experienced by people who may not have encountered it before.

Ethnic and Racial Studies - Yener Bayramoglu

This book will be invaluable to anyone working in feminist studies, queer studies, performance studies, Black studies, and Black geographies.

Lateral - Naz Oktay

"Feels Right is an invigorating addition to the growing scholarship elucidating the labor Black queer women perform to sustain and create Black communities. It inserts Black queer women into the scholarship on queer nightlife that largely focuses on white queer men. As a dance studies text, it exemplifies how to dance alongside and do ethnography with care and respect for the people who invite us into their communities. I am thoroughly struck by how Adeyemi rigorously operationalizes the theories she creates to describe the strategies Black queer women deploy to party and navigate within the trappings of neoliberalism throughout Chicago."

Dance Research Journal - Raquel Monroe