In the Life, on the Scene: the Spatial and Discursive Production of Black Queer Women's Scene

Charneka Lane

2015

for my momma and all my aunties

IN THE LIFE, ON THE SCENE: THE SPATIAL AND DISCURSIVE PRODUCTION

OF BLACK QUEER WOMEN’S SCENE SPACE

IN WASHINGTON, D.C.

Charneka Lane

ABSTRACT

This dissertation examines the spatial and discursive practices of black queer women (hereafter BQW) in Washington, D.C. Drawing from ethnographic research conducted within “the Scene,” a colloquialism referring to the transient collection of leisure spaces in D.C. produced for and by other BQW including book clubs, professional sporting events, private house parties, semi-public events held in mainstream venues, happy hours, and annual Black Pride Celebrations, I explore the way BQW actively bend, borrow, and queer language, space, and black cultural values to make room for their unique expressions of black female sexuality within black sexual politics, American popular culture, and the urban landscape. There are two key levels of analysis: (1) I examine the way BQW produce and maintain the “BQW Scene” within the context of a city that is both “gay-friendly” and majority black; and, (2) using critical discourse analysis alongside queer theoretical approaches to the study of affect, I analyze discourses of belonging, self, and others which manifest in my informant’s discussions of the scene. This dissertation demonstrates how BQW make sense of multiple, sometimes contradictory normative practices related to race, gender, sexuality, and class. In so doing, it explicates the interrelationships among race, gender, sexuality, and class as they instantiate themselves within space and discourse.

PREFACE

Family (fam-Lee), adj. 1. Meaning or referring to an individual who is same-gender loving; who identifies as gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, and/or queer, or who practices homosexual behavior. —adj. 2. Related to, or sharing common qualities with someone who is same-gender loving.

The word family within black lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans language communities is an adjective referring to or describing someone who is same-gender loving in some way. The specifics of how they identify matters less than their being identifiable as someone who is “related” to other black lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans people based on the shared experience of being black and being in the life, or actively engaged in the black lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans community. Family functions similarly to an adjective of nationality. For example, “Are you Irish?” is similar to the construction of the question, “Are you family?” This question, “Are you family?” is a safe, discrete way of asking if someone is lesbian, gay, or bisexual. If they understand the question and answer in the affirmative, then they are indeed family. I grew up a military brat, but spent the majority of my life in Atlanta. I was raised on New York house music. I thought RuPaul was the most beautiful woman in the world, played with action figures instead of dolls, and I never had to "dress like a girl." And all of my family was family. My parents had the unique challenge and good fortune to choose their family. Almost all of their closest friends, my aunties and uncles, were black lesbians and black gay men--they were family. I lived for the family house parties. Me, upstairs somewhere "asleep," them downstairs dancing, drinking, smoking, talking loud and simply enjoying the company and sensation of being together. Sometimes the parties were massive and other times they were small. It depended on who was throwing the party and whether they had a tiny apartment or a big house. Sometimes they were barbecues and sometimes they were game nights, but they were always a good time and I always found an auntie or uncle willing to shelter me from my parents sending me back to

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bed. And so I learned how to throw down on the spades table, talk trash, play the dozens, and how to dance at those parties. One of the most important things I learned at those parties, and which inspires this project, is that people who are marginalized always find a way to make space for themselves. It wasn't until I was older that I would come to realize that my little queer life was not the "norm." My family was not in the books that I read in school or on television, and in church I came to understand that it was best to keep the truth of my family to myself because there were people, belief systems and forms of "common sense" that would construe the love my family had into something bad. According to these ideas, my family was "living in sin" and therefore I had to learn to “love them from a distance.” I suppose the fear was that their “lifestyles” would rub up off, but nothing worked like that except maybe dirt. And so I realized that while I loved all my aunties and uncles because they were my family, they were too often forced to live in secret and shadow out of shame and fear for their livelihoods because something about them made their lives made them “dirty.” And so my family didn't belong anywhere except in the spaces that they created for each other. When I moved to Washington, D.C. for college in 2005, I was a racial minority at a predominately white institution. I helped to organize events and parties that catered to the unique cultural experiences of African, African-American and Latino students. I lived in what we affectionate referred to as the “Black House” whose intent and mission was to keep an "open door" on campus for students of color who could enter the Black House and simply be. Spaces like the Black House were important to us because our experiences were almost never reflected in the spaces we spent the majority of our time, like the classroom. And then in 2006, I fell in love with a woman. Finding spaces to be comfortably became even more of a challenge. There were the steps of the dorm where the women’s basketball team lived. All the black lesbians on campus seemed to congregate there. And there were Sunday nights when we’d watch The L Word together, again, in the basement of women's basketball team's dorm. While we made iv

due, these spaces never quite felt adequate. In the spring of 2007, I began dating the woman who would became my wife and she told me about the Black Lesbian Support Group that met on Saturdays near U Street. She was white but had nonetheless heard about this group and thought it might be good for me since I was going through a very tricky process of “coming out.” On a late Saturday morning in the summer of 2007, I got on the Metro and made my way down to U Street. I walked past the barbershop where I got my haircut; walked across the street past the Footlocker where I’d purchased the shoes I was wearing, and walked into 1810 14th St. NW, the Lesbian Services Project (LSP). It was a small unassuming building with a purple awning. I walked past what appeared to be a reception area, but it was unstaffed. I wandered behind the desk toward what appeared to be meeting rooms and found one with chairs arranged in a large circle. There were a few women there who welcomed me. Soon, more women began to arrive. There were about 10 of us there, myself the youngest of the group, which I learned after introductions. After we talked and shared our stories, our challenges, and offered one another advice, we went to grab lunch together at a nearby restaurant. We laughed, we joked, and exchanged contact information. I had a great time with those women, many of whom I still have relationships with today. They introduced me to the black queer women’s “Scene” in D.C. and while I didn’t know at that time I would be researching and writing about black queer women in D.C., they inspired me. In my journal entry for that day I wrote, “I think I found my aunties in D.C.” This dissertation is about family; it’s about my aunties, their creativity, and their resistance to systems that would mark them as undeserving of spaces to simple be.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

“First of all, giving honor to God who is the head of my life...”

- Any black person who has ever done anything of note or received any special honor of any kind

The Divine had Its hand in this project from the beginning. Heaven knows how many times I cried and screamed and threw things and cried some more because I thought I had lost my mind thinking I could complete this project. And so, I echo every black person who has ever done anything of note or received any special honor of any kind. Thank you God (all of them and the Goddesses as well) for getting me to the finish line.

Behind the Good Lord Baby Jesus, I have to thank my family of sister friends and informants for inviting me into their homes and sharing their lives and their stories with me. This document would not have been possible without the women whose beautifully complicated lives served as the primary sources for this intellectual engagement with black queer women’s lives in

D.C. For being candid, for being honest, and for making yourselves available for this work, thank you.

I will be forever grateful to American University’s Office of the Vice-Provost of

Graduate Studies and Vice Provost Jonathan Tubman for funding my research, and the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at American University, Dean Peter Star for funding the data collection and writing phases of my dissertation. American University has always valued my research. Their investment in my work is an investment in Black Feminist Anthropology and

Black Queer Studies; for that I am forever grateful.

The classroom was an incubator for me. I tested ideas and played with theories until I found ones that worked. I thank the professors who built classrooms, which allowed me to

develop as a researcher and thinker: Dolores Koenig, Sue Taylor, Dan Sayers, Rachel Watkins,

Sabiyha Prince, Gretchen Schafft, Keith Leonard, Brett Williams, William Leap, and Jennifer

Nash. And in that same vein, I thank my friends and colleagues who helped me to clarify ideas and who challenged my preconceptions inside and outside of the classroom. There were a lot of you but special thanks to Elijah Edelman, Audrey Cooper, Anoosh Kahn, Matthew Thomann,

Ashanté Reese, Joeva Rock, Laura Jung, Ted Samuel, Jennifer Delfino, Joowon Park, Anthony

Gualtieri, Jennifer Grubbs, Nell Hayes, Karen Lindsey, K. Nyerere Turé, and Erin Moriarty

Harrelson. You generously engaged me in conversation, you read my work, and you asked me difficult questions, and your insight helped me to clarify my arguments. Thank you.

There were several people who helped me to get centered, or re-capture my sense of self when it all felt like too much. My family of friends kept me grounded and reminded me that my life is full and extends far beyond these 8.5 x 11 pages. My sister friends were always there to encourage me and served as examples for how to reach for the sky. Shannon Holmes, Kelly

Leon, Ashley Williams, Alicia Mooltrey, Fade Adetosoye, and Brittney Thomas, I love you girls.

To the original brunch crew, Tyler Lewis, Renaldo Hagood, or as I like to think of him, “The

Internet,” Sarah Coker-Robinson, Dionne “Started from the Bottom, Now We Here” Coker-

Robinson, Liz Crow, Samson Ka’ala Reiny, The Real Paul McDaniel, Patrice Ward, and Carletta

Girma. Thank you for all the mimosas and all the good times!

A special thank you to the creators of The Sims 3 and Civilization IV. The hours and hours I spent playing computer games instead of writing gave me the mental space to formulate some of my most profound ideas. To my Facebook community, public profiles of interesting people on Instagram, and the Facebook post “Me and my homies at the turn up function” for always being there when I needed moments (or weeks) of respite from critical thinking. vii

To my advisor, William Leap who guided me through this process. To my advisors and mentors Jennifer C. Nash, Brett Williams, Sabiyha Prince, Rachel Watkins, Katharina Vester,

Sue Taylor, Ami Lynch, Ruth Ost, Dana-Ain Davis, and Nemata Blyden who welcomed me into their offices, their homes, and their lives. Your knowledge, generosity, and sage advice have gotten through every stage of this process. You were (and will remain) there to encourage me and to advise me in the ways of scholarship. Thank you.

To my Momma who has literally given all she has for me to be successful for no other reason than because that’s what mommas do. Thank you Momma for teaching me how to, in addition to other practical things, “drive a bus,” because we’re Lanes, and we can do anything including “drive a bus.” And, to my Auntee, whose character captures the true definition of service, love, and vitality. Thank you for sharing your confidence and your swag with me.

Last, but certainly not least, I have to thank my wife, Julie Ost Lane, who rubbed my back when something went wrong, celebrated me and with me when something went right, and whose naturally keen observational and investigative skills always came in handy when we explored new spaces together. The completion of this project proves just how good a team we are. Thank you, Love.

To everyone, all of you, my community—you made this possible and so, thank you.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... ii

PREFACE ...... iii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... vi

CHAPTER 1 A QUARE LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE

STUDY OF BLACK QUEER WOMEN IN D.C...... 1

1. Introduction ...... 1

2. The Research Question ...... 5

3. Methodology ...... 8

4. A Quare Linguistic Anthropological Approach to Space and Discourse ...... 21

5. Structure of remaining dissertation ...... 31

CHAPTER 2 IN/VISIBLE AND UN/SPOKEN IN CHOCOLATE CITY: BLACK QUEER

WOMEN'S CREATIVE AND STRATEGIC SPACE-MAKING PRACTICES IN

WASHINGTON, D.C...... 33

1. Introduction ...... 33

2. Chocolate City: Black Queer Space in the Black Gay Mecca ...... 36

3. Mainstream Scene Space: The Acela Club ...... 44

4. Semi-Public Spaces: The Happy Hour and the Party ...... 46

5. Exclusive Scene Space: Intimate Spaces and Social Networks ...... 55

6. Finding Black Lesbians in D.C...... 56

7. Black Queer Lifeworlds ...... 64

8. Conclusion ...... 67

CHAPTER 3 ON THE SCENE: THE TEXTURE OF BLACK QUEER WOMEN’S SCENE

SPACES IN D.C...... 68

1. Introduction ...... 68

2. Waiting for Scene Space ...... 69

3. Being in Scene Space ...... 76

4. Conclusion ...... 84

CHAPTER 4 FINDING YOUR PLACE ON THE SCENE: INTERSECTIONALITY,

BELONGING, AND BLACK QUEER WOMEN’S SCENE SPACE IN WASHINGTON,

D.C...... 87

1. Introduction ...... 87

2. Race, Sexuality, and Neoliberalism ...... 88

3. Affect, Orientation, and Intersectional Analyses of Spatial Formations ...... 93

4. “You Don't Have to Explain Yourself”: ...... 97

Foregrounding Blackness, Being ...... 97

Black Enough, and Sexuality ...... 97

5. Scared of Black Straight Women: Foregrounding ...... 101

Sexuality and Gender Expression ...... 101

in the Glass Closet ...... 101

6. It Depends: Foregrounding Middle-class mobility and modern subjectivity ...... 107

7. This is How I Am: Foregrounding Race and Class ...... 112

8. Conclusion ...... 116

CHAPTER 5 THE QUARE WORK OF RATCHET: THE (ANTI)POLITICS OF

RESPECTABILITY IN BLACK QUEER WOMEN’S SCENE SPACE ...... 121 x

1. Introduction ...... 121

2. What is ratchet? ...... 122

3. What's so queer about ratchet? ...... 125

4. The Divide: Ratchet and Professional ...... 128

5. The Optics of Class in Scene Space ...... 134

6. Status and Hierarchy in the Production of BQW Scene Space ...... 136

7. Ratchet BQW Scene Space ...... 150

8. Conclusion ...... 160

CHAPTER 6 CONCLUSIONS: OR WHAT WE LEARN WHEN WE STUDY BLACK

QUEER WOMEN’S SPATIAL AND DISCURSIVE PRACTICES IN D.C...... 163

1. Purpose of the Dissertation ...... 163

2. Key Findings ...... 165

3. BQW “Saying Place”: Language, Affect, and the Unsayable ...... 174

4. Limitations and Areas of Future Study ...... 176

5. Conclusion ...... 178

APPENDIX A INTERVIEW SCHEULE A - ORAL HISTORY ...... 180

APPENDIX B INTERVIEW SCHEDULE B – PRODUCERS ...... 182

APPENDIX C INTERVIEW SCHEULE C - PARTICIPANTS ...... 183

APPENDIX D LIST OF FORMAL INTERVIEW INFORMANTS ...... 184

APPENDIX E TRANSCRIPTION CONVENTIONS ...... 187

REFERENCES ...... 188

CHAPTER 1

A QUARE LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF BLACK

QUEER WOMEN IN D.C.

I stood on the balcony overlooking a crowd of roughly 1,200 black lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans women there to celebrate Black Pride in D.C. It was easily the largest black lesbian party in D.C. in the past 10 years, taking place in the newly renovated Howard Theater just off U Street.

D.J. Mim, a D.C. native and one of the women responsible for hosting the party, comes out from behind her turntables which are set up on the stage and says to the crowd, "We makin' history tonight! This is the first black lesbian event ever hosted at the Howard Theater!" The room erupted in cheers and "yeaaahhhs," my own voice included—our voices carrying over the thunderous bass coming from the speakers. I bet they could hear us from down the street. Excerpt from field notes May 25, 2014

1. Introduction

On the Thursday before Memorial Day, which falls on the last Monday of May,

Washington, D.C. is transfigured for the annual Black Pride Celebration. The transformation is both sudden and subtle as to pass without detection by many of the transient and transplant residents of the District. There are seemingly more gender non-conforming black men and women on the street. It’s more difficult than normal to get seated at restaurants as they are hosting large parties of black men and women with an unrecognizable revelry and excitement around the seemingly innocuous holiday weekend. While just another Monday off work for most people, Memorial Day weekend in D.C. marks a black queer time—it’s Black Pride, a special kind of “family” reunion. Like the funk band Parliament and Funkadelic, who on the cover of their 1975 classic album Chocolate City depicted the monuments and memorials of Washington,

D.C. carved out of molten chocolate—black, stimulating, and bittersweet— thousands of black

lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans people take to the streets of D.C. and for a few days the city becomes a black queer space.

J. Jack Halberstam’s In a Queer Space and Time argues that queers use space and time in ways that are in opposition to those which institutionalized forms of normative heterosexuality

(Halberstam 2005, 2). Halberstam is concerned with the ways that space and time are institutionally constructed around the putative desires of a normative heterosexual body whose aim is to reproduce the conditions by which the value, discursive and material power of heterosexuality is retained throughout society. Queer space and time is both the consequence and the resulting opportunity of being outside of heteronormative scripts (Halberstam 2005, 6).

Halberstam uses queer, not to refer directly to gay, lesbian, or bisexual bodies, but as a term for all non-normative configurations of sexuality (Halberstam 2005, 6). Sexual object choice is not what makes a subject queer; instead it is their position outside of the discursive and material bounds of the heteronormative. I define the term “black queer space" as the result of socio- spatial practices and discursive formations that mark the historical and culturally specific condition of being black, or outside of racially normative scripts, and queer. To put it another way, black queer spaces are those which "unhinge blackness from an assumed and oft-times unquestioned heterosexuality" (Walcott 2007, 235). They are spaces where alternative readings of the historical and contemporary black condition circulate; where representations of blackness are not hetero-washed and representations of queerness are not whitewashed. Black queer spaces allows those whose subject positions are shaped by the experiences of exclusionary spatial practices within and outside of black communities of practice including but not limited to anti- black racism and homophobia to "throw shade" on such practices while fully articulating their blackness and queerness. Studying black queer space is not as easy as simply plotting points on a 2

map and discussing their significance. They are not necessarily "places," and are characterized by their ability to take from and expose the boundaries of both blackness and queerness.

E. Patrick Johnson’s essay “Feeling the Spirit in the Dark” borrows from French theorist

Michel de Certeau’s formulation of the difference between “place” and “space,” where “place” allows only for a set of prescriptive interpretations and possibilities as they relate to the performances of the black transgressive body. Alternatively, in “space” there are a broader range of interpretations as it allows for multiple ways of being (Johnson 1998, 400). Places then are sites where one must play a particular role, talk a specific way, do what is expected. Spaces are sites where one is able to act up and act out; spaces are sites where performances occur and are interpreted outside of normative constructions. Johnson (1998) offers analysis of an ethnographic instance where black gay men remove Christian discourse from the place of the black church, shifting that discourse instead into the space of the gay nightclub. He describes the mood of the space shifting as the D.J. plays gospel music and entreats the club goers to look next to them, because “somebody that was here last year ain’t make it… Somebody’s lover has passed on”

(Johnson 1998, 409). As the D.J. mixes gospel songs into the dance music, the club erupts into a mass of synergistic dancing, shouting, testifying, and a rapturous same-sex eroticism (Johnson

1998, 409). Johnson writes,

The echoes of my Southern Baptist minister's sermons consume my thoughts . . . yield not to temptation ... I dance on ... something got a hold on me... Kevin pins me against the wall... it's just like fire! ...I consume his tongue ... "There was sin among them." ... I feel the tears well up in my eyes... "It seemed that he could not breathe, that his body could not contain this passion" . . . I dance on . . . Somebody say yes (yes), say yes (yes), yes (yes)... (Johnson 1998, 409, emphasis in original)

The nightclub in Johnson’s analysis becomes a black queer space for black gay men where the D.J. marks the lives and deaths of black gay men important, over and against dominant

discourses that would suggest those lives are insignificant (Johnson 1998, 409). The use of gospel music and black Christian discursive practices, which might be thought of as out-of-place in a normative gay club, signifies on the homophobia of the black church and the racism often embedded within normative gay spaces all while marking black queer space as something other than purely secular and sexual. Within this black queer space we see black cultural and discursive practices congeal with same-sex eroticism, marking it as a site where being African

American, homosexual, and Christian is not only possible, but an acceptable interpretative framework for understanding ones place in the world (Johnson 1998, 409). Further, the introduction of black discursive practices into the gay nightclub opens up a unique opportunity for the expression of black same-sex eroticism. In fact, same-sex eroticism and same-sex love are what inform the D.J.’s original call: “Somebody’s lover has passed on,” which thus transformed the nightclub into a space where the eroticism between two black men was not only

“appropriate,” but where it sat comfortably among black cultural values and discourse.

Similarly, by affirming to the crowd at the Howard Theater, that we were “making history,” D.J. Mim attests to the significance of black queer women’s erotic and cultural lives in the narrative and geography of Washington, D.C. Stuck somewhere between the American North and the South, Washington, D.C. is both the first city to abolish slavery within its limits and a city with the largest percentage of its black population in its criminal justice system (Warren

2009). A rapidly gentrifying city with one of the highest costs of living in the country and one of the largest gaps between the wealthy and the poor, Washington, D.C. has been the site of some of the most important moments in Black American history, and yet few know that the city exists in the black queer cultural imaginary as a "Black Gay Mecca.” D.C. is a city that attracts black lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people from all over the country, and has at least 4

since 1975. This dissertation considers the spatial and discursive dimensions of D.C. as a "Black

Gay Mecca," considering the way race, gender, sexuality, and class are both felt and experienced by black queer women. As black women whose queerness is facilitated specifically by their same-sex desire, their subject position is often shaped by absence and presence, exclusion and inclusion, visibility and invisibility. D.J. Mim’s claim was about the presence, visibility, and potency of black queer women’s lives in D.C. It was a bold claim that women who identified as black and lesbian, gay, bi, studs, doms, femmes, high femmes, bois, or trans, belonged in the racial and sexual geographies of D.C. precisely because they were able to take up space— transforming the Howard Theater, an institutionally recognized site of black history and culture, into a black queer space.

2. The Research Question

Black matters are spatial matters. And while we all produce, know, and negotiate space— albeit on different terms—geographies in the diaspora are accentuated by racist paradigms of the past and their ongoing hierarchical patterns. I have turned to geography and black geographic subjects not to provide a corrective story, nor to “find” and “discover” lost geographies. Rather, I want to suggest that space and place give black lives meaning in a world that has, for the most part, incorrectly deemed black populations and their attendant geographies as “ungeographic” and/or philosophically undeveloped. (McKittrick 2006, xiii)

In this dissertation, I ask: how do black queer women (hereafter BQW) in D.C. make space for themselves despite the overlapping systems of exclusions in which they must negotiate their everyday lives in the urban landscape? Further, how do BQW experience black queer space in D.C.—in other words, how does it feel to be in black queer space—and how do mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion manifest in the spaces that BQW create for each other? To put it simply, my dissertation asks a question few have ever considered when thinking about lesbian, gay, or queer space: where are all the black women? I argue that by answering these questions,

we learn when and (of increasing importance in the United States) where categories of difference such as race, gender, sexuality, and class make a difference.

Asking about space and spatial practices is at once a discussion about points on a map, and a discussion about a set of unstable, dynamic conceptual tools we use to refer to meaning making practices around those points on the map, boundaries, and places that we inhabit. Space, therefore, is not only physical and material, but also discursive and imaginary. Things happen, people exchange things—like words or ideas—in space. They move, are removed, and kept from space. They go and travel to spaces. We have words for several kinds of socio-spatial acts, acts that have consequences for both spaces and people in them: colonization, segregation, and immigration. The history of black life in the United States is made up of complex geographic shifts, and considering the specificity of black queer life forces us to reconsider the ways non- normative sexualities have been implicated in the ways that black life in the urban landscape have been organized (McKittrick and Woods 2007, Walcott 2007). While some would argue that black queer geographies are characterized by their “underground” or “secretive” nature, such frames do not fully capture the geographic realities of contemporary black queer life.

Black queer women living in and around Washington, D.C. have developed a dense collection of black queer spaces within the urban landscape including parties, book clubs, support groups, house parties, performances, workshops, happy hours, festivals, seasonal gatherings such as the events held during Black Pride, and sporting events including women’s professional basketball and football. These spaces and the social networks that create them and inhabit them are colloquially referred to by BQW in D.C. as “the Scene.” These black queer spaces constitute all together a physical and symbolic temporary securing of the sometimes hostile urban landscape by a network of women committed to holding space open for other 6

women whose racial, gendered, and sexualized experiences in the urban landscape are often fraught with various kinds of exclusion. If places such as the street, one’s church, or workplace require BQW to behave in ways that might deny their very existence, then the black queer spaces that BQW create for themselves and one another, which I refer to as BQW's “scene spaces,” are contexts where they bear witness to one another’s existence, bringing to light the normative discourses which predominate about the in/visibility and im/possibility of black same-sex desiring women. As such, scene spaces produce a particular set of sensations or affectations not available to BQW within normative spaces.

The linguistic resources that BQW mobilize to discuss their sense of not/belonging demonstrate the boundaries of normative spatial practices within D.C.’s LGBT communities as well as in D.C.’s normative black communities. In many ways, my dissertation considers the way

BQW transform normative places into scene spaces and also how being in such scene spaces effects one's sense of belonging in the urban landscape. In so doing, I wish to understand not only the geographies available to BQW, but also their strategies for negotiating their social and cultural inclusion and exclusion inside and outside of the spaces that they inhabit. Understanding these transformations and their affective and geographic dimensions, I argue, helps us to explicate the complicated nature of race, gender, sexuality, and class as they coalesce and dissolve in language and in space.

While some geographers and social scientists prefer to think about space in a concretized form, within a “just is” framework where spaces are passive, unchanging places where things happen (McKittrick 2006, xii), anthropologists have shown that space is embroiled within a set of meaning making projects for those with stakes in those spaces (Hill 1995, Leap 2011, Lewin and Leap 2009, LaRoche and Blakey 1997, Epperson 1999, Modan 2007, Battle-Baptiste 2011, 7

Franklin 2001). Language becomes an invaluable tool for understand the meaning making projects which animate places and spaces.

One of the primary assumptions on which my project is based is that BQW do things with language, and one of the things that they do is make space for themselves. This project is in many ways about the way language use shapes and is shaped by socio-spatial realities.

Geographies are socially mediated set of ideas about space and place. Thus turning to the geographic stories of BQW in Washington, D.C. allows us to understand that which maps of discrete places in D.C. where black queer women go, simply cannot convey. As such, my dissertation examines the semantic resources that BQW deploy in marking space and their place within it. It examines the ways BQW in D.C. use discursive acts to make space for themselves in the urban landscape. My interest in the social and cultural production of space at the intersection of language use marks this project as interdisciplinary. I rely heavily, however, on the interdisciplinarity inherent to Linguistic Anthropological data collection and analysis using theories of Critical Geographies and Black Queer Theory to attend to the relationship between language, culture, and space. I ask of BQW's situated language use, or language use within a particular social and cultural context and seek to understand their projects of self-making and space-making (Leap 2008, 2011). Following what William Leap and others have called "Queer

Linguistics" (Leap 2015), my projects asks what language use can tell us about the ways race, gender, sexuality, and class organize individuals' understandings of their place.

3. Methodology

While there are many traditions of ethnography and much debate and tension as to the exact goal of ethnography, most share a commitment to exploring particular social or cultural

milieus through first-hand experience, often referred to as participant observation, and through talking with those under observation through either formal or informal interviews (Atkinson et al. 2007, 4-5). These two forms of data collection—participant observation and ethnographic interviews—are the hallmarks of anthropological data collection and served as the primary mode of data collection for this research. In addition to using participant observation and ethnographic interviews with differently situated informants, I supplemented my data through the collection of oral histories. Ethnography is a process where one is constantly building “new insight and understandings upon prior insights and understandings” (Emerson, et al. 2011, 13), therefore the methods that I employed to collect data for this project were designed such that I could search for “threads,” or themes that occurred across the various forms of data collection. Searching for

“threads” is a common technique in both ethnographic research as well as linguistic analysis, and yielded a great deal of insight into the texture of BQW scene spaces and the everyday experiences of BQW in D.C. Ethnography provides a compelling entry point into the study of space-making precisely because space begs to be analyzed from the inside out.

I conducted formal fieldwork between April 2013 and October 2014.1 I conducted initial fieldwork between October 2011 and December 2012, which allowed me to develop and test interview instruments while learning about the kinds of spaces BQW made in D.C. that might serve as “field sites.” During both informal and formal field work periods, I interviewed 40 informants and performed participant observation at 2-3 events a week in various kinds of black

1 This research was generously funded by the Office of the Vice Provost for Graduate Studies at American University.

2 I confirmed all the addresses, dates of opening and closing on the Rainbow History Project’s Places and Spaces Database. Last updated August 5 2014, it contains a full list of all known LGBT establishments in D.C. with the dates9 they opened and closed. I relied on the information there to confirm addresses and dates of the locations my informants mentioned. This database, is a collective project between scholars and people in the D.C. area with information about LGBT sites and history. Rainbow History Project. Places and Spaces Database, http://rainbowhistory.org/?page_id=28 (last accessed August 11, 2015).

3 U.S. Census Bureau, “Profile of General Population and Housing Characteristics: 2010.” District of Columbia QuickLinks, queer women’s (BQW) social scene spaces in D.C. including book clubs, discussions, film screenings, professional sporting events, private house parties, semi-public events held in mainstream venues, happy hours, and annual Black Pride Celebration (BPC) events in D.C. and

Atlanta, a common sojourner for many of my informants. On average, my trips into the field lasted between 3-4 hours at a time (unless it was during BPC which meant I would have stints of

8 hours or more in the field).

I used social media a great deal throughout this project. I followed BQW party promoters and performers in D.C. on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook and I signed up for their listservs. I joined groups on Meetup.com for BQW in the DMV. Meetup is an online space where groups form based on shared interests and geography. I also used Phatgirlchic.com, a website founded and managed by a BQW which collects various kinds of LGBT events taking place in the DMV, many of them for women of color. There were only a few places where it was guaranteed that I'd be in the midst of other BQW outside of those listed in Phatgirlchic.com. They usually touched upon interests of BQW in D.C. and included the Acela Club during the WNBA season; feminist- related programming hosted at Busboys and Poets, lesbian film screenings, performances by

BQW artists, burlesque shows, and college basketball games. Phatgirlchic.com quickly became my primary source for finding BQW scene spaces, because I found the events collected there to be eclectic. In addition to listing parties, it listed book club meetings, charity events, and events hosted by D.C. government, and various NGOs. Since it did not just collect parties, I was also directed toward town-hall discussions, networking nights, open mics, and outings across the city.

As I began to become integrated into more social networks, I was invited by friends and informants, both formal and informal, to birthday parties, house parties, and small gatherings with other BQW. For example, after an interview with one informant, she added me to a small, 10

intimate listserv she maintained of friends and associates. She frequently organized small social gatherings of these women. Between all of these sources, I became integrated within the Scene and was almost always able to find out where scene spaces would be.

Scene space operated on a queer timetable. During my fieldwork, parties and happy hours, for example, would take place every second Tuesday, first Friday, or second Saturday of the month. This in opposition to the spatial practices of most heterosexual people since parties and happy hours on any night of the week will cater to their modes of socialization. Additionally, several annual events dotted the calendar often coinciding with holidays such as the Sunday before Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, President’s Day, or Thanksgiving, holiday weekends with days off during the week, usually a Monday. Many of these were “Day Parties” usually starting around 4pm and ending around 9pm when the clubs would open for their “regular” customers.

Black Pride Celebration events and parties taking place in late May represented the capstone for the season of events on the BQW Scene. During my time in the field there were fewer parties during the summer typically with the beginning of fall and spring marking the time when there would be the most events.

Scene spaces also operated within a queer geography. In addition to private homes, scene spaces took shape in several kinds of venues across the city and in nearly all quadrants, NW, NE, and SE especially. The names of parties and events would often stay the same, however, the venues would change regularly, sometimes with little to no warning. Maintaining a network of

BQW and tapping into that network to learn about scene spaces was particularly important for research given this queer geography. I learned this during preliminary fieldwork when having attempted to go to a lesbian happy hour listed online, the bartender informed me that the happy hour hadn’t happened in months. Other ways the queer geography of scene space manifested was 11

the fact that not every scene space could be clearly marked, because they were not sanctioned.

Instead, they were organic. For example, the bar of the chain restaurant downtown turned into a black lesbian scene space every Friday night through no planning of its own. Instead, BQW flocked there, using the space with regularity and eventually coming to be known as a scene space. Its convenient location near several Metro rails and at the end of several bus lines that went into Southeast, made it an ideal place to congregate. Finding out about these kinds of unsanctioned scene spaces was one of the benefits of my method, which relied both on word of mouth and social media research. It is important to note that not all scene spaces were parties or happy hours. Some were film screenings, discussions, poetry readings, book readings, product launches, and performances of BQW artists. And, as mentioned previously, not all were formally marked as “gay” or “lesbian” spaces. When the independent film, Pariah (2011) screened at E

Street Theater, an independent movie house, it was clear that the space had, at least temporarily, become a scene space due to the number of BQW, some of whom were acquaintances of mine, who had shown up to watch the film together. One entertainment company specialized in creating outings for queer women in and around D.C. and hosted events such as lazy river tubing, kickball games on the Mall, trips to museums, and game nights. All of these too contributed to the notion that scene spaces could be made out of any place, at least for a few hours.

Within BQW’s scene spaces, I participated in dancing, customary people watching, chatting, discussions, and other activities as long as they allowed me to both be an active participant and free to move throughout the space with relative ease. This meant I would grab a pair of bowling shoes and join a game, ask questions during a discussion, or stand in line for barbecue with everyone else making friends along the way. In places where alcohol was served, I 12

often had one drink that I would nurse the entire night, which I thought would make me “blend in.” I often arrived to parties and events early, which always gave me time to chat with the scene space producers. When possible I stayed late, as this usually led to opportunities, as I would come to refer to them, to “follow the lesbians.” In some cases I was invited to join groups for dinner, late night meals, or the next club or party. Most of my time in scene spaces were filled with standing to the side, listening, watching, chatting, and recording moments that stood out as

“jot notes” such that I could remember them for later. I captured “jot notes” on my Android cell phone using the features of the mobile and desktop note taking application Evernote including picture and textual note capturing which instantly synchronized data into a secure online account.

When I returned from my shifts in scene space, I used jot notes to aid in the full capture of field notes. Taking jot notes on my cell phone proved not to be disruptive or as obtrusive as a notepad and pen might have been, since it was not uncommon to see someone feverishly typing on their cell phone in most scene spaces.

My field notes also contained information about who was throwing the party, their choices in location, décor, entrance fees, bouncers, music, ambiance, and marketing materials. I sometimes drew crude maps of the interiors of locations as this helped me to remember how spaces were organized and how I moved within them. I also recorded my impressions of the demographics of the people there, weary of the subjectivity of these kinds of observations, however, careful not to assume that mine or anyone else’s impressions could ever be objective facts. I also engaged in what can only be called “eavesdropping,” a common practice among ethnographers. In my field notes I talk about the kinds of interactions I witness and jotted down what I could make out of the conversations.

I spent much of my time in scene spaces engaged in conversations with women and when asked the question, “What do you do?” I always described the work I was doing in plain terms

(“I’m a Ph.D student and I’m doing research about black queer women in D.C. and the places that they go.”). In many cases, this prompted people to tell me about their experiences in D.C. and for those who were older, they would tell me about how things “used to be.” Some people asked me questions like, “Where do they go?” which I would usually turn back to them, “Well where do you hang out?” I did not audio record these conversations, rather recorded them as best

I could in my field notes giving those who I spoke to pseudonyms. After several months, these women began to appear more frequently within my field notes as I saw them more regularly and began to develop friendships. As I began to see the same people, I quickly got integrated within different (but often loosely connected) networks of friends and acquaintances. I began to learn who was dating, who had children, what kind of work people did, the kinds of places they preferred to hang out, and the other “scenes” they were embedded in within the Scene. Several women spoke to me informally, unrecorded, on the phone or in person. My field notes are laced with stories women told me which I would furiously jot down in Evernote on the cab or train ride home. I refer to these conversations throughout the dissertation as “informal interviews” and the informants are kept anonymous in my reporting. My field notes were, above all, where I intended to capture a sense of the texture of a scene space. I tried to capture within them, the things marked me and impressed upon me; how I felt in a particular space, how I found myself experiencing objects, bodies, and the relations between them, and how I felt my body being effected by the texture.

Informants for formal interviews were self-selected. After several failed attempts during preliminary field work of asking people at clubs, bars, and happy hours to participate in my 14

research (my overtures were sometimes met with suspicion mixed with confusion: Was I hitting on them?), social media became the primary source for soliciting interviews with BQW. I created a website for my call for participants and used Facebook groups, Twitter, business cards with information about the project and a link to the website, and email listservs to solicit interviews.

My interviewees came through a mixture of individuals who had responded to my social media posts, contacts of those who I had already interviewed, and my direct requests for interviews by way of email or phone. This final mode is especially true of those who were producers of scene spaces. I had, after a few months of sustained contact on the Scene, developed friendships with many of these individuals, and so most of these interviews occurred based on direct requests.

This meant that I was not able to make contact with everyone in D.C. who produced scene space for BQW during this time, but I was happy to have spoken with many of those who had hands in throwing some of the largest and most attended events.

I conducted formal ethnographic interviews with 40 informants all of which were audio recorded: 7 oral history interviews and 33 formal semi-structured ethnographic interviews with

BQW. I gave $15 Amazon gift cards as incentives to those who sat with me for formal interviews. Of the 40 informants, 38 self-identified as black or African-American, 1 identified as mixed-raced, 1 as multiracial, and 1 identified as Latina. While 38 of my informants self- identified as women who were lesbian, bisexual, or "queer," two of my informants were transmen who partnered with women. Most of the individuals in my sample were not from D.C.

Only 9 of the 40 informants were born and raised in D.C. with the rest coming to D.C. for work, partners, or school.

I used three different interview schedules for the formal semi-structured ethnographic interviews, which means I tended to ask open-ended questions based around a core set of 15

interests related to leisure space, allowing my informants to elaborate on themes of interest to the project. I would then follow up with more pointed questions based on what they had said. I interviewed some informants more than once, but for most informants we only had one occasion to talk. Informants were given the choice to remain anonymous or to use their first names. Those who chose to be anonymous selected their own pseudonym. I do not make note in the reporting where informants used pseudonyms as this seemed to somewhat defeat the purpose of giving people the option of choosing the names used in the reporting and respecting the anonymity as best I could of all my informants. I conducted the interviews in locations of my informants choosing. I met people at their homes, in coffee shops, their offices, and even in my own home.

Interviews lasted between 45 minutes and 2.5 hours. With longer interviews almost always being oral history interviews.

For women who were born and raised in D.C., or who had lived in Washington, D.C. for more than 15 years, I conducted an oral history interview. Oral history interviews began with childhood, moved into their teens, and then into young adulthood. For some women this meant a discussion about their time in college and for others, their time having just moved to D.C. Oral histories allowed me to explore the process of meaning-making that informants engaged in as they named and framed stories about their lives (Yow 2005, 23). It gave a glimpse into the ways that race, gender, sexuality, and class were constantly lived and experienced across their lives, as well as in the moment of the telling. Informants were asked to name their experiences over time, but as Leap (2003) makes clear “texts always contain formal marking which identifies their location within the larger setting and their connections to other textual materials within the same economic, social, and historical setting” (Leap 2003, 403). This approach relies on a view of memory as “a vehicle of self-constitution” such that the person remembering is “squarely in the 16

middle of a world of people and things, engaged in a continuing effort—sometimes conscious, often unconscious—to reconcile the inner world with a perceived external reality” (Prager 1998,

94). In other words, while the stories were of the past, informants were telling these stories in the present, thus the past is tinted by the context of the present. Remembering is always an act of creating a representation of self in the past and representations are necessarily a present-sense interpretation. To put it plainly, I understood oral history as providing two different kinds of information: (1) factual information about D.C.’s history and the kinds of places where BQW frequented; and (2) information about the way informants understand their changing relationship to the Scene in the present.

The second interview schedule was for women who currently produce, or had produced black queer women’s spaces in D.C. Questions related to how they constructed spaces for other black women (“What’s the first step in planning an event?” “How do you find the places where you can put on these events?”), why they did it (“What made you start putting on these events?”

“Why do you continue to do it?”), the challenges to creating these kinds of spaces (“Have you ever faced any challenges?” “What are some of the considerations you make so that your audience will be comfortable?”), and changes in D.C. that effected the kinds of scene spaces that they could create (“Have there been any changes in D.C. that effect the kinds of spaces you create?”).

The last interview protocol was more general. I used the protocol for those who attended various kinds of social spaces for BQW as well as those who did not frequent BQW scene spaces. These questions tended to be more open ended and asked women to elaborate on the kinds of spaces that they went to, (“It’s Saturday night. Walk me through what you’ll do.” “What are your plans for Saturday?”) The questions in this protocol focused how these women spent 17

their leisure time generally and with whom (“Is it important to you to have friends who are black and queer?”), their perceptions of the “BQW Scene” contemporaneously and in the past (“Would you say that there was such a thing as “BQW Scene”?), and their experiences within BQW scene spaces (“How would you describe what it’s like to be at a party with other black queer women?”). Many of the questions were broad enough as to elicit narratives from my informants.

While the experiences and narratives these women shared with me are not necessarily generalizable to all BQW, they serve an important purpose, especially in linguistic analysis. Jane

H. Hill rather aptly argues that narratives are about more than the events that they describe because “they somehow make public the covert underlying presuppositions that organize the worlds in which speakers live” (Hill 2005, 159).

Though there were three different interview schedules, I asked many of the same questions to all of the women I spoke to: biography (“What year were you born?” “Where did you grow up?”), race and sexuality (“How would you describe your race or ethnicity?” “How would you describe your sexuality?”), coming to the knowledge of their sexuality (“Do you remember when you realized that you were attracted to other women?” “Did you share that with friends or family?”), and what it was like to be in spaces with a majority of BQW (“Tell me what it’s like to be in a room full of other black queer women.”). Further, since ethnography is a process, later interviews ask slightly different questions than earlier ones. For example, the word

“ratchet” began to appear frequently in informal interviews while I was in scene space and in formal interviews to describe certain kinds of scene space, or kinds of people. Therefore, if an informant did not mention it by the end of our interview, I would ask if they had ever heard the term before and what they thought it meant. I soon learned both in the process of collecting the

data itself and in its analysis, that the word was wrapped up in discourses of class (see Chapter

5).

My field notes and interviews were coded using the qualitative analysis software

MaxQDA. I did not fully transcribe all interviews, however, using one of the hallmark features of MaxQDA, I was able to code the audio data directly. For example, I was able to code minutes

93:00 through 98:00 as “class” and “scene space” where an informant discussed how certain kinds of scene spaces seemed more or less “classy” than another. This, along with the jots I maintained during interviews where I marked the time stamp of the appearance of themes, allowed me to search for threads much more quickly and efficiently. I could then transcribe relevant sections of an interview as needed for further analysis. Using this technique four major themes emerged including the strategies BQW employ to create scene spaces (Chapter 2), the texture of scene spaces and the ways issues of inclusion/exclusion manifested in/outside of scene space (Chapter 3), issues of affect including sensations of “belonging” within scene space

(Chapter 4), and finally discourses of class that circulated in and about certain scene spaces

(Chapter 5). Other minor themes emerged as well including aging, gender and gender performance, stress and body image. Black lesbian gender and gender performances have been discussed in some detail by others (Fullwood, Harris, and Moore 2007, Moore 2006). Black lesbian aging has received little attention, but has been treated (Hall and Fine 2005). And issues of stress and body image in Black lesbians have also received some attention as well (Bowleg et al. 2003).

I perform close linguistic analyses of several key informants throughout the dissertation.

The texts that I choose to analyze are ones where informants clearly discussed the way their race, gender, sexuality, or class refracted in social space. Additionally, the texts I chose to closely 19

examine tended to either capture the way several other speakers in my sample talked about a particular aspect of their experience, or they offered a unique perspective that could not be found elsewhere in my sample. Most often these stories related to their experiences in semi-public scene spaces such as clubs, happy hours, and parties. While I discuss other kinds of scene spaces,

I followed my informants, who framed their experiences most frequently within the "visible" forms of black queer spatial practices. Alongside ethnographic analysis, I analyze the discourses about the Scene and self that allow BQW to make sense of multiple, sometimes contradictory normative practices related to race, gender, sexuality, and class.

The kind of ethnographic study I engaged in was based on the fact that I am a black lesbian who had developed relationships on the BQW Scene prior to my formal research. Having lived in D.C. since 2005, I was officially connected to the Scene in 2007 through my engagement with the Black Lesbian Support Group. I was familiar with the Scene and thus was positioned to have a sense of where the scene spaces were, but this should not be confused with me having

"insider" status. Not only was I unfamiliar with the complexities of the Scene, but I also knew very few people and those relationships were not well developed, particularly because while I was familiar with some of the scene spaces, I spent very little time in them. In other words, I was not connected within the Scene's loosely connected social networks prior to this research. And most importantly, I did not necessarily understand how race, gender, sexuality, and class held the

Scene or its spaces together. These understandings came through observation, attention to how people talked about the BQW Scene in D.C., and filtering this information through an analytical framework capable of dealing with the complexities of race, gender, sexuality, and class as they manifest in the everyday lived experiences of BQW.

The analytical approach I take is woven together from three interrelated bodies of literature: queer theory, critical geographies, and affect theory. What links the approaches I have selected are (1) their insistence on the important of the role of language and discursive practices in understanding the way racialized, sexualized, classed and/or gendered space is produced; and,

(2) their critical attention to the ways systemic and institutional forms of exclusion and inclusion are experienced in the quotidian. These approaches allow me to understand how black, women, and/or queer subjects experience space, how language and discursive practices relate to their lived experiences, and the way affect, referring here to the social dimensions of affective experience, are interrelated with their notions of belonging and being in social space.

4. A Quare Linguistic Anthropological Approach to Space and Discourse

A Quare Linguistic Anthropological approach is one that borrows from E. Patrick

Johnson’s notion of quare (Johnson 2001) and William Leap’s approach to Critical Discourse

Analysis (CDA) (Leap 2008, 2011, 2015). E. Patrick Johnson offered “quare” as a critique of queer studies for its failure to render legible the experiences of queer bodies of color. Quare is as an African American vernacular term meaning “odd and slightly off kilter” and is characterized by an “excess incapable of being contained within conventional categories of being” (Johnson

2001, 2). Johnson wishes to “‘quare’ ‘queer’ such that ways of knowing are viewed both as discursively mediated and as historically situated and materially conditioned” (Johnson 2001, 3).

Such interventions are critical in order to make black same-sex desiring subjects legible, because of the way whiteness tends to stand in as the dominant and normative subject position from which queerness is theorized. Similarly, black cultural theory has tended to elide the sexual differences between black subjects, and thus has participated in the "straight washing" of

blackness. In other words, while queers of colors have always been there, the theoretical tools for analyzing the specificity of their experiences have emerged primarily from challenging their absence. In the edited collection Black Queer Studies, Johnson and Henderson (2005) write:

We seek to quare queer—to throw shade on its meaning in the spirit of extending its service to ‘Blackness.’” … just as “queer” challenges notions of heteronormativity and heterosexism, “Black” resists notions of assimilation and absorption. And so we endorse the double cross of affirming the inclusivity mobilized under the sign of “queer” while claiming the racial, historical, and cultural specificity attached to the marker “Black.” (7)

I wish to extend a quare approach in my application of linguistic anthropology primarily as a means of calling attention to the ways that topics of language and sexuality are by their very nature about the ways that race, gender, and class because these discourses always travel together, fixing certain kinds of difference on bodies in particular ways. Approaches to gender and sexuality in language, what Leap (2015) has referred to as "queer linguistic analysis" is closely tied to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and is concerned with analyzing the power laden practices of discursive formations of sexuality broadly, and queer subjects specifically.

CDA refers to a range of analytic methods, including the evaluation of systems of appraisal, the examination of the use of metaphors, and narrative analysis. While critical discourse analysis has many different techniques, it remains attuned “the role of discourse in the (re)production and challenge of dominance” (van Dijk 1993, 249). Leap’s approach to discourse analysis holds that one must:

[Locate] connections between gender and other forms of social location that are being addressed within the social moment. This requires a close reading of text, and careful consideration of speaker biography and speaker intention, but it also requires social and historical perspectives that extend far beyond the textual boundary. (Leap 2008, 295)

By quaring CDA, I want to think about the ways that the "different ‘standpoints’ found among lesbian, bisexual, gay, and transgendered people of color—differences that are also conditioned by class and gender” (Johnson 2001, 3) are embedded within social spaces and linguistic practices. Leap (2015) argues that queer linguistics “engages the linguistic dimensions of affective and intersectional alignments, thereby exploring the many ways in which desire itself become expressed—or materialized—in everyday experience.” Not only must one be concerned with analyzing the textual data, but one must also understand the social contexts in which the textual data emerges. This is the crucial difference between a project that is only concerned with the theoretical uses of language and one which is interested as E. Patrick Johnson has points out, the very real conditions of subjects “on the street” (Johnson 2001). Anthropology allows us to bring into focus how difference is navigated at those various standpoints. When we focus on individual, local experiences of larger macro-processes, we begin to acknowledge the various ways individuals and groups have defined their subjectivity, with and against, seemingly all- encompassing cultural, political, and social forces. Furthermore, by focusing on individual, local experiences of capitalism and its economic and cultural projects, we begin to see how it structures sensibilities, tastes, everyday life, and ordinary experiences.

Building on Raymond Williams’ (1977) “cultural hypothesis” of structures of feeling, the affective turn in the humanities and social sciences has demonstrated the power of affect to inform social consciousness, and vice versa. For Williams, structures of feeling are the ways meanings and values and their interrelations are both emergent and actively lived, felt, practiced and interpreted (Williams 1977, 133). Affect then has come to refer to the interrelated performative, social, and cultural aspects of feelings, sentiments, and emotions (Ahmed 2010,

Berlant 2011, Cvetkovich 2003, Eng 2010, McElhinny 2010, McGlotten 2012b, Probyn 2005, 23

Stewart 2007). Among linguistic anthropologists, there has been sustained interest in the role of affect in language and have found that affect is a rich and complex site for understanding the way “language is interwoven with the psychological makeup of self and society” (Besnier 1990,

421). “Affect” is a linguistic practice “deeply embedded in social, political, and economic contexts” (Besnier 1990, 438). One might argue then that affect (both as linguistic practice and theory of performance and embodiment) is a rather ordinary means for individuals to index particular kinds of sensations. For Besnier, “the indexical nature of affect in language makes it both an ideal vehicle for the affirmation of hegemonic structures an ideal (often covert) tool in the resistance to these structures” (Besnier 1990, 438). Borrowing from Kathleen Stewart,

Lauren Berlant defines the ordinary as the “porous zone that absorbs lots of incoherence and contradictions” (Berlant 2011). Stewart suggests that an ethnographic method that attends to the full range of affective states in their banal, mundane, and shocking, aids in our understanding of how the texture of ordinary life is made meaningful (Stewart 2007). I argue here, that as my informants tell stories about where, how, and to whom they “belong" they rely on a set of affectations that reflect their relations and (sometimes contradictory) identifications with blackness, same-sex desire, gender identity, and modern citizenship. In other words, I ask how language serves as a portal through which we can see the social, spatial, cultural, and temporal nature of emotions and feelings that make up the sensation of belonging, which animates projects of “orientation” (Ahmed 2006).

Language becomes an especially important site when examining meaning-making projects that involve both an individual’s sense of self and an individual’s sense of space. If space is produced, known, negotiated, contested and struggled over, then language provides an entre into the way subjects experience and understand space. For Katherine McKittrick, 24

considering both the discursive and material aspects of space brings “into view material referents, external, three-dimensional spaces, and the actions taking place in space, as they overlap with subjectivities, imaginations, and stories” (McKittrick 2006, xiii). Considering both the language and physicality of geography is important for BQW who have been erased from certain kinds of landscapes, forcibly removed from or not allowed in others, all while being the subjects of being put “in their place.” Without their geographic stories, we know very little about the actual means by which they make their mark on the world or how they experience and understand their subjectivities in terms of their spatial dimensions. This is especially true for

BQW, because at the time of my writing this, there are no black lesbian bars or clubs in

Washington, D.C.—no institutionally recognized, mappable places for black queer women, and yet, there are vibrant communities of BQW in D.C. which are not necessarily tied to a particular place, or places. Instead the Scene, as I have defined it—the collection of networks and spaces those networks inhabit and produce—is comprised of a set of constantly shifting, constantly moving scene spaces. The way these scene spaces appear in the urban milieu must be understood through frameworks that address how marginalized subjects grapple with overlapping systems of racism, sexism, and homophobia in social space.

George Lipsitz’s How Racism Takes Place describes the meaning making projects that

“take place” at the junction between place and race in the United States. He argues that “race is produced by space” and “that it takes places for racism to take place” (Lipsitz 2011a, 5). He examines the white spatial imaginary in the United States describing it as white supremacy in concretized form (Lipsitz 2011a, 28). The white spatial imagination as Lipsitz describes, derives from exclusivity and subsidized material wealth rooted in decades and centuries of racial residential segregation that took shape in the formation of white suburbs and the concentration of 25

black people and the lower class in the city during the mid 20th century. Now in the beginning of the 21st, the cosmopolitan city landscape remains steeped in these same logics that reproduce forms of exclusion (and exclusivity) and augmented exchange values that primarily benefit white people (Lipsitz 2011a). Now, in the 21st century, the white spatial imagination marks the city center as prime real estate translating into the removal of black and poor people from the city center. Wealth and services are concentrated in the city center while black and poor people are concentrated at the city's literal and figurative margins. Lipsitz takes care to describe the white spatial imaginary as not simply emerging from “the embodied identities of people who are white,” but as a consequence of white supremacy, such that it “is inscribed in the physical contours of the places where we live, work and play and it is bolstered by financial rewards for whiteness” (Lipsitz 2011a, 28).

Lipsitz also examines the black spatial imaginary. The black spatial imaginary, we learn, developed in response to the white spatial imaginary. Because of the white spatial imaginary and the power flowing from it, meaning its discursive, material, and physical force to bend and shape land, institutions, and policies, “black people have developed innovative ways of augmenting the use-values of the spaces they inhabit” (Lipsitz 2011a, 56). From the corner to the pulpit, the project courtyard to the freedom march, black geographies are examples of black people

“appropriating private and public spaces for novel purposes” (Lipsitz 2011a, 56). Lipsitz observes that because of lack of access to other forms of public space and due to the “systemic impediments to asset accumulation, blacks had to learn to recognize the public possibilities of privately owned spaces, to perceive potential new uses for any arena open to them” (Lipsitz

2011a, 58). This speaks directly to the nature of black lesbian space making as described by

Rochella Thorpe in Detroit during the mid 20th century. 26

Thorpe found that the sexual geography of Detroit greatly differed for black lesbians and white lesbians. The difference between black and white lesbians took shape not only in their styles of socializing and the ways that they constructed their daily lives, but also in the way black queer spaces developed. As a means of bypassing systems of power and exclusion such as racial segregation and homophobia in public spaces, black lesbians often repurposed private homes for

“semi-public” use (Thorpe 1996, 43). A semi-public space is only "public" to those for whom the space is intended. Privacy and discretion are assumed, but more importantly these spaces are open for all those who do not fit in normative forms of public space and exists outside of the control or surveillance of white gay spaces. Thorpe argues that there is a difference between not participating in the expression of one’s sexuality in space coded as “public” (bars or clubs) and choosing to socialize in space that is “private” (individual homes). Borrowing again from

Lipsitz, “public” spaces here are almost always coded as white. So that, for black queers, being absent from these public spaces such as lesbian bars and gay clubs, often results in the mislabeling of their “private” homes as “just that”—private, and therefore secretive and

“underground.” This “just is” framework of thinking about black queer space, Thorpe explains, does not quite capture the complexity of the way black lesbians in Detroit socialized. In particular, it does little to explain the “semi-public” spaces such the home of black lesbian elder

Ruth Ellis. Ellis was a long-standing pillar of black lesbian and gay life in Detroit and opened her home to black queers for 40 years. Her home was “private” only in the sense that the deed was in her name; however, we learn from Thorpe that Ellis’ home was public for those who knew where to look. Thorpe’s work clues us in to the novel ways that black queers have used space, including re-casting private spaces as “semi-public” (see Chapter 2) such that they “met their social needs and circumvented the problems created by a racist, homophobic society” (Thorpe 1996, 42). If 27

bars and softball games in public parks were the center of the “Scene” for white women during the same time, or rather if as geographers and historians of the time depict the lesbian Scene as revolving around only the places where white women went (see Faderman 1991, Buring 1997,

Bouthillette 1997), then following Lipsitz, one might argue that there is a difference in the

“lesbian spatial imagination” for white women and black women.

Nina Held, a white lesbian researcher, and Tara Leach, a black lesbian researcher, explore the differences between white and black spatial imaginaries in their essay aptly titled,

“‘What are You Doing Here?’ The ‘Look’ and (Non) Belongings of Racialized Bodies in

Sexualized Spaces.” The essay came to fruition after the pair visited a lesbian bar together in the

United Kingdom, and after a discussion about the night, realized that each had had a radically different experience in the same space (Held and Leach 2008). The essay begins with the accounts themselves and we come to understand the way that the texture (I fully define this concept in Chapter 2) of the space rubbed each of them differently. It was a white lesbian bar where Leach’s black body appeared out of the ordinary. Leach notes that the bartender takes an exceptionally long time to wait on her, and that while she waits for service the looks that she gets from the white lesbians at the bar, let her know that her presence was not wanted. The optics of her brown body disrupted the otherwise racially homogenized space. While Held did not experience any discomfort, Leach was made painfully aware of her blackness and its out-of- placeness. Further, things like the “dive bar” nature of the space, the lack of a skillful D.J., and lack of a proper dance floor all made for Leach to experience discomfort in the space. Held, on the other hand, liked the cheap drinks, the radically different musical genres the D.J. pulled together, and did not notice that the space to dance was not adequate. She notes that because she

was white in public (read white) lesbian space, she had not thought of the way her body was being read in terms of its race (Held and Leach 2008).

In another essay about studying the process of racialization of lesbian spaces in the U.K.

Nina Held describes the way her white lesbian body was “at home” in white space (Held 2009), such that she never experienced the ‘look’ that Leach experienced that marked her body as out of place, nor had she been denied access to gay clubs by bouncers seeking to limit heterosexuals from coming into gay spaces that had become popular to a broader range of customers. She describes an incident where a pair of her non-white friends were misread by a bouncer at a gay club because they didn’t “look” like lesbians. They did not have the correct identifying markers of white lesbian identity and so as women of color their lesbian identities were differentially (and therefore, incorrectly) configured. They did not have the correct (read white) “lesbian habitus”

(Rooke 2007). Their racial identities made their lesbian identities illegible, and therefore they were prohibited from entering the protected “gay space.” Here I want to return to Marlon B. Ross who asks, “What does it mean for a racialized body to be named before a gendered or homosexual one?” (Ross 2005, 166). This question is answered in Held's description of what transpired at the gateway of this gay space: the desire to keep out heterosexuals from gay space manifested in the maintenance of the spaces as predominately white (Held 2009). If the racialized body is read over and against the gendered and homosexual one, then BQW’s bodies remain principally subject to the white spatial imaginary such that there will be fewer places for them to go; they will be made to feel “out of place” in white queer spaces, and they may be subject to exclusionary spatial practices on account of their race in addition to their gendered and sexualized embodiments.

Research interested in sexualized space typically agree that “space is not naturally authentically ‘straight,’ but rather actively produced and (hetero)sexualized” (Binnie 1997, 223).

BQW's scene space is a particular kind of racialized and sexualized space that exists not only in response to exclusionary practices, but also as a way of foregrounding the needs, desires, and pleasures of black women. It is space where eroticism between black women is performed and thus shapes the contours of space. Following Browne and Bakshi who read space as

“performative and becoming,” we can ask how enactments of race, gender, and sexuality, along with relationships between bodies, and the discursive practices that occur in and around those spaces work together to produce BQW's scene spaces (Browne and Bakshi 2011, 180). In other words, scene space is “what it is” because it is space that is organized by and occupied by BQW.

Any space, including a strip club, hookah bar, a restaurant patio, a rooftop deck, or someone’s backyard has potential to become a BQW's scene space.

Black feminist scholar Eveylnn Hammonds observed over two decades ago that approaches to analyzing Black lesbian sexuality tended to take the form of discussions of

“differences from or equivalencies with white lesbian sexualities, with “black” added to delimit the fact that black lesbians share a history with other black women” (Hammonds 1994, 136). In this formulation white lesbian sexualities and experiences are placed at the center of the inquiry and assumed to be the standard by which all others should be compared. Similarly, the experiences of black heterosexual women stands in as the ‘default,’ where lesbianism or queer sexuality is treated as something that only slightly alters the experience of black womanhood which is thought to trump all other experiences. In both instances, where race is tacked on to the discussion of lesbian sexuality and where non-heterosexuality is tacked on to issues of racialized experiences of gender, the specific conditions of black queer women’s lives in America is treated 30

as a parenthetical, bracketed such that it is assumed not to provide any significant information about the default group—lesbians or black women. I would argue that such approaches to race, gender, and sexuality are fundamentally flawed, and reify the assumption that all lesbians are white and all black women are straight. Further, this line of reasoning prevents deeper exploration into other forms of exclusion that both white lesbians and black heterosexual women face, especially for refusing to stay “in their place.”

That said, black queer spaces are not the only spaces where one can find black same-sex desiring women in D.C. and hear their stories, but do offer compelling insight into the unique expressions of BQW's culture. BQW's scene spaces affirm the expression of BQW’s specific racialized gendered and sexual identities, and allow for women to express their same-sex eroticism. By placing BQW and their scene spaces at the center of analysis, I am able to consider the ways that BQW mark their membership to the larger context of black sexual and cultural politics (Chapters 2 and 3), to reveal the ways BQW experience being “at home” in black queer space (Chapter 4), and to consider the differences that manifest between BQW in these spaces

(Chapter 5).

5. Structure of remaining dissertation

In Chapter 2, I theorize the ways that BQW, the Scene, and the scene spaces that they create are situated ideologically and spatially in D.C. I argue that the Scene’s in/visible and un/spoken nature are part of what constitutes its texture, and that characterizations of the texture as "underground" participate in the construction of white (mostly male), middle-class, "public" spaces as normative forms of gay space and black, middle-class, heterosexual spaces as normative forms of black spatial practices in D.C. In Chapter 3, I render the contours of BQW

spaces using ethnographic analysis of three moments I experienced in scene space. I discuss finding, waiting for, and being in BQW’s scene spaces and the ways that those activities produced particular ways of doing one’s race, gender, sexuality, and class. Chapter 4 seeks to map the affective dimensions of BQW scene spaces. I offer analysis of BQW negotiating their

“place” in Washington, D.C. what I refer to as "narratives of intimacy" which tell stories of belonging (or not) in the cosmopolitan urban landscape. In considering the narratives of intimacy

BQW tell about being in BQW scene space, I wish to consider the way affect dimensions of

BQW scene space thus allowing us to see the dominant spatial orders that define mainstream space. Chapter 5 discusses the way that discourses of class inflected the formation and creation of black queer women’s scene space. In particular, I analyze the two ways that the term “ratchet" was deployed among my informants either as disciplinary technology of what might be called black homonormativity, and as a means of instigating purposefully "bad" behavior as a way of critiquing the normative impulses of the black middle-class. Finally, Chapter 6 concludes the dissertation and engages in a discussion of the major findings.

CHAPTER 2

IN/VISIBLE AND UN/SPOKEN IN CHOCOLATE CITY: BLACK

QUEER WOMEN'S CREATIVE AND STRATEGIC SPACE-

MAKING PRACTICES IN WASHINGTON, D.C.

1. Introduction

We used to call D.C. Chocolate City. D.C. was for women, what Atlanta was for men. -Sarah, 56

There are just a lot of black queer women in D.C. - Kay, 26

D.C. is one of the Black Gay Meccas. - Tiffani, 23

There are a lot of black queer women in D.C. - Be, 28

We thought here, we thought educated black people… I mean we thought we were going to find this like, social black mecca. - Tomar, 34

Studies of gay and lesbian urban geography which focus on lesbians’ uses of “gay villages” in the Global North, or their formation of distinct “lesbian villages,” often completely miss the unique ways BQW socialize and experience urban contexts where being a person of color produces a unique set of experiences of social space (Tucker 2010, Puar 2006, 2007,

McKittrick and Woods 2007). In other cases, researchers simply are unable to engage or locate black same-sex desiring women (Buring 1997, Held 2009, Myrdahl 2011), contributing to the sense that black lesbians and gays socialize "underground" because their communities are so homophobic. This notion of black queer lives being always "closeted" simply does not follow the actual geographic or cultural realities of black queer women's lives in D.C. Amina, who had been

hosting and Djing parties in D.C. since 2005, observed that there was a willful ignorance to the ways black lesbians in D.C. were contributing to the cultural milieu of LGBT life in D.C. Rarely were concerns or successes of BQW, or D.C.'s BQW social or cultural figures, featured the city's popular gay or lesbian magazines. While there is a general lack of recognition and representation of BQW in the mainstream gay and lesbian press, this does not mean that BQW socialize in secret, underground locations. On the contrary, BQW socialize in rather visible ways, and

BQW's visibility in the urban landscape serves as both a benefit and unique challenge to the creation and maintenance of BQW scene spaces in D.C., especially during the twilight hours when de facto forms of discrimination are most insidious.

Valentine and Skelton (2003) describe the white lesbian, gay, bisexual scene as a collection of commercial venues, gay and lesbian events, and support groups. They associate the scene primarily with the urban built landscape, and think about the scene’s role on the “coming out” processes of young adults (Valentine and Skelton 2003). I believe I complicate their notion of the scene. First, I argue that any space has the potential to become a scene space as long as the social networks of the Scene are actively shaping it as such. Second, the Scene need not be locked into a particular kind of landscape (the city, for example), nor does it need to be officially or institutionally recognized in order to count. Further, the Scene is not only a collection of venues, events, or parties. It is also a collection of individuals and social networks.

There has been a sustained interest in engaging questions related to sexual geographies in

D.C. (see Carnes 2009, Edelman 2012, Leap 2009). These studies emphasize the specificity of the cartography of D.C., contrasting the way that many white gay and lesbian urban landscapes and commercial territories are mapped and framed, often around the existence of “gay villages” in cities, or the existence of lesbian neighborhoods and suburban enclaves (Binnie 1995, 34

Bouthillette 1997, Podmore 2006, Retter 1997, Valentine 2000, Visser 2008b, Weston 1995). For example, Leap’s emphasis on gay men’s movements across the city rather than their production and maintenance of “gay ghettos” in D.C. has produced rich information about the complex ways gay men utilize the city’s landscape (2009). Similarly, emphasis on the geographic knowledge of transgender people in Washington, D.C. demonstrates the importance not only of the political economy of the city’s landscape, but also the precarious ways those viewed as gender and sexual dissidents are forced to occupy city space both ideologically and physically (Edelman 2012).

Washington, D.C. provides a compelling site for this case study about black queer women’s experience of queer space not the least because so many women viewed D.C. as a place where there are “a lot” of black queer women. One of my informal informants Sarah, a retired military veteran, told me that “back in her day” during the late 1970s and 1980s, D.C. was a

Mecca for black lesbians in the military. She fondly recalled visiting “Chocolate City” and attending parties with her black lesbian friends who lived and worked in D.C. Sarah went on to compare D.C. to the way that Atlanta exists in the black queer cultural imagination as a common destination and haven for black gay men. Sarah was one of the first women that I talked to about the Scene in D.C. While she lived in Atlanta, she had several former military friends who had remained in the D.C. area after retirement. Tomar recalled that before moving to D.C., she imagined D.C. to be a safe-haven for well-educated, well-informed, and social black LGBT people who would be easy to find and connect with. Another informant, Tiffani, when asked to qualify her observation that D.C. was a "Black Gay Mecca," said that the city’s high density of black residents meant that it would have more black gays and lesbians. Tiffani echoed several other informants who said that there were "a lot of black lesbians in D.C.”

D.C. has come to exist within the black queer Diaspora as a “Black Gay Mecca,” and yet those outside of the black queer Diaspora remain largely unaware. In this chapter, I engage

Rochella Thorpe’s query "what does ‘public’ mean for people who have been denied access to public space due to economic and political oppression?" (Thorpe 1996, 42). I also ask what does

“private” mean for those who experience broad cultural disavowal of their existence and systematic exclusions from many forms of "public" culture? I argue that this relates to how neoliberal politics of space in D.C. have positioned BQW and the Scene contributing to the sense that both exist only in private (read here, “secret” or “underground"). I demystify the notion that black queer spaces exist only in private and discuss the ways that BQW strategically deploy that which is in/visible and un/spoken about themselves and the spaces that they produce.

2. Chocolate City: Black Queer Space in the Black Gay Mecca

At the turn of the century Washington was in vogue. Black women flocked to

Washington, D.C. in the early 20th century as it was a city ripe with employment opportunities

(Lindsey 2010, Harley 1982). Various kinds of professional and non-professional jobs were available in D.C. such as administrative work in both the local and federal governments, as well as private and public institutions such as Howard University and the Freedman’s Hospital.

Additionally, D.C. was an obligatory “stop” on many artists, writers, and musicians' way to

Harlem, the New Negro Mecca of the time. D.C. was home to many of the Harlem Renaissance’s most well known figures including jazz innovator Duke Ellington, poet Georgia Douglas

Johnson, and the architect of the New Negro Movement, Alain Locke, a professor at Howard

University. Blues performers such as Gertrude “Ma” Rainey and Bessie Smith performed in front of crowds at the Howard Theater, and Harlem Renaissance poets and D.C. residents Langston

Hughes and Angelina Grimke sat among its rafters. The U Street Corridor, off of which the

Howard Theater sits, was a center for black life in Washington from the 1910s well through the early 2000s when the area began to gentrify. D.C., like other American cities, was a segregated city during the early 20th century, but because of the city’s highly skilled black population and the presence of the historically black college Howard University, it attracted many talented and middle-income blacks (Prince 2014).

This time period is especially important for black queer history, because the Harlem

Renaissance was such a queer time (Garber 1990). According to historian Eric Graber (1990)

Throughout the so-called Harlem Renaissance period, roughly 1920 to 1935, black lesbians and gay men were meeting each other on street corners, socializing in cabarets and rent parties, and worshiping in church on Sundays, creating a language, a social structure, and a complex network of institutions. Some were discreet about their sexual identities; others openly expressed their personal feelings.

It was well known that both Bessie Smith and Gertrude “Ma” Rainey engaged in same- gender sexual relationships (Davis 1998), but so did D.C. resident Alice Dunbar-Nelson, wife of

Harlem Renaissance poet Paul Laurence Dunbar (Lorde 2007). Speculation circulated about the queer sexualities of other New Negro Movement figures such as Alain L. Locke and Langston

Hughes (Harris 2001, Vogel 2008). And the struggles Angelina Grimke, also a D.C. resident, faced around her same-sex desire are also well documented (Woods 1993). Indeed as Garber describes, the early 20th century was a complex time for black gay, lesbian, and bisexual people who were actively developing new ways of being themselves—being black and being queer.

That D.C. was somewhat at the center of the lives of so many New Negro Movement thinkers is by no means a coincidence, and I believe it helps to explain why D.C. remains a Black Gay

Mecca.

In addition to being an important city in the constellation of the New Negro Movement,

D.C. remains a Black Gay Mecca for at least four other reasons. The first is that it was home to one of the most popular black gay clubs in the country. The Clubhouse opened in 1975 in the upper northwest quadrant of the city on Upshur Avenue and was home to the city’s most popular

DJs who were known for their innovations in house music2. Modeled after exclusive New York discos, the Clubhouse was classified as a public hall and only members or individuals who were sponsored by members could party there. Memberships were free, however, members were interviewed by the club owners and had to sign a membership agreement stating that they intended to abide by the rules of the space. By the time the doors opened, the Clubhouse had an excess of 400 members most of whom were black. In an interview with the Rainbow History project, the owners recall that there were about 4,000 members 90% of whom were Black. The

Clubhouse was in many ways responsible for putting D.C. “on the black queer map.” As the

Clubhouse became a destination, D.C. became a focal point in the black queer geographical imagination. The Clubhouse wasn’t the only black gay destination in D.C. The Nob Hill was one of the first black gay bars in the country, opening in 1953 on Kenyon Street NW, also in the northwest quadrant of the city in the predominately black residential neighborhood of Columbia

Heights. Nob Hill is also noted as one of the longest running gay bars in the city, closing in 2003 as a causality of the area’s gentrification projects.

2 I confirmed all the addresses, dates of opening and closing on the Rainbow History Project’s Places and Spaces Database. Last updated August 5 2014, it contains a full list of all known LGBT establishments in D.C. with the dates they opened and closed. I relied on the information there to confirm addresses and dates of the locations my informants mentioned. This database, is a collective project between scholars and people in the D.C. area with information about LGBT sites and history. Rainbow History Project. Places and Spaces Database, http://rainbowhistory.org/?page_id=28 (last accessed August 11, 2015). 38

D.C. developed into a Black Gay Mecca in part as well to the fact that by 1975

Washington, D.C. had become a majority black city with black political leadership, or a

“Chocolate City” as funk legend George Clinton would christen it. The city was more than 70% black and had elected its first mayor, a black man, Walter E. Washington. During this time, D.C. experienced a burgeoning of art and culture among the black working class. Go-go music would develop and flourish. Black political leadership would begin to shape the city’s infrastructure. It is interesting to consider that at the same time the city was becoming more black, it was also becoming more queer. This follows the Williams Institutes statistical findings that black queers flock to places that are more densely populated by blacks. During the 1980s and 1990s, the city experienced a surge in black queer life with several gay and lesbian clubs opening along the southwest waterfront that frequently became black queer spaces.

A 2013 statistical study conducted by the University of California Los Angeles' Williams

Institute, confirms my informants’ observations of the number of black queers in D.C. Kastanis and Gates (2013) found that D.C. has the highest percentage of African American LGBT identified individuals among its black population than anywhere else in the United States with

9.7% of the African American population being LGBT identified (Kastanis and Gates 2013).

One of the key findings of the report was that African American LGBT people tended to "flock" in cities where there was a high density of African Americans (Kastanis and Gates 2013). This is significant for D.C. because while African Americans make up roughly 14% of the country’s total population, according to the 2010 U.S. Census, D.C. had an African American population

of just over 50%3. That particular finding is important because it points to a major difference between the spatial practices of black LGBT people and white LGBT people. White LGBT people were found to migrate to cities and neighborhoods where there the LGBT population was more dense. The study synthesized data showing that D.C. had the highest percentage of same- sex households in the United States at just over 4% (Kastanis and Gates 2013), which means that

D.C.’s population of black LGBT people made a significant impact on the percentage of same- sex households in the area.

Another important reason why D.C. has developed into a Mecca, is that D.C. and its metropolitan areas in the surrounding states Maryland and Virginia, colloquially known as the

DMV, has the highest concentration of middle-class African Americans than anywhere else in the country (Lacy 2007). Kastanis and Gates (2013) does not provide granular state level information about employment or education of the African American LGBT population, however, in D.C. the conditions are met for there to be a high concentration of some of the most educated, and well-resourced African American LGBT people in the country. It should be understood, however, that the black middle-class in America fares far worse than the white middle-class (Lacy 2007, Lipsitz 2011). Still, the relatively higher incomes, rates of education, and access to resources among its black queers has allowed for the development of scene spaces in D.C. that would allow it to become a Black Gay Mecca.

3 U.S. Census Bureau, “Profile of General Population and Housing Characteristics: 2010.” District of Columbia QuickLinks, http://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/DEC/10_DP/DPDP1/0400000US11 (accessed August 12, 20015).

The last reason D.C. developed and remained a Black Gay Mecca is that it was the site for the first Black Pride Celebration. Every year during Memorial Day Weekend in May, the

Clubhouse hosted what they called “The Children's Hour,” an annual night of partying and celebrating black gay and lesbian culture. From 1975 to 1990, the Children’s Hour marked an occasion for black queers throughout the region to come to D.C. for a massive nightlong celebration. The Clubhouse’s doors shuttered in 1990 as HIV/AIDS claimed the lives of many of its patrons and the encroaching urban decay of the city which had been all but abandoned in the wake of the “War on Drugs.” There to pick up the torch was a group of black gay men and women, the Black Pride Committee, who conceived of a day long festival that would bring attention to the HIV/AIDS crisis while simultaneously calling attention to whitewashing of Pride celebrations. Filling in the gap left by the closing of the Clubhouse and the Children’s Hour, the first Black Pride Celebration was held on the Saturday of Memorial Day Weekend in 1991 at

Banneker Park in Northwest D.C., a predominately African American neighborhood.

While black communities are often depicted as more homophobic than others (see Bailey and

Shabazz 2014, Isoke 2014), such representations rely on what Jon Binnie refers to as simplistic

“cartographies of homophobic spaces” (Binnie 2004). Further, they do not give information about how black queers actually contend with the homophobia within black communities (Bailey and Shabazz 2014, Fogg-Davis 2006, Isoke 2014). Threats of violence are very real, especially for the gender-nonconforming (Edelman 2012), and yet most of the black queer spaces in D.C. that have existed in the city have been located in predominately black neighborhoods or in predominately black nightclubs and bars. For example, the Delta Elite (3734 10th St NE; 1976-

2013) was neatly tucked in the corner of a storefront in a predominately black neighborhood of

Northeast D.C. near Catholic University. For 37 years it served as a site for black queers, 41

particularly working-class black men. One of the first black gay clubs in the city was located in the neighborhood of Columbia Heights, then a thriving black middle-class neighborhood. These facts someone belie the notion that black gays and lesbians are unable to make space for themselves in their own neighborhoods.

In William Leap’s 2009 study of the shifting nature of gay spaces as a result of the gentrification project along the city’s southwest waterfront which lead to the closing of several black queer spaces, one of Leap’s informants Bolton, a black gay man living in D.C. discusses some of the quotidian aspects of black queers living in and among other African American families in D.C.:

To me… it seems that with a lot of black gay residents, they tend to be just kind of mixed in with other working-class families in uh row houses in certain parts of the city. Their identities are kept kind of concealed. […] And people tend to respect them for not revealing “quote unquote” their business. (2009, 203)

Rather than live in ghettoized spaces within black neighborhoods, black queers in D.C. are grafted into the very fabric of their neighborhoods in very interesting ways. In the above example, Bolton describes black gays as having a very “tacit” agreement with their neighbors about their sexuality (Decena 2008, Moore 2011). Mignon Moore in her study of black lesbians and gay women in New York found similar patterns of “covering” such that black lesbian mothers could co-exist with their heterosexual neighbors and community members (Moore

2011). Many white gay and lesbian urban landscapes and commercial territories are mapped and framed around the existence of “gay villages” in cities, or the existence of lesbian neighborhoods and suburban enclaves (see Valentine 2000, Visser 2008b, Binnie 1995, Weston 1995, Lo and

Haly 2000, Bouthillette 1997, Retter 1997, Podmore 2006). Yet, as I have thus argued, black

queer spaces often take their shape within predominately black neighborhoods and black queers tend to live in these same neighborhoods.

Discussions about Black LGBT people and their relationships to social space are emerging (Matebeni 2011, Bailey 2013, Bailey and Shabazz 2014, Livermon 2013, McGlotten

2013, Holmes 2011, Johnson 2008, Ferguson 2007, Catungal 2013, Walcott 2007), but what can be gleaned thus far from these works is that the distinction between public and private space for black queers is complicated by the culturally differentiated notion of what constitutes “public” and “private.” For black queers private space is often made communal, because of the lack of access to normative places coded as “public.” Further, the “public” remains a space where one’s

“business” must be constantly regulated. Being a person of color in “public” already produces a unique set of experiences (McKittrick and Woods 2007, Puar 2006, 2007, Tucker 2010), thus it is not a surprise why there are not black analogues of white gay and lesbian spatial formations such as “black gay villages.” In fact, there are no surviving black gay or lesbian bars in D.C. And yet, as I argue, D.C. remains in the black queer cultural imaginary one of few Black Gay

Meccas—a city that attracts black LGBT people from all over the country, many of whom are well educated and well resourced. I would argue that this is in large part because of the creative uses of private and public spaces that BQW in D.C. have developed.

In what follows I discuss different kinds of scene spaces. They fall primarily within three different categories: mainstream, semi-public, and exclusive. I do not mean to suggest that there is a coherent "taxonomy" of scene space where each space fit neatly within each category, but I do mean to highlight the various techniques required to make them in addition to thinking about the techniques BQW put to use to address their ideological and cultural exclusion from the urban landscape and from American popular culture. Mainstream, semi-public and exclusive spaces 43

allows us to distinguish between BQW scene spaces in terms of their relationship to notions of public and private, visible and invisible, spoken and unspoken.

3. Mainstream Scene Space: The Acela Club

There weren't many people in the Acela Club. I noticed a group of five in the seats that overlooked the floor. I made my way to the bar, sat down and placed my order for my customary pineapple juice and French fries. As I waited, a woman from the quintet approached me and introduced herself as Tay and asked me if I was there alone. Unsure if this was a question of my relationship status or whether she was asking if I'd come with friends, I answered awkwardly: "I didn’t come with anyone. I came alone.” She then asked if I wanted to join her and her friends to whom she pointed. I answered in the affirmative and asked the bartender to have my fries sent up to the seating area and walked over with her to her four friends whom she introduced me to. I introduced myself and I told them that I was a student studying black lesbians and the places where they went in D.C. and I was treated warmly; if not as a friend, certainly as an acquaintance. I sat between Tay and Nyla listening for the most part to stories of love and life, children and parents. I asked lots of questions. […] They invited me to dinner and drinks with them afterwards. I accepted the invitation.

Excerpt from field journal: September 16, 2012

This particular selection of field notes is from one of my first experiences in scene space, and was incredibly important to the way that I came to theorize scene space and the Scene. My experience allowed me to understand the importance of the active productions of scene space, how discursive resources were key to that production, and the way certain kinds of conversations were able to take place due to the affective relations (both real and imagined) between BQW in scene space. The Washington Mystics, the city's professional women's basketball team, plays at the Verizon Center located on 7th and F St NW roughly between May and September during the

WNBA's regular season. The Acela Club is the arena's restaurant and bar located on the "club" level on which the arena's "club" suites are located. During WNBA games, the Acela Club becomes a BQW's scene space. There is no official text that names the Acela Club as a place where you'll find BQW so in some ways it is "unspoken," and to those who are unaware, it likely

remains invisible. It became apparent to me that the Acela Club became a BQW's scene space through a set of social practices predicated upon an active cultivation of the site as such only when I became a Washington Mystics season ticket holder. During the half-time of every game, I would go to the Acela Club bar to stretch my legs and get a snack. I soon noticed that there would frequently be a disproportionate number of black women mixing and mingling there. I would see women holding hands, kissing, buying one another drinks, flirting, laughing, watching the game, stepping out on the balcony to smoke. I saw women that I had known from other

BQW's scene spaces and I quickly understood that the Acela Club was another site in the constellation of the Scene. BQW often came in groups to games. Nyla had gotten several tickets for the game from work and shared them with friends and acquaintances, she’d explained, which is how the five of them were there on that evening. While there weren't many people in the Acela

Club on this particular evening, I would argue that it was the desire to cultivate this site as a scene space that led Tay to approach me and for the group to so quickly integrate me into their circle.

Scene spaces that occurred in mainstream, "public" sites, such as the Acela Club, were common. Women would often go in groups to events happening in and around the city such as wine festivals, concerts, and movie screenings. Often these would be groups of women within a particular social network who would plan outings and trips together. It is important to note that not everyone in these groups knew one another to the same degree, or were connected to the same people. This was especially true when these public scene spaces were more formalized. For example, one of my informants curated a listserv of black professional lesbians in the area. She would plan events for these women, often in "public" spaces. Among the events I had attended was a cookout in Rock Creek Park with about 20 women, and a Ski-Trip in the mountains of 45

West Virginia for a group of 50 women. Usually individuals planned these kinds of public scene spaces. Zoom Excursions was a Meetup Group created by a black lesbian and she specialized in creating scene spaces in public sites. I attended several of her events during my fieldwork including a bowling night and a trip to the National Spy Museum. I also went to professional and collegiate sporting events, and would often see groups of black queer women there. When the

U.S. Olympic team practiced at Bender Arena at American University, I went and saw women there who I had known from the Acela Club at the Verizon Center. What is consistent in these public scene spaces is that the spaces operate on a shared sense among the women there that they are actively recasting mainstream, normative spaces as queer spaces, and that any hostility one of them faced, all of them would be there to help “carry the load.” To those on the outside, these moments of black queer scene space making were often invisible. One the one hand, this operated as a benefit, but on the other, these forms of public scene spaces meant that BQW would remain fixed within discourses of invisibility. Often during my fieldwork when I would tell people (usually white people) I was studying black queer women, they’d be surprised to learn that there were communities of black queer women in D.C. They’d “never seen them” they would say. Though this may be true, I think it is much more likely that most people have never really looked. What my fieldwork revealed was that black queer women are frequently making use of public space in D.C., albeit not in the same ways as their white counterparts. However,

4. Semi-Public Spaces: The Happy Hour and the Party

As Timi, one of my informants put it, "The most like visual marker of that scene is kind of like in the entertainment, party circuit—like that’s the best way to kinda like tangibly be like, ‘this is where they are, this where you can find them.'" I followed the same path that many of my

informants had to find semi-public scene spaces in D.C. I looked online. In 2006, a black lesbian in D.C. founded a website called Phatgirlchic.com as a means of collecting lesbian events in and around Washington, D.C. In addition to Phatgirlchic.com, I followed the events of promoters on

Facebook, and toward the end of my time in the field, the social media site Instagram where people could share pictures became another important way for scene space producers to promote their events. In many ways the fact that these scene spaces were so intentionally "visible," but visible only to those for whom it they were intended to see, meant that they fell within the "semi- public" category. These scene spaces are public in that they are advertised on social media and are visible to the larger public, but they take place in private homes or private venues. Typically, in the case of parties and happy hours, semi-public scene spaces occurred in venues usually actively hetersexualized (Binnie 1997), but because the promoters had either reserved the space or worked out a deal with management to host the event, there were sometimes bouncers at the door who turned away those not there for the "private" party taking place. In the case of parties, they were not truly “private” parties, simply parties where there were cover charges which was often enough of a deterrent for most not there for a “black lesbian party” to leave.

Between the early spring and early summer of 2013, I found happy hours to be the most consistent events that took place. Happy hours would often happen on the same day every week, usually during the off-peak nights for the bar hosting the happy hour such as a Tuesday or

Wednesday, and sometimes once or twice a month with the advertising mentioning it would be hosted on the 3rd and 5th Thursday of every month, for example. Well-known and popular scene space producers almost always hosted happy hours. They were not, at this particular time during my fieldwork, typically thrown by relatively new or up and coming producers with smaller followings. To keep their clientele interested and to compete in the marketplace of “things to do” 47

in D.C., each week or every month, producers would try something new during their happy hour.

Nikisha under the name Women of Mova hosted a happy hour at the gay bar Mova on 16th

Street and V Street. After a few months of steady success, she began hosting a poetry open mic on the rooftop of the bar to keep clientele interested. She would also alternate open mic night with live performance of the black lesbian band the Coolots. Not far from Mova, Phatgirlchic’s month happy hour called Revel began in the Spring of 2013 at a then new bar called Vera Cruz on 9th and Vermont St NW and each month there was a new theme. This is important to note, because for many of my informants, they did not feel particularly restricted in D.C. by where they could go and what they could do in D.C. They could as easily go to a movie on a Tuesday night as they could a happy hour with work colleagues. I expound on this in Chapter 4, but just because they could go anywhere in D.C., doesn’t mean that they felt comfortable any where in

D.C. What was most important about black queer women’s happy hours was that they provided a consistent place where you could meet other black women.

The party circuit scene spaces almost never took place in venues designated "lesbian" or

"gay" spaces. They typically took place in large restaurants, lounges, and nightclubs. Most often they took place over a long weekend such as Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend, or President's

Day weekend, the larger of these parties were typically held at venues with capacity around 300 to 400. During my fieldwork there were several monthly parties that were popular among BQW, drawing large crowds of BQW. The first Saturday of the month Stadium Nightclub hosted a

"Ladies Party." There was a Second Saturday’s party hosted by TMS Entertainment that changed locations three times during the course of a year from XII Lounge on H Street, to Layla Lounge on Florida, to Pure Lounge on U Street. Towards the end of my fieldwork, they began hosting a weekly party with several other promoters including MimSol and A2Z Entertainment at a club 48

called Vita Lounge. In 2012, Vita Lounge opened in the space that had been Effin Lounge. Effin

Lounge hosted drag king shows during the early 2000s; they also hosted several queer events including happy hours to support various LGBT non-profit organizations around the city. Their party was one of few weekly parties hosted for young BQW in D.C.

BQW nightlife was not necessarily centered in LGBT spaces. At the time of my writing, there were no black lesbian owned clubs, bars, or lounges in D.C. Lace On the Avenue opened in

2007, but it closed after only 4 years due to poor patronage. Many cited the clubs location far from other forms of entertainment and its inaccessibility to cabs or public transit as the two main reasons why they rarely frequented the space. In other words, the geographic realities made Lace an ineffective "BQW place." While owned and operated by a black lesbian and for some time supported by other black lesbians, it was unable to withstand the economic realities of doing business in a large metropolitan area, which required a much broader base of customers and a location near other areas of nightlife.

BQW happy hours tended to happen on off-peak nights such as Tuesdays and

Wednesdays. At one point during my fieldwork there were two different BQW happy hours on

Wednesday nights and two on Tuesday nights and except one hosted at a gay club called Mova, these happy hours were usually hosted at "straight bars." The majority of the BQW I spoke did not spend much leisure time in gay bars, or at the one predominately white lesbian bar in

Southeast called Phase One. Instead, they went to straight bars or they went to happy hours hosted by BQW. During the two years in which I collected data for this project, there were only three active lesbian bars in D.C., Phase One and Phase Two of Dupont, both owned by the same person, and Lace on the Avenue. Phase Two, hosted a couple of scene space parties but it closed shortly after it opened, and Lace's doors also shuttered during my field work. Mad Momo’s, a 49

restaurant and club which opened in 2013 was not marketed as a specifically gay or lesbian venue. It did however host several lesbian and gay parties thrown by the BQW’s scene space producer DJ India. While some have characterized D.C. as having a lack of lesbian places, this does not seem to fully capture the creative uses of space that black queer people have engaged in.

Based on my time in the field and my discussions with producers of scene space, there have been phases over the past decade where there were considerably fewer parties to go to, as were there periods where there were a lot of parties to go to.

In the mid to late 1990s into the early 2000s, several gay and lesbian clubs were popular among BQW in D.C. including Wet (52 L Street, SE, Est. 1999, closed in 2006) and Edge (56 L

Street, SE, Est. 1991, closed in 2006), and Tracks (1111 First Street SE, Est. 1984, closed in

1999) in the Navy Yard neighborhood. All of these locations were demolished to make room for redevelopment projects in the area when the city’s plan to build a professional baseball stadium in the neighborhood took shape.4 There was also a lesbian club, the Hung Jury (1814 H Street,

NW, Est. 1984, closed in 2002) downtown near McPherson Square, and the black gay and lesbian club in the Brookland neighborhood called the Delta Elite Social Club (3734 10th St NE,

Est. 1976-2013). On any given Thursday, Friday, or Saturday these clubs would draw considerable crowds of black gays and lesbians. Frequently, clubs such as Ziegfeld’s that were primarily for gay men would host "lesbian nights”. But while BQW were actively partying in mainstream LGBT spaces during this time, there were also BQW entertainment groups who were hosting parties in different venues around the city. For example, Sheila Alexander-Reid's

4 Leap (2009) provides a compelling discussion of the cluster of gay clubs in the personal (though not political) discourses of gay men.

entertainment group Women in the Life was the most talked about, and her parties some of the biggest and they were hosted in different venues around the city. Sheila’s parties were

“legendary.” She initially began hosting parties for “professional” women. Women who wanted something more upscale than the sometimes dingy locations available on the waterfront. When I sat down and spoke to Sheila, she lamented that fights plagued some of her later parties. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, people cited that fights between women at or around BQW's parties became a common occurrence. This was much to my surprise, because I didn't witness any physical altercations between women while in BQW’s scene space. In fact, there was often very little to no security at most of the parties that I went because the potential for violence in the clubs was so low. While I did witness on a couple of occasions verbal spats between women

(often intimate partners), one of which left one woman walking in the middle of the street yelling at her partner who had driven off in their car, these were not typical of any kind of scene space that I went to.

Of the D.C. Lesbian scene in the late 1990s and 2000s, no other location was discussed with as much revelry as the Hung Jury. As Amina would put it "The Hung Jury was the spot. It was multicultural. It didn't have that urban grit, so you know, you didn't have to worry about folks getting into fights. It was just real chill." The Hung Jury Restaurant was located at 1814 H

St NW near McPherson Square in downtown Washington. The Hung Jury was a popular destination for young lesbians in D.C. from the late 1990s until it closed in 2002. Nikisha, who in addition to serving on the board of Capital Pride also promoted parties and hosted house parties at her home near Dupont Circle in the 1990s, was present for the Hung Jury’s final party and recalled vividly that it was one of the best parties she'd ever been to. The Hung Jury fulfilled a unique role in the D.C. Lesbian scene. It was a space where there was always racial diversity, 51

which is much in contrast to the kinds of semi-public scene spaces that exist now. In the conversation below, Alaire, an informant who had only been in D.C. for a few months and

Shannon, who had lived in D.C. for 10 years, note that the D.C. lesbian community is particularly segregated.

Example 2.1 – Segregation on the Scene

NL: You said that the D.C. community is segregated? Could you explain? Where do you see the segregation?

Alaire: For instance, you know, you go to a lesbian party and there's nothing but black women. Or you go to another party and there's nothing but white girls. You’ll rarely go to Cobalt on a ladies night and you'll find a mix of people, but I feel like, the formal… some of the formal uh, sort of approaches to gathering, you know, the lesbian community under one roof can be can just be segregated, just a lot of times its either black or white. It's really. That's just my experience, you know. --- NL: So tell me about some of the places that you went? What was it like?

Shannon: So, we tended to go to places on the regular basis that I would say were predominately white, and then we were the diversity. There might be another pocket of black people there, who we quickly met and then tried to bring into the group.

Most of my informants intentionally spent most of their time in BQW’s scene space, because they didn't like the "dive-bar" nature of the lesbian bar, Phase One. They also did not like the lack of diversity at places like Cobalt, which hosted a lesbian party once a month. Some of my informants, Shannon for example, described the way that when they went out in the early

2000s, it was usually in places where they "were the diversity."

I also went to parties during my fieldwork where I was the diversity; parties hosted by white lesbian and queer party promoters. During one particular party hosted at a bar in the neighborhood Adams Morgan I wrote in my field jot notes: “I feel invisible. I need to go.” To be clear, I was never outright mistreated, or harassed in white lesbian spaces, but did feel the pang

of waiting extra long for the bartender’s attention and I always felt invisible. I never caught a friendly eye, and no one ever tried to "bring me into the group" as was what I had been familiar with in BQW’s scene spaces. I was usually one of few black people in these spaces. In one instance, I was one of two black people, and I knew the other person—we'd taken classes in college together. We stood together the entire night talking and catching up. If there was a DJ (at

Phase 1 in particular, I had witnessed an iPod being used to control the music), the music was usually techno and thus unfamiliar to me. The sense of being "in the right place" that I felt in

BQW’s scene spaces, did not translate well white lesbian spaces. I was awkward, I couldn't dance to the music, and I didn't drink PBR. Instead of being looked at, I was looked through, clearly without cache in what Dwight McBride might describes as the D.C. (white) lesbian

"marketplace of desire" (McBride 2005).

And so, without lesbian places like the Hung Jury, a place that is always open specifically for same-sex desiring women and always organized such that a racially diverse group of women enjoy it, the lesbian scene in D.C. tends to organize in mostly segregated sets of leisure space, with few exception. In the summer of 2012 and 2013, I saw this begin to shift as there were several seasonal monthly parties such as the Ladies Tea Dance and FreakOut dance party which were popular across a much broader range of people as the organizers of these parties actively worked to make sure to have DJ's who could play multiple genres, host the party at a bar that had a range of drinks from domestic to craft, and they never charged a cover at the door. These parties were almost always organized by a multicultural group of queer people who made it a point to create spaces that they felt were inclusive of a broader range of individuals including transmen and transwomen. Shannon, for example, talked about their distaste for much of the advertising for many BQW’s scene spaces. One in particular they did not like featured a scantly 53

clad black woman sitting suggestively inside a martini glass. If the purpose of the party was to dance and have a good time, why would you need a woman sitting in a martini glass to communicate that? For Shannon, this particular image stood out as antithetical to kinds of spaces they were interested to go to, so Shannon and their friends began to throw parties and events that they wanted to go to instead. For as important as parties were, Shannon also thought it was important that there be more spaces that centered on the artistic and intellectual curiosities of black queers and trans people.

There have been at least 3 distinct "back in my days" in the past two decades that are worth noting, and that are in many ways connected to the rapid changes in Washington, D.C.’s landscape. As BQW readjust to the changed conditions, they also develop strategies to address the current conditions. For those such as Amina, the late 1990s was a time of bounty. The clubs in the Southwest waterfront offered a plethora of options for women to party. The recession of the early 2000s seems to have hit Black lesbians in Washington, D.C. particularly hard. Breeze discusses the recession as a time when promoters did not have the excess cash to host parties and patrons didn’t have extra money to spend on parties. It was “a hard ask” she described trying to get people to pay any more than $5 at the door. This time of recession seems to coincide with other informants who described house parties as being particularly popular. For example, in the spring and fall there are considerably more events, however, in the winter and summer, there are less.

House parties were and remain a large part of the way same-sex desiring women in D.C. socialize. During the late 1980s well through the early 2000s, especially as options for going out were beginning to dwindle as the clubs near Navy Yard, large house parties seem to have very important in filling in the gaps of more mainstream semi-public spaces available to the Scene. 54

These were large house parties where hosts may not know many of the guests. Three of my informants Shannon, Nikisha, and Sheila had all thrown large house parties in the late 1990s and early 2000s. While the nature of house parties seems to have shifted somewhat in the past decade, they still rely on the basic tenant that hosts open up their private residence up to the community. There is no cover charge. If there is alcohol, it is free. “You can really get your life at a good house party,” Anna said to me.

5. Exclusive Scene Space: Intimate Spaces and Social Networks

In my time in the field, large house parties were not as common, and if they were, they tended to be exclusive, requiring invitation or connection to someone with a connection. Among the black middle-class and upwardly mobile queers I developed relationships with, they frequently created events for themselves and one another that could offer a sense of exclusivity.

Exclusive scene spaces were ones not advertised through "traditional" channels such as

Phatgirlchic.com or Facebook groups. Finding out where an exclusive scene space was involved having some prior knowledge of the host or friends of the host. “Invite-only” house parties fall within this category. Many informants stressed the significance of house parties and their preferences for this form of socializing over the club/party circuit. They also discussed how these kinds of scene spaces were typically just for their friends. Three of my informants were members of the same close-knit group of black queer people. Their group hosted a revolving house party that moved from one member’s house to another’s. While others could be invited, they were primarily hosted for each other. As Dominique, another informant who preferred house parties would put it, “everyone at a house party has been vetted.” Amina and her partner hosted large party circuit semi-public scene space parties, and they also hosted a small group of their friends

at their home weekly for more intimate gatherings. It is important to note that the "exclusive" nature of these events is related more closely to the maintenance of the connections within their social networks, than to the purposeful exclusion of others. It was only after 11 months of sustained contact that I was invited into the home of some the most connected members of the

Scene, and nearly 7 years before being invited to another such figure. Sharing the intimate space of the home, outside of the context of the "party circuit" meant that the connections you made could move beyond the tenuous ones most common in semi-public and public scene space. In many ways, finding and locating more exclusive scene spaces was a matter of needing to know where to look, who to talk to, and what to say.

6. Finding Black Lesbians in D.C.

Prior to the integration of the Internet into the everyday lives of most Americans, my informants emphasized that if one wanted to find BQW’s scene spaces, they first had to find someone who they thought might be gay or lesbian who they could then ask for information about parties, events, and happenings, often at the risk of outing themselves. Alternatively, one could wander into a gay or lesbian friendly bookstore or coffee shop, find a poster on a community announcement board, and seek out a phone number on the advertisement. One would then call the number and ask the person on the other line for more information about where the party would be. In the 1980s there were several bookstores clustered along Dupont Circle, and in the mid-1990s, Faye Williams, a black woman, opened a bookstore called Sisterspace & Books on the 1500 block of U Street, which served as an important site for black lesbian women to meet and connect until the bookstore was evicted in 2004. It reopened in the Petworth neighborhood a few months later. While Williams had created an important space for organizing

and community, the store was not sustainable closing for good in late 2012—going the way of most independent bookstores in the age of digital books. Gay newspapers such as the

Washington Blade also served as a resource for finding out where parties and events would be hosted, but my research has found that there were few lesbian of color events advertised or listed in these sources. If they wandered into a place that sold the Women in the Life Magazine, an independently published magazine by Sheila Alexander-Reid whose entertainment company of the same name was one of the most well known in the city,5 they might also find out where

BQW events were happening.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, producers of scene space who I spoke to described the importance of handing out palm cards, or 5.5” x 8.5” advertisements, for their upcoming parties at the "let out" of other parties such as those hosted by Women in the Life. Some even discussed selectively choosing whom to hand out palm cards to in order to try to control what kind of women would attend their parties. This seems to have changed significantly with the opening up of Facebook to anyone with a valid e-mail address in 2006. For all of the women I interviewed who organized parties and events, the expansion of Facebook served as an important marker for the changing nature of publicizing and mediating entrance into BQW’s scene space. But while they all marked Facebook and sites like Phatgirlchic.com as “game changers,” both my ethnographic notes and my interview data suggests that the Internet was not a wholesale replacement for face-to-face interaction with other women. The Internet could tell you where the parties were, but it would not be able to tell you if you would feel comfortable at those parties,

5 Sheila Alexander-Reid was appointed the Director of the newly elected D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s Office of LGBT Affairs in 2015.

book club meetings, or social outings. It wouldn’t tell you if the space was regularly attended, or if you would be able to make meaningful connections. So, while the Internet could mediate one’s access to BQW scene spaces, there was another, equally important step in the orientation process of the Scene. Making connections within the social networks of the Scene.

The narrative in Example 2.2 emerged as Elliot and I were having a conversation about her decision to move back to D.C. Elliot is a D.C. native who went to college in a nearby state.

After she graduated and lived for a year in a nearby city she decided that she wanted to move back to D.C. She described that just prior to making the decision to move back to D.C., and amidst all the changes that were taking place in her life, she was concerned with being comfortable in Washington, D.C., specifically around her sexuality. She went on a popular networking site and changed the location of her profile to D.C. and began meeting women on the site who lived in the area. I chose to share Elliot's narrative because like other younger women in my sample, she started first with making connections with people, using the Internet to first foster those connections—rather than looking for scene spaces. In addition to meeting her current partner, she quickly developed a platonic friendship with a BQW and upon officially moving back to D.C. asked to meet with her in person to get an orientation to black lesbian life in D.C.

Example 2.2 - Elliot, “It’s Going To Be Okay”

01 We met at Bus Boys and Poets, 02 and she was just like, 03 "Okay, this club on this night is this thing and this thing. 04 And whatever [knuckles rap on desk] whatever [rap on desk] whatever [rap on desk]." 05 And we talked about a lot of things. 06 We talked about like, "Does D.C. feel comfortable for you?" 07 Like you know she sort of .. ^more than anything else^ 08 I don't even remember like the nights ^that she said^

09 um, but it just really calmed me down about moving back here. 10 I was like "Okay there's a space. 11 There are many spaces.. 12 It's not going to be crazy weird.. 13 If I'm like walking down the street with a woman. 14 Um, there are other women here to meet. 15 Like this is.. 16 It's going to be okay. 17 Um, so that was huge.

We are oriented to this narrative as abruptly as Elliot seems to have been oriented to the

Scene: “We met… and she was just like” (2.2:01). The exchange Elliot describes having took place between she and the woman was “real talk” and sits within a category of speech events associated with directness as it takes shape within African American English (AAE) communities of practice. In African American communities of practice “straight talk,” “real talk,” or “getting real” (Alim and Smitherman 2012, 178, Spears 2001) is related to honest, even if to a fault, speech acts that require a high degree of candidness. “Real talk” is a hip-hop idiomatic expression referring to speech that is “straight up,” or authentic and lacking pretense.

When an interlocutor gets "real," she provides full candid appraisals of persons, places, objects, or situations (Spears 2001). Getting real entails interlocutors orienting towards objects familiar to both, and a desire to be aligned. In lines 2.2:03-04, Elliot describes their exchange as being very matter of fact beginning with her source saying, “Okay” and proceeding immediately to list a number of clubs where “this thing” or “that” was going on depending on the night.” Elliot was informed through this conversation that there were several events where she could go to meet other queer women of color, but this was hardly the most important aspect of her meeting this woman. Elliot does not tell me this story so that I know that she knows about all the places to go.

She moves quickly through this bit of the narrative to arrive at what she says really made the difference: the conversation itself situated within a frame of real talk. She was able to make a 59

genuine connection with the other woman, and this is what allowed her to come to the knowledge that she would be "okay" in D.C.

There are several moments in my field notes where I note being asked by individuals who were "new to the scene," to tell them about the parties, events, and places to hang out. After a year in the field, the conversation felt much like a ritual whenever speaking to someone to whom

I was unfamiliar with on the Scene. "So where do you hangout?" they would ask. This question was usually loaded. In a sense, if they'd found this event, or party, they could certainly find another. For example, when I'd ask, "What are ya'll doing after this?" to a group of women, it was not just a question about the next geographic location they'd be visiting. I was also asking if

I could go with them. Being asked where I “hung out,” was a question about with whom I spent my time. In my time in the field, I found that making connections within the social networks of the Scene, and “finding one’s place" (Chapter 4) within the BQW Scene required sustained contact—people had to see you on multiple occasions and in multiple kinds of spaces, before the opportunities for the purposeful creation of more intimate moments to engage outside of the

"party circuit" could occur.

The level of sustained contact that I maintained for the year and a half, in which I was embedded within the Scene, was atypical—I was at 2-3 events every week for nearly a year and a half. Not every event cost money, but many of them have indirect costs such as train fare, taxi fare, and money for gas; if I was going to a book club meeting, I had to purchase a book. This particular method—going to every event possible—would be an expensive way to meet friends.

Further, it required an investment of time and energy that not everyone has or is willing to make.

It is not a surprise then that people found other ways, such as social networking sites, to find

entre into the Scene. Still, for some of the women in my sample, they struggled with making connections even having gone to the events and meeting all the right people.

Example 2.3 – June, “Difficult to Connect”

01 You know, I still find it, even after being here for 30 years or whatever, 02 I still find it difficult to connect with the women of color community. 03 I think it has always been very elusive because it's so underground, or cliquish, 04 I shouldn't say the word underground 05 but certainly it's a network of women that do things in groups 06 but never really present on a public level. 07 Um, and so it's harder to get in that circle. 08 And I still find that challenging. 09 I consider it to be the issue, 10 probably the issue for me is that I am a little too out for most women of color. 11 So there's always that guilt by association 12 particularly for those that have jobs that don't allow them to live quite openly 13 or families that their concerned about or you know, whatever. 14 I've, it's always been harder. 15 Even when I was at Black Lesbian Support Group, 16 I always felt like there was this sort of space between me and the other women.

Several informants in both formal and informal interviews spoke about the “cliquishness” of the BQW’s Scene in D.C. They found it to be especially difficult to get in to the social networks of the Scene. Tomar, for example, said that she and her partner would go to the places, but for some reason, were never able to connect with any of the women in those spaces. As I have defined the Scene, it is as much a collection of constantly moving spaces, as it is a collection of social networks, but describing them as "cliques" implies that these networks are exclusive, and closed-off social circles6. Research into social networks has found that there are

6 "clique, n.". OED Online. September 2015. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com.proxyau.wrlc.org/view/Entry/34455?rskey=8ulkDg&result=1 (accessed November 09, 2015). 61

many reasons why one might be excluded from cliques and those reasons can be active or passive, intentional or unintentional forms of social ostracism. Further, there are personal and interpersonal reasons as well as contextual factors which might explain why an individual was unable to get connected to one of those social networks (Sias 2009). For some, it was the transient nature of the population that made it difficult to connect. Even though there were a lot of gay people here, Shannon would say, they are typically not here for very long. They did not, therefore, have the time to invest in developing or building community. Others thought it might be due to their own "awkwardness" or "nerdniness" which prevented them from meeting people who they were similar to and thus could feel a connection. Still others were not "party" types, and therefore parties, which were the most "visible" and easy to find forms of scene space, simply did not hold for them the same kind of attraction as they might for others. While there are and always have been spaces outside of the semi-public party circuit, as I have described of both mainstream and exclusive scene space, these spaces can sometimes be more difficult to access or be privy to.

Interestingly enough, June (Example 2.3) was a well-known figure in Scene. She helped to found the Black Lesbian Support Group, and had well-established links to both black queer women outside and inside the mainstream LGBT community. While her connection to the women in the BQW's Scene might have been tangential, after 30 years in D.C. it was clear that she knew some of the most well respected women in the Scene. Still, however, she was not alone in feeling outside the Scene even with a set of connections to the Scene. Several informants discussed how difficult it was to get in to more intimate, close-knit networks within the Scene.

And yet, even those who were not active in the Scene, tended to know individuals in the Scene. I would often joke once finding individuals that I had in common with individuals who seemed 62

like strangers, that "you're never more than one lesbian removed from someone on the Scene."

However, as the next chapter will demonstrate, just because a black same-sex desiring woman is in scene space, doesn’t mean that she’ll feel apart of the Scene.

What stood out in June's narrative was the fact that she imagined BQW's social life to take place only within networks that never had a "public" presence (2.3:05-06). On the hand she is correct. The scene spaces that BQW create are often not recognized as "public," because they are not connected to mainstream LGBT sources of visibility and power. The work that black queer women do to produce public and what I would call exclusive scene spaces tend not to

“count” because they may not be sanctioned or recognizable to those who are not BQW.

Additionally important is the fact that my informants described the club/party aspects of BQW

Scene as being places of celebration and fun, but these were not the places where true bonds of friendships were forged. Friendships were mostly made after the parties were over, or before they began. The club/party circuit aspect of the BQW Scene was, if anything, space where these variously positioned social networks of BQW met up, but they were hardly the places where one could expect to make new friends. The spaces women talked about as those that led to more lasting connections were things that took place in people’s homes such as book club meetings, social support groups, or small gatherings organized through Meetup.com. That said, these more intimate spaces are the least visible portions of the Scene, and largely go unrecognized outside of the Scene. Perhaps one of the most important things I learned about the BQW Scene was from an informant Amina who said, "There are many different 'scenes' in the Black Queer Scene in D.C."

There are multiple kinds of scene spaces in D.C. and there are multiple networks of black queers doing different things in and around D.C. Whether or not they gain recognition from the

mainstream or the LGBT mainstream, BQW have and will continue to create and maintain scene spaces that address their unique needs and desires.

7. Black Queer Lifeworlds

I would argue that needing to know where to find and connect with other black queers is not necessarily a function of secrecy, or the closeted nature of these individuals, but rather their careful cultivation of space. It speaks more closely to what Carlos Decena describes as “tacit subjectivity” (Decena 2008). Decena argues that there is a difference between refusing to talk candidly about one’s sexual practices and being silent about them (Decena 2008). Carlos

Decena, Marlon B. Ross, and others have questioned the use of the “the closet” as a means of understanding the unique relationship that people of color often have with their families and communities. Marlon B. Ross goes as far as suggesting that white queer theory is fixated “on the closet as the grounding principle for sexual experience, knowledge, and politics, and that this claustrophillic fixation effectively diminishes and disables the full engagement with potential insights from race theory and class analysis” (Ross 2005, 162). Certainly the lack of clarity about the forms black queer spaces take as a result of racism, sexism, and homophobia, is connected to the lack of attention to differing ways that black queer women experience public space.

Fiona Buckland in her ethnographic monograph Impossible Dance: Club Culture and

Queer World-Making about queer dance clubs in New York City, uses the of concept of "queer lifeworlds," borrowed from Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner (1998), to refer to the social environments created by queers. According to Berlant and Warner (1998) a lifeworld

"necessarily includes more people than can be identified, more spaces than can be mapped beyond a few reference points, modes of feeling that can be learned rather than experienced as a

birthright" (Berlant and Warner 1998, 558). The concept of lifeworld is a term that is not fraught with the trappings of "identity" or identificatory markers such as terms like “community.” For

Buckland, "a queer lifeworld is not only a stage outside of the body, but a state of consciousness and a way of deportment" (Buckland 2002, xxxv). Rather than a bound entity with ridged laws governing the behaviors of a homogenous group of subjects, queer lifeworlds are spaces of

"creative, expressive, and transformative possibilities" (Buckland 2002, xxxiii).

The BQW Scene in DC as I have described it is in many ways a kind of "queer lifeworld." The BQW Scene or Scenes are times/spaces of possibility. They include far more people, more cliques, more spaces than anyone could ever hope to identify. The BQW Scene(s) are the places where BQW’s culture is invented. They are fluid spaces in which people move in and out of, improvising as they pass through. BQW Scene is not necessarily a state of consciousness itself, though it might be said to produce certain kinds of sensations, deportments, and states of consciousness. Most importantly, the Black Queer Lifeworld includes “modes of experience that can be learned” (Berlant and Warner 1998, 558). Access to BQW’s scene spaces does not happen simply because one is black and queer and a woman; everyone in the BQW’s

Scene has found there way there and it often took connecting someone willing to help you “get in” and get comfortable (Example 2.2).

Buckland discusses the way she understands queers of color organizing spaces in response the organization of gay and lesbian clubs around whiteness and middle-classness. She describes queers of color in the 1980s and 1990s in New York:

[They] denned their own club spaces, away from fanfare or mainstream vehicles of publicity. News of these spaces spread by word of mouth; therefore, these spaces had underground cachet. This epithet held value in being outside of mainstream vehicles of publicity and the types of club populated by tourists to the city. (Buckland 2000, 133- 134, emphasis mine) 65

Buckland's observations of the scene in New York at first glance seems to have much in common with the way my informants described Washington, D.C. during the same time period.

Much and more has changed about the way the way BQW's spaces are organized. While word of mouth remains an important means of getting connected to a BQW's network which would lend you information to the BQW Scene, the Internet and social media platforms such as Twitter,

Instagram, and Facebook have made the texture and form of the spaces black queers make far more complicated than what the word "underground" is able to connote. The problem with relying on a notion of queer of color spaces as existing "underground," is that black queer’s do not enjoy "underground cachet.” Descriptions of their often times public and “visible” lives as

“underground,” necessarily devalues the culture that they produce. Further, the idea of black queers having "cachet" masks the fact that black queers have consistently been excluded from public white-dominated gay and lesbian social spaces, even as their cultural products have been appropriated. Black queers do not create spaces only in response to the racial and classed based exclusionary practices for the purposes of being further excluded in the mainstream. They create scene spaces that are simultaneously in/visible and un/spoken because while this is a function of their exclusion, it also supports unique ways of being and doing black queer sexuality. In other words, the BQW’s Scene in D.C. is public for those to whom it needs to be—those who are in it.

This posture, no doubt, as June points out, produces it's own set of exclusions among BQW, but it also fosters a strong set of bonds within it. Those outside of the Scene might imagine the BQW

Scene as illusive, underground, and shrouded in secret words and handshakes. However, this is because the Scene has been made to occupy marginal spaces such that the way it is organized is made to seem deviant and abnormal compared to the "hyper-visual" (potentially, obsessively scopic) normative LGBT scene. Therefore, BQW tend not to enjoy the benefits of larger social 66

and cultural recognition, further reproducing the sense that white-dominated gay and lesbian clubs are the primary means all gays and lesbians socialize.

8. Conclusion

How do queer communities of color stake out a territory beyond ghettos and enclaves and beyond demarcated moments such as Pride Days and ethnic celebrations? These questions haunt the struggles, rituals, and practices of African American, Latino, and Asian American queers as they engage with the travails of urban life today. (Manalansan 2005, 141)

Attempts to map the territories of queer communities of color, simply do not capture the breadth of what Manalansan calls the “struggles, rituals, and practices” of queers of color in their everyday movement throughout the urban terrain. It is my contention that the discursive practices that BQW engage in to construct the Scene and scene spaces provide a compelling point of departure in the exploration those struggles, rituals and practices. When I speak of BQW, I do not mean resent a homogenous group. On the contrary, I wish to evoke the heterogeneity implicit in the terms black and queer. BQW have different ethnicities, (non-normative) sexualities, and have different relationships to economic and cultural capital. Part of what I intend my analysis to demonstrate is just how much those differences affect their experiences of social space. Not every BQW is a part of the BQW Scene, but for those BQW who are “on the Scene,” the Scene becomes an important aspect of their everyday lives because it is in these spaces where BQW meet one another, create and share cultural knowledge, and share experiences based on their unique experiences of race, gender, sexuality and class.

CHAPTER 3

ON THE SCENE: THE TEXTURE OF BLACK QUEER WOMEN’S SCENE SPACES IN D.C.

1. Introduction

In the previous chapter I argued that BQW scene spaces are the sites where the BQW

Scene is instantiated, but the Scene cannot be reduced to scene spaces. The BQW’s Scene in

D.C. is an amorphous, loosely connected set of social networks of BQW and their allies, most readily identifiable at the parties and events produced for and by those social networks. There are different kinds of BQW scene spaces in D.C. including book club meetings, annual events, festivals, weekend get-aways, social support groups, women’s professional sporting events, house parties, happy hours, and private parties in commercial venues which take place in and around D.C.’s neighboring suburbs. Since scene spaces are bound by time, but in constant motion, scene space is an instantiation of a particular kind of moment, that needs to be constantly reproduced in order to take shape again. In the introductory chapter, I discussed lesbian spatial imaginaries and argued that each produces particular kinds spatial practices and expectations for the cultural texts that are in circulation. In this chapter, I zoom in, rendering "snapshots" of different temporal moments of BQW scene space in D.C. and consider the texture of each. What kinds of cultural artifacts: music, food, behaviors, and discourses shape BQW scene space in

D.C.? What are the discourses, objects, and "rules" which shape these spaces? How do they feel?

The first “snapshot” is a view from the general admissions line to get into a BQW scene space party that took place at a mega-club called Love Nightclub. I discuss the ways BQW access scene space amidst the ongoing processes of heterosexualization that occur on the street.

In the second "snapshot," I describe in some detail my experience at a yearly barbecue hosted by

BQW in the backyard of one of its organizers. I conclude with a short discussion about the purposeful slippage between the public and private, which characterizes the spatial practices of the Black Queer Lifeworld examining Sabrina's narrative of being in BQW's scene space for the first time. The texture of these scene spaces tells us about the strategies BQW employ to contend with various layers of social and cultural exclusions in American popular culture, black popular culture, and the urban landscape. To put it another way, the texture of BQW scene spaces is its fleshiness; the material effects of the multiple layers of exclusion that BQW face in the world and the reverberation of BQW's struggles with those exclusions. Texture is the effect and the affective made manifest in social space. By presenting these ethnographic “stills" of BQW scene space—waiting for it and being in it—I wish to provide a sense of exactly how BQW re-organize urban space to challenge overlapping systems of exclusion.

2. Waiting for Scene Space

I arrived to Love Nightclub, a mostly black, hip-hop mega-club, just before midnight with my partner and two of our friends, a couple. We noticed quickly that there were two lines leading inside. Initially it was difficult to tell where we should be and in fact, it wasn’t until I saw a familiar face, a woman who I knew organized BQW Scene parties, directing women to the “Ladies Takeover” line, that I was clear on which line we should be in. We were there for the “Ladies Takeover” event being hosted at Love Nightclub by several entertainment groups who hosted BQW parties in and around D.C. They'd combined resources to host one massive party at Love Nightclub. I was confused about the two lines, because I had assumed that they'd "taken over" the entire club. Instead, they'd taken over just one of floors of the massive club, which boasted three floors and a rooftop.

Quickly, what felt like a camaraderie, formed among those of us waiting in “Ladies Takeover” general admission line. It was cold and the lines were moving at a snails pace, even though there weren’t that many of us in line. We felt like we were being corralled, in order to make the club look better. The longer the lines, the more packed a club appeared. I had spent enough time waiting around in club lines to know that this was common practice, but my group and I agreed that this seemed an especially bad way to handle these lines on this particular night. My group and I were participating in light banter with the women around us mostly about our wait in line. Why did we have to wait

in the same line as those who had not yet purchased tickets? We'd purchased ours in advanced online. We were also annoyed because those who paid for VIP were being allowed in with no wait at all, which was fine, but our line wasn’t moving at all as a result. As we stood in line, chilly; huddled together, complaining, watching the line grow longer, I couldn’t help but notice that people, mostly women, who were there for the "straight" party, walked by making sly, sardonic commentary about those of us there for the Ladies Takeover party as they made their way toward the “straight line.”

During our nearly 30 minute wait, I noticed four women jump out of line, making a big fuss as they did. The two women in front leading the group to the “straight line” made it a point to call out their friend who had accidentally led them to the “wrong” line. “She bi[sexual], though. So she probably want to be in that line!” They all laughed, except for one of them who were paying particularly close attention to the ground, her shoes perhaps, or maybe her eyes were downcast in shame? Then several dudes in a noisy mid- sized car, two hanging out the windows of the rear and passenger’s side, rolled by at around 5 miles per hour, yelling “Dammmnnn!!” and other obscenities the entire length of the block. […] The girls and I had a really good time, after that first drink, we didn’t even talk about that shitty wait in line.

Excerpt from field journal: April 20, 2012

In the above excerpt from my field notes several issues are foregrounded about the circumstances under which BQW create, maintain, and access BQW scene space in D.C., however, I want to highlight one issue in particular. As previously discussed, semi-public scene spaces are the most visible forms of scene space. They are often "carved" out of places that are actively heterosexualized. The process of heterosexualization sometimes takes the form of blatant verbal assault against women who do not (or do) conform to heteronormative expectations. Drawing from the theory of performativity, much of the literature interested in how spaces become lesbian, gay, or straight, argue that space is performative and thus becomes as a result of repetition and regulation (Valentine 1993, 4). Cultural geographer Jon Binnie (1997) argues that spaces are "actively produced and (hetero)sexualized” (Binnie 1997, 223). However,

we should not overstate the ability for those lacking cultural and social power, those marked as sexual and racial dissidents—BQW—to challenge the heteronormative, masculinist order of space. When I suggested that the process of heterosexualization was actively taking place at

Love Nightclub, it was taking place even as BQW stood waiting for a "Ladies Take Over" party.

Therefore, BQW were working to make space for themselves over and against a powerful set of social and cultural forces. Their very presence was cutting in and disrupting the hegemonic orders of the space, however, these transgressions were not without consequence.

Behaviors such as women dancing together, flirting with one another, buying each other drinks, exchanging phone numbers, accidentally on purpose brushing their hand against another’s thigh—when performed by BQW outside of scene space can be met with hostility, contempt, or blatant disrespect. At parties where there were predominately heterosexual men and women, I have been fondled, I've had to watch my queer friends have their asses grabbed, and been called a "bitch" for not wanting a man's crotch thrust into my girl friends ass while we were dancing together. More importantly, it was in these spaces where I was reminded of the fact that

I had to follow the rules or be reminded of "my place" at the bottom of the hierarchy in heterosexualized space. So while technically protected against forms of discrimination in the form of de jure policies in the District of Columbia, those policies and laws were of little help when it came down to negotiating my personal space within the context of spaces being actively, aggressively heterosexualized such as the sidewalk or the nightclub. This is what makes scene space so important in the lives of BQW.

As I stood waiting to be permitted to enter into this particular scene space, I, along with all the women waiting there, were subject to intraracial street harassment, or verbal sexual harassment meant to "remind women of their vulnerability to violent assault in public and 71

semipublic spaces" (Fogg-Davis 2006, 57). While street harassment is not unique to black civic life, it is a pervasive black patriarchal practice used by black men to control black women. In a city that is predominately black, encountering street harassment is a common, everyday experience that is only exacerbated at night and in leisure spaces.

All black women must contend with the stereotype of promiscuous sexual deviance: the prostitute, the Jezebel, the wet nurse. Black feminists widely acknowledge this stereotype, but most fail to notice its profound heterosexism. Black women, like animals, “are promiscuous because they lack intellect, culture, and civilization. Animals do not have erotic lives; they merely ‘fuck’ and reproduce” (Collins, 2004, 100). Black lesbian identity may include parenting, but it also asserts an erotic life not tied to “breeding.” black communities vilify black lesbians for their sexual rejection of black men, while the larger U.S. society deems them irrelevant and ungrievable. (Fogg-Davis, 2006, 64)

Fogg-Davis (2006) argues rather poignantly that there is a persistent social devaluing of black lesbian life in American public culture, in the black sexual and cultural politics, and in black feminisms. Fogg-Davis analyzes responses to the 2003 murder of 15 year-old Sakia Gunn who was fatally stabbed in the chest by Richard McCullough after she and four friends told him they were lesbians and turned down the sexual propositions made by him and another man.

Street harassment, Fogg-Davis argues, is not simply a reminder of heteromasculinity's dominance of public space, it is a threat of violence if women do not stay in "in their place." This threat is complicated for black lesbians due to their being characterized as "betraying" black men and "the race" (Fogg-Davis 2006). I encountered street harassment during almost every one of my trips to scene spaces in D.C. The character of the harassment depended on my attire and perceived sexual identity, but was a steady, certain aspect of going out. Men on public transit propositioned me for sex. I was kicked out of a taxi at 3 a.m. after the cab driver didn't like my explanation to his question as to why I was wearing a tie. And I had my arm grabbed by a man on my way home from a black queer dance party on U Street, a popular center for urban nightlife, in the

presence of cops who looked only mildly interested when I cursed him and his friends out as they pulled him away. Black lesbians' perceived sexual rejection of black men positions them as not only sexual dissidents, but also racial dissidents who refuse to play by the rules of black sexual politics and black civic life.

At Love Nightclub, where the two lines indicated that there were two different kinds of patrons, two different kinds of parties, the presence of BQW served to temporarily expose the heterosexualized boarders of the club, and this was met with a posture of intimidation on the part of black men and women. The bisexual friend of the group of women who ended up in the wrong line was publicly humiliated for her perceived preference for other black women. And many

(though certainly not all) of the men on their way to the "straight line" certainly did not spare the black lesbians their attentions or suggestive comments. And yet we stood in line and waited to get into a party whose hosts had implicitly promised us respite from these forms of verbal assault, a space that was based on a different set of rules of behavior. Even if only for a few hours and only one floor, as the name of event "Ladies Takeover" suggested, there was an intention to disrupt the heteronormativity of the club and to recast BQW as in control.

In "Homophobia as Moral Geography," Leap (2011) found that when his informants would tell narratives of homophobia experienced in the urban landscape, they would employ linguistic maneuvers that positioned them as the heroes of their story. For Leap, these stories were anomalous and outside of the norm of the way most narratives of homophobic violence were told. However, throughout my fieldwork, I witnessed these kinds of stories as quite common among BQW who continually found creative ways to make statements about their place in D.C. in the face of homophobic violence. One of my informants, Timi tells of her experience

at one of her favorite happy hours during the early 2000s that was hosted by another informant,

Jay.

Example 3.1: Timi, “The Straights are Coming”

01 But the crazy thing about the Datalist party is that we would get kicked out 02 for the straight blacks to come in. 03 So it was always that interesting interaction. 04 We would go from 6 to 11 and at 11 it was like, 05 “lights on, get out, cause the straights are coming.” 06
07 of the black lesbians coming out and the straight blacks, 08 women and men, coming in 09 was always just 10 awkward and tense. 11 And you would hear 12 it was just an interesting dynamic going on there. 13 But Datalist was wonderful for what it was.

Timi uses the word “interesting” to describe what she calls the “interaction” (3.1:04) between Black lesbians and Black straight men and women and a “dynamic” (3.1:10) of being subjected to “rude fucking comments.” This was the “crazy” thing about Datalist she says, being

“kicked out” of the venue so that the straights could come in. This metaphor, “kicked out,” is powerful in that it signals a kind of violent removal of black lesbians from a space normatively and normally coded as heterosexual. “Crazy” is an appraisal of Datalist, the scene space, and does not have a clear negative or positive affective marking. It’s somewhat neutral. But the interaction and dynamic between black lesbians coming out and black straight women and men coming in, is experienced as a negative affectation, as “awkward and tense” (3.1:09).

Additionally we get a sense that the “rude fucking comments” (3.1:10) are the triggers for what we might expect to be feelings of unease at the end. However, in the coda of this narrative, Timi says, “But Datalist was wonderful for what it was” (3.1:13). This evaluation of the scene space

speaks to her as a survivor—who in spite of intentions to make her and other BQW feel unwelcomed—she still manages to find the scene space “wonderful for what it was.” It’s not perfect, but it’ll do. In spite of these homophobic experiences Timi still found a way to enjoy the experience of BQW scene space. There is a resilience to BQW on the Scene that despite homophobic experiences, despite street harassment, despite the "rude fucking comments," that they are able to squeeze every bit of enjoyment they can out of being with other BQW.

Normally, we’d read “what it was” as this extremely homophobic exchange: getting kicked out abruptly for the straights to come in, but for Timi, Datalist “was wonderful.” In spite of experiencing homophobia, Timi still found a way to enjoy the experience of scene space and so did we.

While the line at the mega-club Love might have been hostile, the party itself was great.

Good music, strong drinks and a good atmosphere. Strategically placed security at Love ensured that people could not move between floors, and so the blatant heterosexism was contained. A year and a half later in 2014, the group of promoters who had taken over Love, "took over" the historic Howard Theater and hosted one of the largest BQW parties in a decade with at least

1200+ in attendance. It was also the Theater's first time hosting an entirely BQW's party. BQW continue to negotiate with power in ways that would allow them to carve out space for themselves in the face of intimidation and the hostile climate of the urban landscape. But resilience served as an important discursive resource and set of affective resources for BQW who were a part of BQW Scene in D.C. allowing them to continue, in spite of, to carve out space for one another.

3. Being in Scene Space

If black Pride weekend is the "family reunion," then the Brown Sugar Bash feels the family barbeque. It's a women's event so the majority of the individuals there identify as black same-sex desiring women, though black transmen are sometimes in attendance as well. For the past two years, BSB has taken place in the generous backyard of one of its organizer's home in a majority black neighborhood in Northeast Washington near Catholic University. The train tracks are located a stone's throw away so as I walk down the street toward the house, I hear the music first and then the rustle of the train tracks just underneath the baseline. It’s a Luther Vandross song, “Never too much.” A car pulls up next to me, "Hey, you know where the picnic is?" "Yeah, it's down there on the corner," I say pointing. "Ok, thank you!"

The closer I get, the stronger the smell of BBQ. As I round the corner, I notice three women across the street moving in the same direction, lawn chairs and coolers in tow. We exchange nods and smiles. As I pass by one of the row houses, I see an older black woman sitting on the stoop in a folding chair. "Ya'll have fun and be safe!" she says to me. "Thank you!" I say back to her a smile on my face.

And then I'm at the gate, waiting for my wristband. While I wait, the laughter of other women join the rustling of the train, and the smell of the chemical toilets lightly mingles with the smell of the charcoal smoke. I'm excited. I've paid for my ticket in advance and so one of the women at the fence with a headset and a lanyard that reads "Staff" places a wristband on my left wrist and instructs me about the rules for alcohol. Coolers are to be lined up against the back fence. If you want to purchase beer or wine, you can buy drink tickets with the woman standing "over there" underneath a table shaded with an umbrella. I brought my cooler, so after grabbing a beer, I stored it near the others. None of them had names on them, but everyone’s cooler looked different enough, so it was fine. I found a spot near the back, farthest away from the stage, but closest to the food that was set up buffet style underneath a generously sized shed. I propped my lawn chair up and saved enough room for my wife who joined me about half an hour later.

We drank our Mike's Hard Lemonade. We partook in the BBQ, catered by a local BBQ joint. But what we really came to do was chill; catch up with friends we see only once a year at Brown Sugar Bash, and people watch. Beautiful women, average women. Dark- skinned women, light-skinned women. Tall, short, round and skinny. Masculine of center and high femme. Long hair and short. Hats and fans, sweat, perfume, and cologne. Mostly women in groups of three or more. A few people didn’t bring lawn chairs or blankets. New. People were sharing blankets and rotating between lawn chairs. Lots of flirting. Lots of plates of BBQ and cans of beer. Pitchers of sangria and bottles of water. The mood is relaxed, mostly. But some folks are clearly on the prowl. It’s Black Pride.

There’s the usual air of sexual tension, people checking each other out and discussing in hushed tones who is with whom, and who broke up with whom, and who is “back on the scene,” because they’re newly single. I run into several people that I know and we exchange pleasantries. One woman who I met out at the Zoom Excursions bowling night last year and told about the BSB was there with a friend. It was nice to see her and I was happy to have introduced BSB to her. There's a woman who I went to college with who I was avoiding like the plague. She freaked out on me after I told her I wasn't interested in her after she confessed her love for me, and always greets me as if it never happened which makes me feel weird and I am convinced that she knows it. Women I don’t know well, but see at least once a year, usually at BSB, greet me with open arms. I see a long time friend who was there to "show their face," but who was trying to avoid seeing and talking to their recently ex- ex-girl. I even saw an informant who was volunteering. […] About an hour or two in, at the zenith, a Santeria priestess pours out libations to the orishas and the ancestors. The live entertainment would begin soon.

Excerpt from field journal: May 25, 2013

The Brown Sugar Bash (BSB) is a home-style picnic that takes place on the Saturday of black Pride Celebration in D.C. It features live entertainment by BQW artists and crafts by local

BQW artisans. It is hosted at the private residence of one of its organizers. Tickets are between

$25 and $30 and for that price, one gets to spend the daytime hours of the Saturday of black

Pride relaxing, eating catered BBQ on a blanket or lawn chair with friends, old and new. The

BSB, like many events during black Pride are annual events attended primarily by local BQW. I have attended the BSB since 2011 and it usually takes place within walking distance from my home. The weekend is already filled with a sense of anticipation, of tradition, and camaraderie, but the BSB is unique. Tailored to a middle-aged crowd, the music ranging from 1970s soul and funk to early 2000s neo-soul, the majority of the women there are 30 something and up and have lived in D.C. long enough to have been to more than one BSB.

While black communities are often depicted as somehow more homophobic than others,

D.C.’s particular circumstances give pause to such an assertions. D.C. was home to the world’s first black Pride Celebration, which took, place in 1991 in Banneker Park in Southwest D.C., in 77

the heart a predominately black neighborhood where many of the participants lived. Unlike white

Pride celebrations that include the spectacle of the parade that travels through the city’s “gay village,” most Black Pride Celebrations do not include parades. The first Black Pride celebration did, however, take place in the “open-air” in a black neighborhood. In 1991, at the height of the

AIDS crisis for black gay communities, organizing a black gay pride celebration in the middle of a black neighborhood was a radical act, as it would have violated the unspoken code of keeping one’s “business out of the street”. The very public act of Black Pride being held in Banneker

Park is interesting to consider when many contemporary festivals and expos of Black Pride in

Atlanta, Philadelphia and D.C., for example, all take place inside the walls of large hotels and convention centers. This is not to argue that because Black Pride Celebrations take place inside they are not “radical,” but to suggest that the relationship that black people have to public-private is more complex than many queer theorists and lesbian and gay historians have addressed

(Thorpe 1996). Bolton, one of Leap’s black informants, gestures to the possibility of this different use of space by black queers when he says,

The BSB is different than what Bolton experiences, however. Or perhaps it demonstrates the changing nature of what constitutes “business” in black communities. The BSB takes place in the context of a mixed income neighborhood that is quickly becoming more racially diverse as gentrification in D.C. accelerates. When asked, the organizer whose home is where the BSB is hosted, says she has always tells her neighbors about BSB and they have always been very supportive. As my short but sweet encounter with the older black woman at the house next door,

suggests, there is a much more complicated process of integration of black queers in black communities. Though she spoke to me as if I were the representative of all of "us," she also recognized the shared experiences that BQW face in the urban landscape. "Have fun" she said,

"and be safe." The "be safe" was not a call for us to "act right" and "play by the rules" of dominant, hegemonic space by avoiding detection. Instead, it was a wish that me and everyone else would "be well" in "public" contexts where others may not be as kind. It also demonstrates that BQW scene space is not "underground," or secretive in some way. It is not a "closeted."

Returning to Thorpe's (1996) discussion of Ruth Ellis' home, which was “private” only in the sense that the deed was in her name, it was public to those who knew where to look. This seems to echo throughout many forms of scene space. For black queers, there seems to be definite slippage between the private and the public. However, because BQW scene spaces tend to exist outside of white, mainstream LGBT spaces, they often do not gain the same kinds of recognition that mainstream, white spaces do in popular media. Further, scene space producers must be both creative and flexible in their uses of the urban landscape, well aware of the continued social, cultural, and political devaluation BQW. The slippage between the public and private produces particular kinds of paradoxes within BQW scene spaces and outside of the BQW Scene. BQW scene spaces are at once private, occurring in spaces where you have to know someone who knows about them to gain access to them. Many BQW scene spaces are often public, but few outside of the Scene know about them. BQW’s scene spaces tend to take place in venues that are heterosexualized and must be actively reshaped to make space for BQW to feel safe and comfortable. Each of these speaks precisely to the BQW Scene in D.C. typifying what Michael

Warner would call a counterpublic.

Warner argues that a counterpublic is “constituted through a conflictual relationship to the dominant public… [and] maintains at some level, conscious or not, an awareness of its subordinate status” (Warner 2002, 424). Scene spaces are the places where we can see BQW become a public based on their conflictual relationship with the dominant public. Further, scene spaces reveal precisely the ways that BQW maintain the conscious awareness that their space- making practices are situated in opposition to hegemonic forms of power, which often seek to both silence and erase them. The social lives of African American same-sex desiring women have been effaced in much of the literature about LGBT life. The truth is, if you're not a black lesbian you may have a very hard time finding and accessing the spaces where all the black lesbians are. But this is intentional, and at the same time, that does not mean BQW are "hiding."

On the contrary, as the Brown Sugar Bash demonstrates, black lesbians make quite a bit of noise, but their forms of creating and maintaining space have adapted to resist the racism, sexism, and homophobia of their communities and the urban landscape such that they become visible only in ways that suit them. In the example below, my informant Sabrina tells me about her first time in

BQW scene space; the first time that she decided to be visible as a black lesbian in scene space.

Sabrina is a native Washingtonian. Both of her parents had migrated to D.C. From the south, her father from Georgia and her mother from North Carolina. Her parents moved the family out to

Maryland in the mid 1980s, but they maintained their membership with a church in D.C. At the time of our interview in 2013, she was 42 years old and worked in the healthcare industry. When

I asked Sabrina to tell me about her first time in a BQW scene space, she shared an episodic narrative that begins with her gay male cousin asking her to go out with him, and ends with her seeing several people that she knew in a BQW scene space.

Example 3.2 - Sabrina, "It was a reunion."

01 So I go, this is going to trip you out, 02 so I get into Ziegfeld’s when I get to the door, 03 the first person I see is my best friend growing up in church my whole life, 04 her Aunt, who I know was gay. Aunt Tanya. 05 NL: You were like 06 S: No and the first thing she said, "Fuck are you doin' here?" @@ 07 I mean I knew she was gay I mean [I was in shocked to see her] 08 NL: [[Was she older than you?]] 09 S: Yeah she's a lot older. She's her oldest aunt, 10 so Aunt Tanya is probably about 10 or 12 years older than us. 11 She might be 52 or 53, and I'm 42. 12 An=d I was like, you know, really, I'm here-- We're-- 13 Right, I mean it's kinda. [You know] 14 NL: [["You here too?"]] 15 S: Yeah, it's like, I mean, we're experiencing the same thing. 16 And we laughed. And she was like, "Mmmm hmmm," 17 and she just all night, 18 every time she saw me she just kept saying, 19 "mmm mmm mmm, what are you-- like, 20 of al=l people, are doing here?" 21 And so I proceed, and this is, 22 I am not fabricating this story, ok. 23 From this point on, I'm really, I swear-- 24 I mean I haven't been, but I really am not 25 because people don't believe me when I say this part. 26 I walk in and I see.. 27 3 best friends from high school. […] 31 Yes. I go further. I see Michaela. Her girlfriend. 32 I'm in- Now I'm in utter shock. [Like I'm falling out] 33 NL: [[Now you see two more people that you know]] 34 S: [yes, yes] 35 Right so all in all within 10 minutes of the club 36 I'm- I'm seeing people that one, 37 I haven't seen in forever, two, find out they're gay 38 and have been partying with the gay kids 39 and are gay or something…. 40
41 I feel like I walked into my real life. 42 I did. 43 And all though we didn't stay connected 44 it was quite the introduction to my world of today. […] 81

49 And so it was a re-^union.

The story reads as “unbelievable” because it doesn’t read as a story of someone who is new to the Scene. Instead, it reads as a story of a regular night on the town where one sees all the familiar faces that they often see. If intimacy as Berlant describes “involves an aspiration for a narrative about something shared, a story about both oneself and others that will turn out in a particular way,” then Sabrina’s story of her first time in a BQW space is a story of intimacy. The story’s coda is perhaps the most interesting, “And although we didn’t stay connected/it was quite the introduction to my world of today/And so it was a reunion" (3.2:43-44,49).

Sabrina frames her first time in BQW scene space as a reunion. Reunions, be they familial or not, are moments where individuals who have been disconnected or separated by time and space, are able to experience again a feeling of kinship. She saw women that she'd known for years, but who she did not know were "in the life." In the retelling of this narrative as one based on kinship, Sabrina offers a story not of the first time she was in a space where there were majority black queer women, but a story of the time where she is reoriented toward women she’d always known and who had always been queer, but she didn’t know because she was not attuned to that part of herself. She’d “missed” the fact that they were lesbians because she had not yet oriented toward lesbianism as a possibility for herself.

David L. Eng defines feelings of kinship as the confluence of “collective, communal, and consensual affiliations as well as […] psychic, affective, and visceral bonds” (Eng 2010, 2).

BQW scene space is an instantiation of a particular moment, where the emotional, close-knit relationship between black queer women's bodies is central to the texture of that space. In her work with sex workers and those who perform sexual labor, Bernstein discusses this in terms of

"bounded authenticity" where what is on sale is "authentic emotional and physical connection" in 82

a capitalist milieu which is "perceived to have rendered more and more quarters of social life

'artificial'"(Bernstein 2007, 103). Most of the "visible" and public kinds of BQW scene space in

D.C. are produced for profit. What is on sale, is not just a fun party. Again, most of the women in my sample did not express any restrictions on their ability to move about the city. What BQW are willing to pay for, is access to a setting where they can experience an authentic sense of connection to women like themselves. Much of the texture of scene space is based on the assurance that a set of affectations closely related to feelings of kinship could be reproduced in a setting. This did not always happen. Not everyone left having felt that they made authentic, lasting connections or bonds. This is the very nature of intimacy according to Lauren Berlant.

Intimacy […] involves an aspiration for a narrative about something shared, a story about both oneself and others that will turn out in a particular way. Usually, this story is set within zones of familiarity and comfort... Yet the inwardness of the intimate is met by a corresponding publicness. People consent to trust their desire for "a life" to institutions of intimacy; and it is hoped that the relations formed within those frames will turn out beautifully, lasting over the long duration, perhaps across generations. (Berlant 1998, 281)

Intimacy is a private, albeit dialogic, process of making something shared, but it has a distinctly public nature to it. Berlant suggests that people find “a life” in institutions of intimacy.

I would borrow that concept and stretch it to suggest that the BQW’s Scene as I’ve described it exists as a kind of institution of intimacy, where BQW have an opportunity to find their queer life. Black queer women look to form lasting friendships, partnerships, and familial bonds. On the one hand this fact can be read in an anti-utopian, skeptical sense: scene spaces traffic in a set of well-cultivated fantasies of all black same-sex desiring women belonging to an imagined community as a replacement for and “an alleviation of what is hard to manage in the lived real— social antagonisms, exploitation, compromised intimacies, the attrition of life” (Berlant 2008, 5).

But on the other hand, that scene space allows for authentic, though temporary, emotional 83

connections within a counter public of similarly situated bodies, black queer women, makes some women, like Elliot (Example 2.1) and Sabrina (Example 3.2) feel okay with being, living, and moving around in D.C. That scene spaces, even temporarily, could alleviate that which was hard to manage in one’s quotidian, everyday existence, is why many of informants felt that in

D.C. they had found their "tribe."

4. Conclusion

As this chapter has shown, the unique composition of BQW scene space revealed (1) material effects of social and cultural exclusion; (2) the creativity of BQW to make spaces that produced particular sensations; and (3) the interrelationships between place, subject, object, and discourse. I arrived at the concept of texture at a point during my fieldwork where I would come to understand that scene spaces always produced particular kinds of sensations. The producers of scene space discussed the kinds of experiences that they wanted their guests to feel and the lengths that they would go to ensure that it could be achieved. Similarly, women who spent time in scene space often talked about the way spaces made them feel; about the way DJs, a club’s décor, the music, drinks, the price of drinks, and conversations with other women would affect them. It became clear that texture was a fundamental aspect of BQW scene-making practices.

As I talked to women formally and informally about the Scene and scene spaces, I became interested in the composition of scene space wanting to understand the specific objects, discourses, and practices which signaled that I had arrived or had just left. In other words, since scene spaces could occur anywhere, what were the unifying or organizing principles that were required in order for a space to become a scene space? In part, I argue, it was a set of sensations produced by the configuration of objects, individuals and discourses which circulated within that

space. If scene space in part required knowing “who and what” to look for (Chapter 2), then the texture was the “who and what” which needed to be found in order to identify a place as a scene space. It’s how walking into a crowded rooftop bar downtown, I knew where to look for the scene space.

This is where Henri Lefebvr’s theorizing about the repetition needed for space to exist is instructive. He argues that social space is primarily a constantly repeated configuration of objects, individuals, and discourse. In the context of D.C.’s BQW’s Scene, the continual reproduction of a particular set of actions—women dancing together, flirting with one another, buying each other drinks, exchanging phone numbers, talking about the quality of the DJ, the price of the drinks, accidentally on purpose brushing their hand against another’s thigh—were only one part of what helped to produce scene space. Required also were discursive practices that were based on an assumed familiarity such as the conversation that my informant Elliot had with the woman she’d met online about finding scene space in D.C. (Example 2.1), or the women who shared things with me in the context of scene space like sensitive medical diagnoses, struggles with their families, or past abuses. These discursive practices were as important in producing scene space as two women kissing. Lastly, producers of scene space had to purposely mark the boundaries of scene space. While arguably the liminal spaces (such as the admissions lines) were a part of the experience of scene space, it was passing through the line and into spaces where the boundary between the sexist, heterosexist, and -phobic normative scripts of everyday life which served as the clear marker that you had arrived. This boundary was less clear when scene spaces occurred in public spaces, but was crystal clear when producers of scene space constructed semi- public and exclusive scene spaces.

In Chapter 4 and Chapter 5, I discuss the ways scene spaces affected women, revealed a great deal about their subject positions. In this chapter, I have sought to provide a closer examination of what it is like to look for, find, wait for, and be in scene space in Washington,

D.C. I argue that the texture of a scene space, that is its composition, its rules for behavior, its discourses, and the sensations it produces, tell us about the way BQW contend with social and cultural exclusions. While the composition of BQW scene spaces varies, what remains consistent is that they rely on a shared sense of the importance of BQW sharing space and willfully “taking over” space wherever possible.

CHAPTER 4

FINDING YOUR PLACE ON THE SCENE: INTERSECTIONALITY, BELONGING, AND

BLACK QUEER WOMEN’S SCENE SPACE IN WASHINGTON, D.C.

1. Introduction

What does it mean for BQW to find space for themselves in the neoliberal city of

Washington, D.C.? What strategies have they employed to negotiate their sense of belonging within and outside of the black and queer communities that have excluded them or only partially included them? In Chapter 2, I suggested that one of the most interesting features of BQW's scene space in D.C. is that it is an example of black women making space for themselves discursively and materially despite their physical and ideological exclusion from the neoliberal urban landscape. Like black queers of the past century, I argued that BQW have organized a set of counterpublic spaces in D.C., which offer intimacy, safety, and possibilities for the enactment of discourses not available to them elsewhere. I described some of the tactics BQW have put into practice and described some of the challenges that persist. In this chapter, I build on those insights to address the ways BQW make sense of their exclusion and (partial, conditional) inclusion within the global city of Washington, D.C. I begin by discussing the relationship between the city's landscape and neoliberalism. I then move into an analysis of BQW in D.C. experience their raced, gendered, sexualized, and classed subjectivities in particular kinds of social space. The narratives I read here are examples of BQW negotiating their “place” in D.C. amidst the cultural politics and post-Fordist policies of neoliberalism. As BQW describe their sense of feeling in/out of place in the urban landscape, each informant does their race, gender, sexuality, and class in different ways foregrounding particular aspects of themselves in the

process. I suggest that in foregrounding particular aspects of their identities in favor of others, they expose the dominant spatial orders that define social space. Valentine argues “when individual identities are ‘done’ differently in particular temporal moments they rub up against, and so expose […] dominant spatial borderings that define who is in place/out of place, who belongs and who does not” (Valentine 2007, 19). In analyzing the feelings of in/out of place, we come to understand when, where, and how race, gender, sexuality, and class become salient in the everyday lives of BQW.

2. Race, Sexuality, and Neoliberalism

The condition of Modernity, often described as the cultural project of capitalism—or neoliberalism—refers to the complex changes occurring globally within political economies as a result of the hegemonic spread of capitalism (Duggan 2004, Harvey 2007, Hodgson 2001).

These changes facilitate the flow of capital upward and Westward all while promising

“happiness,” “freedom,” and “choice” for those who tend to benefit the least from the expansion of capitalism (Ahmed 2010, Berlant 2011, Duggan 2004). The underlying assumption legitimizing neoliberalism’s promises is IT IS YOUR RIGHT TO BUY WHATEVER YOU WANT. This assumption warps citizens into consumers, rights into products, and makes the city, the ultimate cosmopolitan marketplace. However it is important to note that neoliberalism does not operate in every context and on every body in the same way.

John D'Emilio (1983) famously argues that gay and lesbian identities are the result of the expansion of capitalism. The loosening of family bonds, the anonymity offered by the urban landscape, and the ability for some gay men and lesbians to organize their lives around their affective (erotic/emotional) connections to other gay men and lesbians. D'Emilio (1983) and

Faderman (1991) who offers a historiography of (white) lesbians in the 20th century both white- wash the emergence of gay and lesbian identities in America; their insistence on pivoting their histories around the experiences of white gays and lesbians results in erasing the experiences of gays and lesbians of color who did not, at the turn of the century, experience the same kinds of

“freedoms” as a result of the expansion of capitalism. Ultimately, both analyses fail in taking into account the specificity of the people of color’s experiences of the modernizing project.

In my ethnographic research with BQW, I have found that middle-class black queer women are rarely limited in their movement in and around the city. This is, at least in part, because D.C. is what Jason Hackworth (2007) describes as a neoliberal city. The neoliberal city, as Hackworth (2007) argues, is a city which is governed according to “an ideological rejection of egalitarian liberalism in general and the Keynesian welfare state in particular, combined with a selective return to classical liberalism” which holds that the government’s sole purpose is to protect “free exchange” (Hackworth 2007, 9). Therefore, the city protects the “free-movement” of BQW as it would any other consumer-citizen. The neoliberal city makes room for the “pink dollar,” because “consumption is now central to how citizenship is defined” (Binnie 2004, 167).

The city has purposefully employed a “public discourse [which constructs] homophobia as a form of deviance from liberal tolerance” (Binnie 2004, 171), thus positioning itself as

“accepting” for the upwardly mobile, professional straight person and upwardly mobile, professional gay/lesbian person.

As Lisa Duggan points out, neoliberalism has meant an increased acceptance of “the most assimilated, gender-appropriate, political mainstream portions of the gay population,” though this “acceptance” does not necessarily mean that governments (and corporations) have moved toward substantive equality (Duggan 2004, 44). The racial politics of neoliberalism are similar, 89

though not quite the same as its sexual ones. Under the rubric of neoliberalism, race is structurally unimportant. In this post-civil rights era and following the election of Barack

Obama, race—particularly, Blackness—has been proven to be inconsequential to ones success as long as said black persons are willing and able to perform according to the “normal” dictates of

(white) society. So while people of color, gays, and lesbians de jure have in many cases the same rights to buy “whatever” they want, what becomes increasingly clear is that they can’t always buy wherever they want. Lawful and unlawful discriminatory racial segregation and homophobia still exist in most states and becomes a part of the de facto “law of the land” within some public and private institutions and establishments. Similarly, outright and overt forms of racism in business practices are treated, at least discursively, as passé (Spence 2012). This does not mean that racism and homophobia are non-existent within the city. The “real life” effects of neoliberalism and the ways that states and individuals negotiate within its purview must be grappled with.

In Washington, D.C. one of the most glaring instances of neoliberalism in its concretized, urban form is the rapid gentrification taking place throughout the city. Hackworth (2007) calls inner-city places ripe for the implementation of neoliberal ideals “soft spots." Softened by nearly

30 years of urban neglect following the riots of 1968, the entire city of D.C. was a soft-spot: neglected neighborhoods, warehouses and abandoned buildings, and lots of tracts eligible for gentrification. Since 2000, more than half of the city’s eligible gentrifying tracts, or areas with median incomes less than 40% of the metropolitan areas median, have in fact gentrified.7 This is

7 Statistics from a 2015 Governing report by Mike Maciag titled Gentrification in America Report. http://www.governing.com/gov-data/gentrification-in-cities-governing- report.html (last accessed 29 June 2015). 90

in contrast to the decade prior, between 1990-2000 where less than 5% of the city’s eligible tracts gentrified. Nearly half of the lower income neighborhoods in D.C. becoming gentrified has indeed lead to the beautification of downtown and popular neighborhoods, more dog parks and bike lanes, and more racial diversity overall, however, accompanying these shifts: one the greatest racial income disparities in the country ($64,000 for black residents and $108,000 for white residents).8 During the past decade, many upper- and middle-class black individuals and families moved to Maryland's Prince George's County. Paired with high incoming whites, the city that was once "Chocolate City" and 70% black, is now just under 50% for the first time in almost 50 years.

Natalie Hopkinson’s ethnography about the “life and death” of the black youth cultural form go-go music provides some clues as to some of the changes taking place in D.C. She cites the election of mayor Adrian Fenty as one of the turning points in the city and describes the disillusionment and suspicions many working-class and middle-class black voters had with

Fenty. Fenty ushered in a “renaissance,” but only for some.

Under his watch the renaissance of the city raced ahead, with doggy parks, renovated schools and recreation centers, and sparkling new libraries. But Fenty seemed to relish any opportunity to defy establishment elders as he made an aggressive show of remaking D.C. into what he called a “world-class city.” In a city that often communicated via subtext, many wondered if by “world-class” the mayor meant the opposite of “Chocolate” (Hopkinson 2012, 4)

Fenty’s policies laid the groundwork for much of the gentrification taking place in D.C.

In order to transform the District into the "world-class" city he envisioned, Fenty used

8 Harris, Hamil R. “Annual State of Black America report shows troubling disparities persist” Washington Post, March 19, 2015.

controversial no-bid contracts9 and sold government property including public buildings10 for redevelopment. Fenty applied the grease, but the District had been in crisis for nearly a decade from the AIDS/HIV epidemic, the War on Drugs, and the mass incarceration of thousands of people in D.C. For many people, the city was hostile and dangerous and in need of serious renewal (Hopkinson 2012, Lornell and Stephenson 2009, Prince 2014). Cities use a number of policies to attract capital including taking on the risk and cost of land development (Weber 2002,

520). Under Fenty, the District headed toward the direction of "urban renewal," which was not at all what residents complained about (Prince 2014). On the contrary, for the black residents who had "braved it" through the city's roughest times, what they wanted was to reap the benefits of capital in the city. Instead, they were simply removed—priced out, rezoned, or redeveloped

(Prince 2014).

There had been redevelopment projects taking place in the city since the early 2000s well before Fenty, and the redevelopment project that had the biggest impact on BQW Scene in D.C. was the building of Major League Baseball team the Washington Nationals' baseball stadium.11

At the site of the Nationals Stadium was a cluster of gay bars and clubs that were popular among women in my sample from the late 1980s well into the early 2000s when the Nationals’ Stadium prompted their demolition. These clubs, including Wet and Edge (56 L Street, SE, Est. 1991,

9 Stewart, Nikita. 2009. “D.C. Council questions park project it didn’t approve.” The Washington Post, October 23, 2009. Accessed August 12, 2014.

10 Stewart, Nikita and David Nakamura. 2007. “Deputy Mayor’s Objectivity Challenged.” The Washington Post, September 27, 2007. Accessed August 12, 2014.

11 Nakamura, David and Thomas Heath. 2004. “Amended Deal on Stadium Approved.” The Washington Post, December 22, 2004. Accessed August 12, 2014.

closed in 2006), and Tracks (1111 First Street SE, Est. 1984, closed in 1999) were all sited as spaces regularly frequented by women in my sample.12

I want to consider both the cultural and spatial dimensions of neoliberalism because I believe both speak to neoliberalism's effect on individuals' construction of their gendered subjectivities (Leap 2003). The modern city, a cosmopolitan marketplace—offers a range of options, but previous studies of D.C.’s sexual and moral geography have shown, those options remain limited for racial and sexual minorities (Carnes 2009, Edelman 2012, Leap 2009, 2011).

Considering how BQW’s particular experience of race, gender, and sexuality is mediated by neoliberalism allows us to center on the way these women creatively and actively engage neoliberalism, producing new ways of “being modern […] within shifting structural (such as historical, political, economic, and social) constraints and opportunities” (Hodgson 2001, 7). I suggest here that it is through language we can see these women creatively and actively produce their racialized and gendered modern subjectivities. In so doing, they calibrate their sense of belonging within the “local uncertainties of [racialized] gendered late modernity” (Leap 2003,

417).

3. Affect, Orientation, and Intersectional Analyses of Spatial Formations

Sara Ahmed (2006) has been particularly instructive in thinking about the ways that subjects “orient” toward familiar objects within social spaces, or how they come to understand where they are and where they should be. According to Ahmed, “the starting point for orientation is the point from which the world unfolds: the here of the body and the where of its

12 Leap (2009) provides a more robust discussion of the cluster of gay clubs in the spatial imagination of gay men in D.C.

dwelling” (Ahmed 2006, 8). For Ahmed, an individual first has to acknowledge the temporal and spatial aspects of their being. In the examples that I analyze below, individuals first make sense of their race, gender, sexuality, and class, and then orient toward those individuals and objects that are familiar. One way of ascertaining how subjects orient is through their linguistic practices of taking a stance. Taking a stance, we learn from John Du Bois, is a means by which individuals position themselves in relation to others (Du Bois 2007, 163). Du Bois describes stance as a dialogic act that presumes interlocutors are taking up positions about an object in order to align with one another. When an individual takes a stance they rely on the semantic resources of appraisal which allows them to “negotiate emotions, judgments, and valuations” (Martin 2001,

145). In this sense, we might say our emotions, judgments, and tastes reveal our social location.

In an attempt to better understand the social locations of BQW, I have considered the way these acts of orientation occur within an intersectional frame.

Gill Valentine (2007), Natalie Oswin (2008), and Yvette Taylor (2011) challenge feminist and critical geographies to engage intersectional analysis in theoretical and empirical studies of sexualized spaces; to deal with the way race, gender, and class are mutually constituting of sexuality, and therefore of social space (Cohen 2005, Collins 2004, Ferguson

2005b, Somerville 2000, Johnson 2003). Space is not simply a passive backdrop for the unfolding of the drama of the intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality, but rather a way to address the moments when subjects actively make sense of their lives at those intersections.

We also see the ways that they negotiate their relationships to the city and to scene space, and the critical investments the make in social space. Intersectionality refers generally to the theory of multiple, “intersecting,” or mutually reinforcing categories of identity and/or oppression including race, gender, sexuality and class. Women of color feminisms are responsible for the 94

theoretical intervention which holds that multiple aspects of one’s identity and multiple forms of oppression come together to characterize the experience of women of color (Beal 1970, Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981, Hull, Bell-Scott, and Smith 1982, Carby 1983, Hooks 1989, King 1988,

Collins 2008). It took shape as “intersectionality” in the work of critical race theorist, Kimberlé

Crenshaw (1995). Crenshaw’s intervention was prompted by what she saw as the problematic nature of identity politics, which she saw as ignoring intra-group difference, or the differences that might be found within a group of women, or within a group of people of color as they made claims in a court of law. She argued that one of the fundamental problems with identity politics was that it forced an individual’s identity to be categorized according to an impossible either/or binary: you were either black, or a woman, for example. The effect was the relegation of ‘the identity of women of color to a location that resists telling’ (Crenshaw 1995, 357). Ultimately, intersectionality, especially within women of color feminist scholarship, has been used to destabilize the claim that feminists can speak for all women, and to address the inattention given to race, ethnicity, class and differences in sexuality between women (Nash 2008).

While existing as a kind of buzzword throughout the social sciences, the theory of intersectionality has been deployed in a number of ways (Brown 2012, McCall 2005), often in ways that do more to muddy our understanding of the “co-constitutive” nature of categories of difference (Puar 2007). In many cases, intersectionality is deployed under the assumption that

"attention to additional intersections will get us to 'etc.,' allowing us to replace 'etc.' with an endless list of intersections" (Nash 2010, 1). The Scene as I have described it is a racialized, gendered, sexualized, and classed formation. Far from an attempt to add race to the discussion of sexuality and gender, or re-centering intersectional analyses in anthropology on the lives of black women, my analysis here is about asking how BQW in D.C. experience their raced, gendered, 95

sexualized, and classed subjectivities; how their talk about their experiences in social space reveal "the mechanisms by which these systems of exclusion are replicated and recreated" (Nash

2010, 1) both in space and through linguistic practices. I am particularly interested in the way that BQW utilize semantic resources of appraisal to negotiate their social location and ask how certain configurations of race, gender, sexuality, and class “feel” and “impress” upon those subjects in social space. How do these configurations affect individuals' orientation to others in social space? What do the feelings and impressions they produce tell us about how race, gender, sexuality, and class are interconnected in social space?

In what follows, I demonstrate how critical geographies can aid black feminist and black queer theoretical approaches to the everyday experiences of black queers as they encapsulate moments where BQW “do” race, gender, sexuality and class. I rely on four different but similarly speakers in this particular analysis: Kay, Maegan, Alaire, and Tomar. I chose these women's stories because they were illustrative of the various ways informants throughout my sample navigated the uneven social terrain of D.C. In each narrative, they foreground various aspects of their racial, gendered, sexualized, and class positions. I highlight their experiences because their lives overlapped in interesting ways, and yet each negotiated their place in D.C. in different ways. By focusing on four individuals, I am able to perform an analysis that begins at the individual and works outward revealing the complex worlds that unfold around them

(McCall 2005). What emerges from this chapter is that as we analyze the way BQW discursively negotiate their sense of belonging in the urban landscape, we can see the way that their race, gender, sexuality and class are both done and felt unevenly across various kinds of social space.

4. “You Don't Have to Explain Yourself”: Foregrounding Blackness, Being Black Enough, and Sexuality

Kay grew up in the mid-west and went to a predominately white high school. She grew up in an upper-middle class home as a transnational adoptee. She had a Masters degree and worked at a local non-profit. Kay was a fan of local women’s rugby and was friends with several players in different clubs around the city. Kay had what she referred to as a diverse group of friends, but the majority of them were white lesbians. She spent most of her leisure time in predominately heterosexual or white lesbian spaces. Kay and I spoke at length about the way she and her friends socialized. They spent most of their leisure time in each others’ home, going out occasionally as a group either to heterosexual bars or white lesbian party spaces. I asked her if the majority of the women she hung out with were white, did she ever have the opportunity to be around other queer women of color. She described having gone to a house party hosted by a black queer woman who she had gone to college with. In the excerpt below, I asked Kay to tell me what it felt like to be in that kind of space—where the majority of the women there were, like her, queer women of color.

Example 4.1 - Kay, “It Feels Like You Don’t Have To Explain Yourself”

01 NL: What does it feel like? 02 Kay: It feels like you don't have to explain yourself. 03 It feels like people understand 04 and even though you're not the same person 05 and you don't have the same experiences 06 and you may think of yourself completely differently than they do, 07 that there are just certain things you just don't have to explain. 08 And those are, you know, just the experience of being a person of color in the world. 09 The experience of dating, sleeping with, loving women, you just don't have to explain that. 10 And it's... it's something that there’s always a piece missing for me. 11 Like I feel like when I'm with white gay women 12 there's always that element of they don't quite get the experience of being of color,

13 and when I'm with black straight women 14 I feel like they don't understand that there's this whole other element 15 and I kinda just, you know, don't seem black enough for whatever reason. 16 So that just never having that space of like “you understand these different elements,” 17 it's like being with people who do. 18 And not just one, not just two but a whole variety of people 19 who do with there own differences among themselves 20 that is what feels good, you know.

In Example 4.1 above, Kay lists a number of feelings associated with being in a space where there a majority of women of color who are queer, or same-gender loving: “you don’t have to explain yourself” (4.1:02), they “understand" (4.1:16), “an understanding of these different elements” (4.1:16), “not just one, not just two but a whole variety of people" (4.1:18) who are also different, but still are able to understand you (4.1:19). Ultimately, these together are what “feel good” (4.1:20). Kay’s description of this particular scene space, a house party hosted by a black woman, reveals that it is an instantiation of a kind of spatial ordering where one need not choose between being black, or a woman, or a woman who dates, sleeps with, and loves other women (4.1:09). On the contrary, in scene space, those experiences are given room to be

“done” all at the same time, absent the need to explain their nature to the other people in the room because you are familiar with on account of your shared, though unique, experiences of these intersections. As Kay says “even though you're not the same person/and you don't have the same experiences/and you may think of yourself completely differently than they do/[…] there are just certain things you just don't have to explain” (4.1:04-07). By not having to explain your experiences of the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in scene space, there’s literally the space to talk about all of the other things. That’s what feels good about being in scene space.

In scene space, the constitutive “elements” of race, gender, and sexuality are already understood (4.1:07-09). When among white lesbians, in contrast, the particular aspect of herself 98

that they don’t “get,” or do not understand, is the way that her experience of being a person of color in the world affects her experiences as a lesbian. Black feminist scholars have leveled this same critique at white feminists who in attempting to outline “women’s problems,” were unable to acknowledge the differences between women, especially the way that race and class augmented one’s experiences as a woman (Carby 1983, Collins 2008, Lorde 2007). Kay faces a similar challenge with black heterosexual women who don’t understand that her experience as a lesbian augments and complicates her black womanhood (Hammonds 1994, Beal 1970, Hall and

Fine 2005, Johnson 2005).

Returning briefly to Ahmed’s notion of orientation and Du Bois’ conceptualization of stance, being understood then is related to having ones race, gender, and sexuality not just read, but felt as familiar to those in the room, or to be able to relate around common, familiar objects to those with whom you are speaking. Kay indexes white lesbians and black heterosexual (or straight) women here as contrasting figures in her depiction of what it feels like to be in scene space. In her dealings with white lesbians and black heterosexual women being “understood” was experienced as a loss, as the “piece missing” in those interactions and spaces (4.1:10). As

Valentine (2007) argues, one’s “ability to enact some identities or realities rather than others is highly contingent on the power-laden spaces in and through which our experiences are lived… in particular spaces there are dominant spatial orderings that produce moments of exclusion for particular social groups” (Valentine 2007, 19). In spaces with white women “the experience of being of color” (4.1:11-12) is not a part of the dominant spatial orderings of the space, and in spaces with black heterosexual women, lesbian sexuality is not apart of the dominant spatial orderings. In Valentine’s terms, when Kay is in white lesbian space her experience as a person of color rubs up against and thus “exposes” the white, dominant, spatial ordering that defines who 99

is in place/out of place. Similarly, when she’s with black straight women it “feel[s] like they don't understand that there's this whole other element/and I kinda just, you know, don't seem black enough for whatever reason” (4.1:15). There were two interrelated moments of exposure around sexuality and race in spaces with black straight women. On the one hand, Kay’s lesbian sexuality ruptures the investment in heteronormativity among black straight women where their lack of “understanding” of Kay’s lesbianism is tied to the “willful ignorance” of the non- heteronormativity of blackness (Snorton 2014, 103). Under the gaze of black straight women,

Kay says she is made to feel as if she is not “black enough” because she partners with women.

On the other hand, she’s also not black enough because she was not born in the U.S. nor raised by black parents. This is the second area of exposure where the spatial and cultural borders of blackness are policed (Ferguson 2005a, Johnson 2003). Kay would go on to describe moments where she was made to feel out of place around African Americans specifically because she was adopted and raised by white parents. Kay does not talk about experiencing this same sense of being “less black” in BQW scene spaces. This may be because she believes that she shares the charge of not being “black enough” with other BQW because they also do not practice heterosexuality. In Example 4.1, however, she contrasts the feelings of being “out of place” because of her race, sexuality, and ethnic identity with the feeling of being in BQW's scene space where those experiences understood (4.1:16-17).

In asserting that there was a feeling of comfort associated with not having to explain what it was like to be a person of color or a woman who partners with women in scene space, Kay exposes the underlying supposition that black women's lives are the subject of constant discussion and are always in need of further explanation (Musser 2014, Snorton 2014) Telling stories about "the experiences of being a person of color in the world" (4.1:08) and "the 100

experience of dating, sleeping with, loving women" (4.1:09) are things that may comfortably go unsaid in scene space because there is a basis a shared set of understandings, a bank of cultural knowledge about the experiences themselves, which allow for different kinds of conversation between black women to occur.

Kay was not alone in thinking talking about the feelings associated with inhabiting spaces with black heterosexual woman. In so doing, she not only exposes the differences between black women but also the ideological constraints in place around black queer women to talk about their non-heterosexuality "in public." Black queer bodies have been made to occupy the position of

"dirty laundry" within black cultural politics and representations (Snorton 2014). To put your

"business" out would expose that not all black bodies fit neatly within a set of fictions about black heteronormative formations (Abdur-Rahman 2012, Ferguson 2000, Johnson 2003).

Maegan, in the example below, describes feeling “fear” around the black heterosexual women who she works with. In bringing to the fore what she terms their “ignorance,” Maegan exposes the dominant spatial orders that coalesce around both race and gender. In so doing, she describes how some middle-class black queer women do their race, gender, and sexuality at work in order to conform to and resist bourgeois notions of propriety.

5. Scared of Black Straight Women: Foregrounding Sexuality and Gender Expression in the Glass Closet

Example 4.2 - Maegan, "I'm Definitely Afraid of Black Straight Women"

01 The funny thing is at work I don't um, they probably know, 02 but that's not something I like advertise. You know what I'm saying. 03 I don't talk about being with men. 04 I don't talk about having kids. 05 There's no ring on my finger. 06 But it's not something I have to say, like "Oh by the way, you know I'm gay, right?" 101

07 NL: Do other people around the office talk about relationships or partners? 08 Yeah, they talk about their girlfriends and their husbands and stuff like that. 09 And I'll just be like, "ok." 10 I mean, I was like, "I was dating" 11 Like I would talk, 12 but I would talk very high level. 13 I don't like, "She's a woman" 14 NL: Why not? 15 Because it's black women, and I'm definitely afraid of black straight women. 16 In terms of you know, I'm in the workplace, I don't want no shit. 17 You know what I’m saying, 18 They're bible thumpers. I don't want to say thumpers 19 But, yeah, […] 22 So it's not something that I.. advertise 23 And I notice that about myself because I don't want to be treated 24 any differently just because I'm gay. 25 I want everyone to see me, "This is Maegan. 26 This is what Maegan brings to the table professionally. Maegan is so super cool." 27 If you ask me, I'll tell you, but I'm not going to advertise it. 28 So later on, it’s like you already know me outside of my sexuality. […] 34 NL: But you wear men's clothing outside of work? 35 Yeah, yeah, you've seen how I dress 36 Yeah but I don't really wear. It's just really androgynous neutral. 37 I don't give them all that... Interesting. 38 I don't do all that, but there are women 39 there who will wear men's clothes and it's all cool. 40 I know one. You know, so. 41 Yeah, but she's white, you know what I'm saying. 42 And she's probably not around all these black women. 43 Like on the side of the house that I work on, it's majority of black women. […] 50 I'm not saying that white people aren't homophobic, they are, 51 but I think white people have a different experience than black people have.. 52 I think the phobia is on a real different kind of level. […] 54 I have always lived in a bubble. 55 And I've always liked to stay in that protective bubble. 56 that's why I live in D.C. because its so gay friendly 57 and I can do what I want to do. 58 But I think black women are just ignorant. Like really ignorant. […] 62 But I think black people in their ignorance and the church 63 Cause I've seen the effects of it in my last relationship 102

64 where my girlfriend was [in a Black Greek Letter Organization] 65 and they gave her the absolute worst time

Maegan works for a government agency in a department with primarily Black straight women. While protected at work under laws prohibiting discrimination because of sexuality, she doesn’t feel comfortable disclosing her sexuality to colleagues. She says that she’s “afraid” of black straight women, particularly those in her workplace who are “bible thumpers,” or those whose Christian religious fervor is very much a part of how they identify and likely includes sanctions against homosexual behavior and conduct (Johnson 1998, Snorton 2014). This fear of black straight women and most importantly their potential homophobia and discrimination is contextual. That is, it is brought to the foreground specifically because she is in the space of the workplace where stigma could have an impact on how she’s recognized at work (4.2:26), and consequently on her opportunities for career advancement. She also fears black straights because she's "seen the effects" (4.2:63) having seen how a previous girlfriend was affected by the homophobia of fellow members of a Black Greek Letter Organization (BGLO). Maegan’s strategy for keeping her sexuality out of the context of work then is to “talk at a very high level”

(4.2:12) and not to “advertise” her lesbian sexuality through her attire (4.2:27). While other women at work may wear men's clothes (4.2:38-39), Maegan feels that her experience of homophobia from black heterosexual men and women would be fundamentally different from that of her colleagues (4.2:50-52). Maegan is in a fundamentally different situation than her colleague who wears men's clothes. Maegan indexes two distinctions between her situation and her colleague who dresses in men’s clothes.

First, the woman is white (4.2:41). Maegan suggests the fact that being white, at least at her job, might bring with it a certain level of privilege with non-gender conforming presentation. 103

This speaks to the issue that Kay raised about being in spaces with white lesbians who lack an understanding of how being a person of color affects ones experiences of being a lesbian (4.1:11-

12). Maegan highlights here that the expectations for her, as a black woman in a space with other black women, are different than the white woman not only because Maegan doesn't enjoy white privilege, but also because of the second issue she raises which is that she works in a department where the majority of her colleagues are other black women (4.2:42). By being in the context of other black women, another issue Kay raises in Example 4.1, there are a set of assumed experiences and understandings that circulate about the experience of being a black woman

(4.1:13-14). Maegan experiences being among black women as the presumption that everyone is heterosexual, and that everyone should be staunchly Christian both of which are quite at odds with her sexual identity as a lesbian. We might frame Maegan's decision in terms of a “Don’t

Ask, Don’t Tell” policy whereby she keeps her sexuality invisible/unspoken, or private among this group of black straight women because they are homophobic, but I wish to argue that something perhaps more complicated is taking place evidenced by what she says in line 4.2:01,

"they probably know."

It's clear that Maegan believes her coworkers know that she’s a lesbian even without having gone around and said directly that she partners with women (4.2:06). Despite her "talking at a high level" and her choosing a more androgynous form of dress in an effort not to "give them all that" (4.2:36-37), her sexuality exists as a tacit supposition that undergirds all of her interactions with her colleagues. I borrow here from Carlos Decena's notion of tacit subjects which addresses the linguistic negotiations of Dominican immigrant gay men's sexual identity with their families and communities where an open conversation about their sexuality might mean breaking apart "the very glue of sociality that [makes] survival possible" (Decena 2011, 104

21). Decena suggests that the notion of tactic subjects brings to bear "the way people were linked to one another in asymmetrical power relations that they were invested in maintaining" (Decena

2011, 21). Maegan's colleagues may know that she's a lesbian, but Maegan intentionally refuses to talk about her sexuality making it such that her colleagues know that it is not a topic for discussion. Her refusal is of course based on the uneven power dynamic whereby the straight women are able to dictate what can be read as "normal" at work, but on the other hand, it is a dynamic that she does not wish to disturb because she does not want to discuss her sexuality with black straight women who are “bible thumpers.”

Maegan's discussion about the way she negotiates her sexual identity and gender performances at work also calls into question “the closet” as a productive means of understanding the unique relationship that people of color often have their families and communities (Decena 2008, Moore 2011, Ross 2005, Snorton 2014). Maegan does not lie about her sexuality (4.2:03-05); she simply doesn’t talk about her sexuality with her colleagues. Where shame animates the discourse of the closet, it is ignorance, particularly her colleagues' ignorance, that animates Maegan's decision not to directly talk about her sexuality with her colleagues. In Nobody is Supposed to Know, C. Riley Snorton says,

If shame is based on nonrecognition—the recognition of not being recognized—then ignorance works on misrecognition, a performative refusal of the centuries-old mythologies that suture together the representations of black sexuality that equate blackness with sexual deviance. In addition, to understand when ignorance might be at work or, perhaps more appropriately, in play requires a different methodology that would enable us to read ignorance as a possible tactic of refusal than as a (shameful?) absence of reason. (Snorton 2014, 90)

Snorton reads R. Kelly’s melodramatic musical video and “hip-hop opera” Trapped in the Closet discussing the multiple "closets" it dramatizes. Each closet, we learn, is "structured by ignorance. They are spaces that require a performance of not knowing" (Snorton 2014, 91). 105

Maegan says that her black female colleagues are ignorant. They are not "ignorant" about her sexual identity, but they do perform a kind of not knowing. While "they probably know"

(4.2:01), they perform an ignorance about her sexuality by not talking about it which allows both them and Maegan to suspend any discussions which might reveal their homophobia. Maegan reads the homophobia of her black heterosexual Christian colleagues as a hyperbolic form because of their ignorance, and yet Maegan's refusal to talk only animates the idea that for her

"queerness is the 'truth' of [her] black sexuality yet [their] blackness (as a site of hyperbolized homophobia) keeps this fact hidden" (Snorton 2014, 26). Indeed, Maegan’s refusal to talk about her sexual identity also exposes the borders around blackness in the space of her workplace. As a black woman working with other black women, she still needs to keep up the appearance of

“solidarity.” By not discussing her sexual identity she makes it such that her colleagues know that it is not a topic for discussion not only because their input would be unwanted but also because it would break apart the very fragile sense of solidarity that they enjoy. In effect,

Maegan operates within a “glass closet” at work. Snorton says of the glass closet that it is a

“contradictory space marked by concealment and display” and “reflects not only certain anxieties about same-sexual attraction but also the more generic consequences of black solidarity in a so- called post-racial era” (Snorton 2014, 92). If everyone already knows you’re black, they don’t also need to know you’re gay. You don’t need to advertise it.

Outside of work, Maegan enjoys life within a "protective bubble" (4.2:55), which consists of a supportive family and dense network of gay and lesbian friends. Maegan lives in

Washington, D.C. "Because its so gay friendly and I can do what I want to do" (4.2:56). This seems at odds with the fact that she refuses to discuss her sexual identity at work, but it also reveals the way she experiences the social space of work as it is organized according to black 106

middle-class homophobia and heteronormative logics. D.C. is a "gay friendly" city where she feels like she can do whatever she wants to do. She can be "out" at work and not have to discuss it with her colleagues. While she fears having to deal with the homophobia of Black heterosexual women, she frames her experience of work within the broader context of Washington, D.C., which affords her a wide range of options about how to live her life and how to spend her leisure.

Work, for Maegan, is not outside of D.C., but a part of it, and at work she decides what kinds of conversations she's willing to engage in about her life. What Maegan's discussion points to is how spaces organized around homophobia and heteronormativity are incorporated into the daily experiences of Black queer women lives in D.C.

6. It Depends: Foregrounding Middle-class mobility and modern subjectivity

Alaire had recently moved to D.C., and at the time of our interview had not yet been in

D.C. for a year. She’d recently graduated from law school and soon after began working at a firm in D.C. She described her social network as consisting of several “quadrants of friends,” most of whom were straight. She had begun to meet more lesbian and gay friends through her sibling who lived in the area and by going out, but for the most part her social network was primarily made up of loosely connected groups of straight friends she’d formed relationships with in law school, college, and work. As we will see in the example below, Alaire constructs a modern gendered subjectivity focusing on her ability to move through the random, unknown parts of the city how she wants, and on the diversity of her social network. In effect, she describes herself as a modern subject with great flexibility in the cosmopolitan urban terrain. As a BQW she was not restricted in her movements throughout the city. How she spent her time depended, and as the next examples show it greatly depended on negotiations of race, gender, and sexuality.

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Example 4.3 - Alaire—“It depends”

01 It depends, 02 I can hang with my straight friends 03 and we go to you know a random bar or lounge, or whatever. 04 Or I can hang out with my gay friends 05 and we’ll go to a gay dominant environment 06 or if I choose to go to one of these venues listed in Phatgirlchic.com 07 I go to wherever they're hosting events, 08 you’ve got Bravo Bravo— 09 They take a lot of heterosexual environments and book them 10 for a certain number of hours

Alaire enjoys a certain level of freedom of movement in the urban landscape. Her friends, straight and gay, are seemingly interchangeable, or rather she has the option to “hang out” with either group of friends (4.3:02-04), but the places that they go are not necessarily interchangeable

(4.3:03-05). With her straight friends she is able to visit “random bars and venues,” and with gay friends, she goes to “gay dominant environments” which are not random (Binnie 1995, 2004).

But with BQW's scene spaces, she goes presumably without straight or gay friends to events she finds on Phatgirlchic.com. Built into scene space is a level of uncertainty. Similarly, Alaire’s linguistic performance of her options for moving throughout the city highlight the nature of the contingency with which she moves about the city space. In other words, her choices are not without restraint and the restraint here points out the dominant spatial borders of gay clubs and

“random” bars and clubs, neither of which provide the same kind of level of comfort or sense of familiarity that BQW scene spaces do. I would go on to challenge the seemingly

“interchangeable” nature of her choices for leisure.

Example 4.4 - Alaire, “I think, yes, I have a natural affinity”

01 NL: Well it sounds like you spend your time in a lot of different places. 02 Do you have an affinity for clubs, parties, events, or whatever 03 where there are other women who partner with women?

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04 Do you feel more drawn to those places as opposed to going out 05 to a straight club or a straight bar? 06 A: It's so interesting you ask, because um recently went out, I went out this weekend 07 this Saturday night to a straight venue. And I go out to straight venues all the time, 08 I grew up going to straight venues, but which… 09 I like, to like switch it up, um. 10 You know, it's hard to say. Um. I mean, I think, from a relationship standpoint like 11 you know, if I were to find, meet someone, I yeah I would probably want to go out 12 to a lesbian gay bar. 13 You know, versus a straight bar venue. Um. It all depends on my mood really. 14 I don't… I think, yes, I have a natural affinity to go to lesbian and gay bars because 15 you know, I want to feel comfortable, most comfortable. 16 That's not to say I don't feel comfortable when I go to straight venues but 17 you know, I just feel more relaxed, and feel more accepted and be more myself. 18 And that's not to say I'm not myself when I go to straight bars, but 19 you know you just feel a little more like at home. 20 You know, there are like-minded individuals like yourself under one space. 21 So it's nice.

I believe the nature of my inquiry (4.4:01-05) called into question her sense of self as a modern black subject who is equally comfortable with straight friends in straight bars, in gay spaces with gay friends, or alone in scene spaces (Example 4.3). Asking if she felt more drawn, or if she had an affinity to lesbian spaces placed her in the position of having to justify her earlier claims (Example 4.3) that her choice simply depended (4.3:01). At the heart of the inquiry is how she manages to be in all of these spaces as a black queer woman, and how she is able to live at the intersection of various identities and negotiate space in such a way as to feel “in place” in the different kinds of spaces. Rather than ask her to discuss the group that she most identifies with, I asked her if she felt more comfortable in spaces where she could “feel” a sense of familiarity, or sameness, in relation to her sexuality. The answer to the question reveals how she orients more or less toward particular aspects of her race, gender, and sexuality depending on the space she’s in.

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She begins by commenting on the question. “It’s interesting you ask” (4.4:06). After a short pause, she goes on tells me that she had gone recently to a straight venue, she regularly goes to straight venues, and “grew up going to them, but which…” (4.4:07-08). Alaire pauses, seemingly at the cusp of a narrative that never materializes. Instead, she returns to the notion of

“it depends” and says that she simply likes to “switch it up” (4.4:09). It was not that straight places were uncomfortable—she has friends to go with, she has money to spend. Being comfortable in those spaces was not a problem. However, there was a difference in the kind of comfort since it would be in lesbian space where she would likely meet someone romantically

(4.4:09-11), therefore it would be in these spaces where expressing her sexuality would be most accepted without any need for caution or pause on her part. After describing the opportunities for locating familiar aspects of self in BQW scene space, Alaire admits that lesbian spaces feel different. Notably she does not qualify these “lesbian spaces” as black lesbian spaces. She feels most comfortable (4.4:15), more relaxed, more accepted, and “more like myself” (4.4:17).

Additionally, it was where she felt “a little more like at home” (4.4:19). Alaire continued by sharing her thoughts about BQW scene spaces including the quality of the space where the parties were hosted, the composition of the crowds at the various parties and happy hours, and her overall opinion about the scene. When I asked her to tell me about some of the straight venues that she went to on a regular basis, she had nothing to say about them, and her reason for not having anything to say about them further revealed her lack of orientation toward the individuals in the space and the spaces themselves:

Example 4.5 - Alaire, “It’s not really my environment”

01 NL: So tell me about some of straight clubs you go to. 02 Do you feel the same away about the crowd?

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03 Crowd is older in this place? Younger in this place? Not quite professional in this place? 04 Do you feel like there's more of a range? Or less of a range? 05 [6s Pause…] 06 Or are those things that you even notice? 07 A: I don't really notice it because I… I don't care. Because it's like, 08 it's not really my environment. I don't claim that space as my own. 09 I'm just like, "Whatever, I'm just because like, I'm here with my straight friends."

Alaire does not “claim” straight space as her own, and therefore does not care enough about the space to make any observations about the spaces (4.5:07-08). And while earlier she suggested that she was comfortable in straight venues (Example 4.3 and Example 4.4), she provides no sense of what or to whom she orients toward in those spaces except her straight friends (4.5:09). This stands in opposition to her experiences in BQW scene space (Example

4.4). In effect, while she does not wish to suggest that she’s uncomfortable in straight venues, her lack of discussion of what comfort looks like in those contexts suggests that there was not the same sense of it feeling “like home” (4.4:19). As one of my informants Breeze, a producer of scene space would say about her time after college, "I stayed in D.C. cause I really like it here. I do like the Scene here. I do love black queer women of color especially in D.C. So .. kinda found a home away from home."

The metaphor of “home” features prominently across my informal and formal interviews with BQW in Washington, D.C. It would be difficult to make a general claim that the women I spoke with conceived of the scene as being “like home” as a result of being ostracized and excluded from their families of origin (Valentine and Skelton 2003, Weston 1997). With the exception of two of the women in my sample, all of them had informed their families that they were lesbian, bisexual, or queer, or their families had simply “figured it out” (Decena 2008).

Whether or not their families were “okay,” with their sexuality, all of them had maintained fairly strong ties to families. More than half of the women I spoke to were still in the midst of dealing 111

with their immediate family’s ambivalence toward their sexuality, and rather than dealing with being exiled from family, they had to negotiate how they interacted with their family around their sexuality (Decena 2008).

While Alaire may feel comfortable in straight space, she was unable to evaluate those spaces. Straight space was not her "environment," it was not "like at home," it wasn't space that required or warranted evaluation, and it did not produce particularly strong judgments or stances.

Stance-taking presumes that an individual wants or needs to position themselves in relation to others. Alaire takes no stance on straight space and therefore abstains from aligning with heterosexual spatial and cultural practices. I found that several women in my sample had a similar self-conscious lack of alignment with hetero-spatial practices and white lesbian spaces.

They didn’t notice anything, because they didn’t care about those spaces. Or said another way, they did not orient towards the texture of those spaces. They were unable to take a stance toward these spaces not only because they spent so little time in those spaces, but also because they never actually felt the need to appraise such spaces because they could not relate to either the spaces or the people in those spaces. The neoliberal city, while “freeing” for some, participates in the shoring up of boundaries of sexuality, race, and class. And you may be free to party wherever you want, but that doesn’t mean that you’ll feel at home.

7. This is How I Am: Foregrounding Race and Class

Tomar was from the mid-west and following graduate studies had moved to D.C. with a former partner. Tomar described the excitement that she and her partner experienced after both getting jobs and deciding to relocate to D.C. Noting D.C.’s existence in the Black gay imaginary as a Mecca for Black queer women, Tomar says that she and her partner said to one another:

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“We're going to have Black lesbian friends when we move to D.C.” But in the example below

Tomar describes how being in “rugby culture” prevented her from getting connected to other

Black lesbians in D.C.

Example 4.6 - Tomar, “It felt like we were Black participating in rugby culture”

01 T: You don't, black people aren't playing rugby. 02 NL: Yeah, it requires a lot of space. 03 T: It requires space and I think it requires sort of a @ 04 cultural competency @. 05 It's like you're only going to get exposed to it.. 06 It's like black lacrosse players. 07 Like well who plays lacrosse? 08 So I think it's about, you know, it's about ^class 09 and it's about.. having achieved a certain level of education.. 10 because those are the two avenues through which you're going to be exposed to anything, 11 you know what I mean. well not ^anything, but just >certain things.. right. 12 And so I felt like rugby was just one of those things. [2s] 13 ^Which would be >fine 14 because at least if you meet a black woman playing rugby 15 you know she's going to be educated, 16 you know she's going to have a certain background. 17 […] 18 Um.. you know.. 19 met a couple of young ladies *rap on the table*, 20 I mean, there are a couple of black women that play for the team, 21 um, but again, the culture, we were all kinda caught up in rugby culture. 22 It wasn't really the culture of being, 23 it didn't feel like the culture of being black in DC, 24 it felt like we were black and participating in rugby culture.

In line 4.6:01, Tomar says plainly, "black people aren't playing rugby." The underlying assumption here being rugby is predominately white and therefore, the type of women of color involved in rugby would be those who had spent a considerable amount of time in predominately white institutions or who had grown up with middle- or upper-class privilege (4.6:14-16). In lines 4.6:08-11, she names the two avenues through which one might be "exposed" to rugby, her

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own analysis very similar to a Bourdiuesian analysis. Sports such as rugby and soccer are primarily popular amongst those who play sports "for fun," rather than because it might afford them access to higher education in America (Kelley 1997). In America such sports are basketball, football and track (Kelley 1997). Habitus makes it such that tastes, or aesthetic and cultural likes and dislikes, remain relatively stable within class groupings because there are few opportunities for those without access to a "certain background" as Tomar might describe it, to be exposed to those particular activities. Therefore, the way Tomar moved throughout the city, primarily with and among white women, meant she was not gaining access to the black queer life, evidence that black women are, in general, not socializing in the same way as white lesbians

(Thorpe 1996). When Tomar did meet black women playing rugby, they were similarly positioned as her and thus also did not necessarily have access to the BQW Scene. Tomar sums up experience plainly when she says that when she was with other black women who were playing rugby, "it didn't feel like we were participating in black culture, it felt like we were black and participating in rugby culture" (4.6:24)

Tomar cites a fundamental predicament best exposed when performing intersectional analysis. While she can participate in rugby culture and (white) lesbian culture in D.C., her race continues to manifest itself as an unresolved mitigating factor affecting her experience of that space. While she might not feel "outside" of rugby culture in most instances, being one of few black women playing rugby makes her race a salient feature in that space while her sexuality and class are less so. Similarly, Tomar cites her class position as affecting her experience of Black queer women’s scene spaces.

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Example 4.7 - Tomar, “But this is how I am.”

01 There's also a class difference, because, I think, because.. 02 I'm trying to be nice… 03 I kinda feel like, the way that they socialized 04 and the things they were into and then I would talk, 05 and this is how I speak all the time 06 and so some of these people were like, 07 "you can turn that off, you don't have to talk like that, you're with us. 08 You can just hang out." And I'm like, 09 "but this is how I am. Like I'm kinda weird that way," 10 you know sometimes I dress down a little bit, but I can't, 11 I feel like if I'm using slang it doesn't sound authentic coming from me. 12 It's just me trying to fit in. I've kinda gotten over that, so now I'm just myself.

In Example 4.7, Tomar makes sense of being in BQW scene space and feeling "out of place," because of the way that she talked. She reports being told “you don’t have to talk like that” (4.7:07). However, Tomar was familiar with African American speech ideologies (Morgan

2002) and relies on them even here. In line 4.7:02, Tomar says “I’m trying to be nice”, a form of what Marcyliena Morgan would call “pointed indirectness”, an African American speech style of signifying which relies on the hearer understanding the true nature of the contempt which she holds for the intended target of critique (Morgan 1996, 407). By saying “I’m trying to be nice”, I know that Tomar has tempered her evaluations, but means them much more harshly than her tone might imply. By informing me that “this is how I speak all the time” (4.7:05) referring to the fact that she rarely used slang and her general style of speech suggested that she was well educated and likely from the Midwest since she had what might be heard as a relatively accent- less way of speaking. The way Tomar talked was viewed as being out of place, as not fitting within the proper set of behaviors in this particular BQW scene space. Since the way she spoke was how she talked all the time, she felt out of place. So not only did Tomar find herself closed off from the BQW scene because of the fact that she socialized primarily with white lesbians, but

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she experienced being "irregular" even in a space where she was supposed to feel normal. This calls into question the fetishization of “gay spaces” as utopian spaces that don't also come wrapped up with their own assumptions and normative projections. It also calls attention to the fact that in this particular BQW scene space, it was not the performance of middle-class behavior that was valorized.

This contrasts with the findings of Taylor (2008) who found that working-class lesbians in the U.K. participated in "commercial" scene spaces but felt that the spaces were unable to provide a safe and comfortable space for expression of their classed and sexual identities.

Taylor’s findings do, however, stress the importance of tuning into subjects’ experiences of “the material and embodied intersections of class, gender, sexuality and age, shaping inclusions and exclusions and a sense of being in or out of place” (Taylor 2008, 524). Tomar was middle-class, highly educated, and her discomfort here was because of "the class difference" between she and the other women in this particular scene space. This was common among the middle-class women in my sample, their discomfort often being directed at being in spaces that were "too young," or spaces that they perceived as being working-class. These were the spaces where they didn't feel comfortable, and yet these were the most common and visible forms of BQW scene spaces.

8. Conclusion

When thinking about neoliberalism, Hodgson implores us to consider that it is “mediated by and through local cultural forms and shaped by the actions and ideas of people operating from different structural positions of power, knowledge, and identity” (Hodgson 2001, 3). Black same- sex desiring women, while increasingly tolerated within and outside of black communities of

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practice, continue to experience their race, gender, and sexuality from a structurally, culturally, and socially denigrated position. While many middle-class black women experience great degrees of freedom within their use of the urban landscape and within their workplaces, many experience those freedoms are considered fragile, and highly contingent on their ability to maintain their middle-class decorum in public. The contingency of their freedom is not just based on the nature of neoliberalism, but also on the uncertainties inherent in being Black same- sex desiring women in America.

Considering how their particular experience mediates neoliberalism allows us to center on the way same-sex desiring women of color creatively and actively engage neoliberalism, producing new ways of “being modern… within shifting structural (such as historical, political, economic, and social) constraints and opportunities” (Hodgson 2001, 7). I suggest here that it is through language we can see these women creatively and actively produce their racialized and gendered modern subjectivities. In so doing, they calibrate their sense of belonging within the

“local uncertainties of [racialized] gendered late modernity” (Leap 2003, 417). Through a framework shaped by queer studies of affect and linguistic anthropological inquires about belonging, this chapter analyzes my informant’s discussions about feeling comfortable and feeling like the belonged on the scene and in Washington, D.C.

Feelings are increasingly brought into the domain of the market, and capitalism has always been interested in the management and regulation of individuals’ affective states (Ahmed

2010, Berlant 2011, Orr 2006, Probyn 2005). Examples abound of products seeking to utilize

(and exploit) the language of affect to sell products: CocaCola’s “Have a Coke and a Smile,”

Kotex’s short lived “Have a Happy Period,” and McDonald’s “Happy Meals.” The association of feelings—be it happiness, belonging, coolness—with particular brands, products, and places is 117

very much an example of capitalism’s preoccupation with our affective states. Similarly, there is a kind of ordinariness to wanting and expecting certain spaces to produce particular feelings— one’s home is supposed to feel safe. Affect plays a tremendous role in the production of sociality, and it is my contention here that by combining the linguistic analysis of affect with a recognition of affect as deeply social and cultural, we bring to the fore the way affect becomes a valuable resource for negotiating how one produces [racialized] gendered modernities.

Finding one’s place on the scene involved a complex process of representing self in relation to others and in relation to certain kinds of space (Hill 1995, Leap 2009, 2011, Modan

2008). What emerges from this analysis is the way that each of my informants differentially foregrounds and elides certain aspects of her race, gender, class and sexuality negotiating her sense of belonging based on where she found herself. Kay demonstrates that the experience of being with other BQW is bound up with a sense of familiarity, not just around being a woman who loves other women, but also of being a person of color in the world. When Kay describes feeling ‘good’ in a room full of women that were both different from her and the same, we come to understand the way her body was impressed upon by those familiar aspects of the women around her. The instantiation of this moment was unlike the feeling of being with white lesbians or black heterosexual women. This is not unlike Alaire’s description of scene space as feeling like “home” in lesbian space.

Alaire also demonstrates that while the cosmopolitan urban landscape encourages unrestricted movement and access to spend your money, certain spaces offer an opportunity to be more yourself. The neoliberal city might proclaim to offer happiness, freedom, belonging, however, Black same-sex desiring women know that it is not necessarily their comfort, happiness and belonging that the city is structured around. They might feel “free” to go 118

anywhere in the city, they don’t always feel free to be themselves in those spaces (Example 4.3 and Example 4.4). This is where Maegan's discussion of the way she manages the misrecognition of her same-sex desire at work.

By not foregrounding her sexuality with her willfully ignorant coworkers, she was able to maintain the integrity of her lesbian identity while presenting herself as a professional who works well with others on her team. Maegan's workspace was organized around the contradictory politics that circulate around anxieties of same-sex attraction and the consequences of black solidarity of the post-racial era (Snorton 2014, 92). Alaire's discussion of feeling more at home in BQW’s scene space contradicted her investment in the post-racial and neoliberal urban terrain, which on the one hand suggests you can buy wherever you want, but on the other hand produces silences around your race, gender, and sexuality depending on where you are. "Home" was used as a metaphor for BQW’s scene spaces, which could produce the sensation of comfort within the mass of uncertainty and choice within the urban landscape.

Black queer women in D.C. not only desire a level of access to the urban landscape where their particular cultural, gendered, and sexual expression is fully articulated allowing them to be recognized as full citizen-consumers, but also desire the safety, comfort and certainty of spaces which allow them to be most comfortable and more themselves. This desire points to the fact that BQW are often required to be less of themselves in spaces organized around ideals of whiteness and heteronormativity. BQW’s scene space is not just “gay space,” or rather it isn’t just space where one’s sexuality is understood. Instead, it is a space where one’s race, gender and sexuality are felt and lived as the experiences that they are. And yet even BQW scene space cannot offer a universal sense of comfort for every BQW (Example 4.6). When race, gender and

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sexuality are shared (Example 4.1), then other differences become foregrounded, as was the case with Tomar’s class (Example 4.6 and Example 4.7).

In bringing empirically grounded analysis of BQW’s experiences to bear, I hope to extend the work of critical geographies of sexuality interested in lesbian, bisexual and queer women’s experiences of commercial and non-commercial gay scene spaces (Bell and Valentine

1995, Binnie 2004, Browne and Bakshi 2011, Valentine 1993, Visser 2008b, Weston 1995). I also hope to encourage critical geographies to utilize intersectional analysis to draw out differences among gays and lesbians. Jon Binnie (2011) has called for the incorporation of class analysis into the geographies of sexuality, and as we consider class, especially in the United

States and the United Kingdom, we cannot disregard the issues of race. Race is intimately bound up with notions, discourses, and folk theories of class (Brodkin 2012, Lacy 2007, Shapiro 2004,

Thompson 2009). Valentine suggests that while feminist geographers have shown interest in

“intersectional types of issues they have tended to limit their analyses to the relationship between particular identities such as class or gender rather than addressing the full implications” of a theory of intersectionality (Valentine 2007, 14). Space is not simply a passive backdrop for the unfolding of the drama of the intersections of race, gender, class and sexuality, but rather when we pay attention to the way that these intersections are actively produced and lived at the same time in social space, we come to see the way the intersections themselves are produced and recreated. We also see the ways that individuals negotiate their relationships to the city and their critical investments in social space.

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CHAPTER 5

THE QUARE WORK OF RATCHET: THE (ANTI)POLITICS OF RESPECTABILITY IN

BLACK QUEER WOMEN’S SCENE SPACE

“Ratchet” Etymology

(with apologies to E. Patrick Johnson and Alice Walker)

Ratchet (ra-CHit), adj. 1. meaning wretched, raunchy, and/or raggedy; also, opp. of highbrow; having low taste, or tacky; from the African American Southern vernacular for wretched; sometimes negative in connotation; denotes a purposeful or careless excess of funk, attitude, filth, and/or grime. Antonyms, classy, professional, and boojie. —adj. 2. socially unacceptable, and/or outside of norms within black sexual and cultural politics and community; often used to describe a person who acts out and “acts up” intentionally, or not, with excess. —adv. 3. lack of pretense, or care for socially acceptable standards; often used to describe an action performed with total disregard for propriety. 4. ratchet is to wretched as quare is to queer.

1. Introduction

E. Patrick Johnson’s etymology of quare provides the inspiration for this chapter’s epigraph, a definition of the word “ratchet” fashioned from the various definitions that presented itself during interviews, both formal and informal, and in my field notes. Analyzing data from formal interviews as well as field notes in BQW scene spaces, this chapter examines the way the word “ratchet” circulated within BQW’s scene space and how it structured BQW’s experiences of the urban landscape and the Scene, more specifically how its attendant discourses of class and hypersexuality operated in and through BQW. I found that BQW defined and developed

“ratchet” and its converse “professional,” as they worked out their own classed positions within scene space and within the context of the urban landscape. Some BQW used “ratchet” as a

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means of distancing themselves from what they understood to be inappropriate representations and performances of black queer women’s sexuality. Others used “ratchet” as a way of talking about theirs’ or others’ purposeful performances of black queer women’s sexuality that is both suspicious of and a rejection of a set of normative rules for black female sexuality.

In some ways it is surprising that black lesbian and bisexual women, who are already outside of the framework of a “proper” black femininity, would be engaged in a struggle within their own communities of practice around the politics of respectability. However, “ratchet” discourse points to the institutional and structural nature of heteronormativity and homonormativity. It also points to the way that BQW are as engaged in maneuvering through the post-modern, post-racial, post-feminist cosmopolitan landscape where they are not only supposed to be comfortable in every kind of space, but are expected to act like they belong. This chapter will demonstrate that ratchet discourses operates on two levels simultaneously within

BQW scene space—on the one hand, we can imagine it as an index finger pointing out that which is selfish, undesirable, and outside of the proper ways of being a black queer subject “with class”; and on the other hand, we can imagine it as the discursive equivalent to the universal sign for “fuck you,” completely disrespecting and disregarding those boojie bitches over there.

During my research I witnessed ratchet discourse operate on both levels, and in some cases by the same people at different times.

2. What is ratchet?

“Ratchet” is a term that has entered into wide circulation in 2010 years through its popularization and usage within the discursive frame and linguistic codes of hip-hop, or what H.

Samy Alim (Alim 2004, 2006) refers to as Hip-Hop Nation Language (HHNL). Like other words

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that emerge from HHNL as “new” to the general public such as “crunk,” “bling,” “trap,” and

“swag,” prior to it becoming popular, ratchet had been in regular circulation within particular locales and linguistic communities of African American English (AAE). Simultaneously, it is a word that African Americans have bent and twisted to their whim like funk and bad, both of which carry connotations in AAE that are different than their English definitions, ratchet is a word with an excess of meaning. Ratchet is a commonly used Southern AAE variant on the words wretched and/or ragged. Ratchet refers to those things or individuals that are of poor quality. It refers to individuals who are loud, tacky, and tactless. When deployed in its pejorative sense, as a critique of behavior and qualities that fall outside of the respectable, ratchet sits within a longstanding set of intra-racial “politics of respectability” which lay out a set of parameters regarding “proper behavior, interracial interaction, and the parameters of blackness itself” (Pickens 2014, 2). However, just as “funk” and “bad” in AAE have multiple meanings and uses (Alim 2004, Alim and Baugh 2007, Morgan 1994, 1996, Smitherman 2000, Spears 2001,

Stallings 2007), so too does ratchet. Ratchet also refers to a general lack of pretense for socially acceptable behavior; a purposeful disregard for the rules. When used as a call to party, to dance, and to disregard the rules, ratchet calls into question what is appropriate and to whom. In skirting the borders of what is acceptable, ratchet is used individually and collectively as a critique of normative black sexual and cultural politics by disregarding these often unspoken and undefined prescriptions for behavior—what we might call black middle-class ideologies.

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham classically lays out the origins of one such black middle- class ideology, the politics of respectability which she describes as a discursive effort of self- representation that black Baptist women undertook in the late 19th and early 20th century meant to contest the racist and sexist representations of themselves (Higginbotham 1993, 185). 123

Higginbotham argues that respectability, or the condition of being worthy of respect, became a matter of political importance for these black women who spread the notion that black people needed to begin to act like those who are worthy of being respected, so that the white majority would begin to see them as such. The politics of respectability would get dispersed within various kinds of black publics and discursive arenas, and would get transfigured and refracted through other black cultural theorists, black artists, and black philosophers of the time (Andrews

2003, Beauboeuf-Lafontant 2008, Bergner 1995, Higginbotham 1993). While it contested the racist assumptions that blacks were lazy, unkempt, and immoral, the politics of respectability

“led to their insistence upon blacks’ conformity to the dominant society’s norms of manners and morals” (Higginbotham 1993, 187). Emphasizing manners and morals as a strategy for combatting racism and white supremacy, the politics of respectability “reflected and reinforced the hegemonic values of white America, as it simultaneously subverted and transformed the logic of race and gender subordination” (Higginbotham 1993, 187). The politics of respectability was rooted in the desire to assimilate to normative white middle-class ways of being and was problematically aligned with the racist rhetoric of the time. However, for Higginbotham, by simply calling attention to the fact that there were in fact black women with “class” and who were worthy of respect, the politics of respectability also called out the inherent problem with racial and gendered subordination. The politics of respectability was shaped by the concerns of black middle-class women in reaction to white supremacist notions about the morality and worth of black women specifically and black people more broadly. Arguably the politics of respectability was about something else as well: the black middle-class not wanting to be mistaken for working-class black people. This would have had much to do with the way intraracial hierarchies would position those who were closer to white norms and behaviors as superior 124

to those who were farther away. As the politics of respectability took a firm hold within progressive racial politics it would position the black middle-class and elite as the moral arbiters of the black community, policing the borders of black respectability and arguably, it policed these borders in service to white capitalist heteropatriarchy (hooks 1996, Marable 1983).

3. What's so queer about ratchet?

Often depicted as falling outside scripts of both heterosexuality and patriarchal ideals,

African Americans are at once figured as aberrantly heterosexual and persistently nonheteronormative (Ferguson 2000, 420, 2004). The infamous Moynihan Report interpreted matriarchal family structures, fictive kin networks, high rates “out of wedlock” births, and low rates of black women getting married as “problems” plaguing the “Black Community"

(Moynihan 1965). In arguing that black women were socially and economically positioned to emasculate the black man (Spillers 1987), black women were positioned as the primary reason why black people have been unable to be viewed as respectable (Smith 1991, 91). Comparing black families to the “average,” or white American family, despite our cultural differences and the persistent effects of racism, is effectively comparing those things they call peaches in cans at the grocery store to actual Georgia peaches. Nonetheless, black middle-class ideologies rooted in the politics of respectability frequently point to the same evidence of our differences as “crises” in the “Black Community.” The politics of respectability demonstrates one of the many ways that African Americans have been engaged in symbolic and cultural struggle to prove that they too can be “normal” (Ferguson 2000). If the politics of respectability would seek to rectify the

“problems” of African American families starting with black women, then the black ratchet

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imaginary would seem to work against this logic. For Pickens (2014) ratchet performances have an oppositional relationship to progressive racial politics.

The ratchet imaginary has no desire to participate in narratives of racial progression or social uplift; instead, it articulates a desire for individuality regardless of the ideas and wants of a putative collective. It functions as a tertiary space in which one can perform a racialized and gendered identity without adhering to the prescriptive demands of either. (Pickens 2014, 4)

Pickens identifies the ratchet imaginary as being a space where racialized and gendered identity can be performed outside of the normative prescriptions. For the ratchet woman then, her presence and her success call into question the very tenants of the politics of respectability which are based on the assumption that if a black female subject acts right, then and only then, can she expect to be treated with respect, and thus be successful. Certainly, as Pickens (2014) argues, the continued propagation of images of black female subjects who are ratchet, Karrine Steffans, self- described hip-hop “video vixen,” Tamar Braxton, reality television star and sister of R&B legend

Toni Braxton, and the girlfriends and mistresses on the reality television show Love and Hip-

Hop “reinforce dominant and racist views of black female sexuality” (Pickens 2014, 7).

However, I depart from Pickens (2014) where she suggests that the ratchet individual is solely concerned with her individual uplift (Pickens 2014, 7). In other words, a black woman’s desire for individuality and self-determination outside of structures which silence her—be they based on racist views of black female sexuality or be they grounded in a set of assimilationist racial and sexual politics—is a matter of collective and political importance. In expounding upon ratchet’s lack of respectability, Stallings cites The Queer Art of Failure where Halberstam argues that

“under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world” (Halberstam 2011, 2). Through “the performance of the failure to be respectable, 126

uplifting, and a credit to the race,” the Black Ratchet Imagination undoes discourses of black sexual politics that posit ratchet individuals and ratchet ways of being as “the promotion of failure or respectability” based on normative, and fixed notions of what it means to succeed by being normal (Stallings 2013, 136). That said, ratchet is both individual and collective and points out the limits of a politics of respectability. For as Pickens points out, the most ratchet of woman often have the “spotlight” and attention from both black and white people. Characters such as

Cookie Lyon, played by Taraji P. Henson on Fox’s Empire capture the imagination of white and blacks, and even if for different reasons, what these images do is point to the fascination, fear, love and hate of all black women’s bodies. Dismissing these images within a politics of respectability elides the more complicated work that they do. Therefore, here I consider the way the politics of respectability, as it plays out within black queer women’s politics in D.C., demonstrates the homonormative strivings of the black queer middle-class subject. Participating discursively in the politics of respectability is one way that black women become invested in the very systems that are implicated in the construction of racist and sexist assumptions of black women’s sexuality. Following Duggan (2004), homonormativity as a politic, not unlike the politics of respectability “does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption” (Duggan 2004, 50). To those who participate in the twin discourses of the politics of respectability and homonormativity, ratchet operates as tool of disciplining and regulating black women’s behavior (Pickens 2014, 15). In scene space, the question of who is and what constitutes ratchet is a struggle over which configurations of race, class, gender, and sexuality

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are most legitimate. It places BQW in the center of ongoing debates and concerns over who gets to determine what are and what are not legitimate forms of black female sexuality.

The first part of this chapter presents examples of how the terms "ratchet" and

"professional" were defined and the kinds of competing discourses that traveled with those definitions. The second part of this chapter examines an ethnographic moment I had in what might be described as a ratchet BQW scene space, a local strip club that hosts a monthly lesbian party. Lastly, I offer a brief discussion of the way black queer female bodies circulate in ratchet hip-hop music, considering how the ways that BQW define ratchet speaks to the struggle for black queer female subjects to be incorporated into the black middle-class imaginary. In analyzing the role of ratchet discourse in the Scene, I hope to demonstrate the individual and collective processes of BQW working out their position within the complex structure of racial and sexual politics.

4. The Divide: Ratchet and Professional

Amber, 33, grew up in Cleveland, OH and after high school went to college at Ohio

State. After graduating, she moved to Minnesota where she lived until moving to D.C. in 2008 for graduate school at American University. She had visited D.C. prior to moving, and was familiar with Lace, the only black lesbian club in the city. She also had previous connections, but said that she used Meetup.com, a popular social media website, to connect with other black gay and lesbian women in the area. Citing two large Meetup Groups for black LGBT women in the area, Amber said that she began to go to events and connect with the women she met through

Meetup.com. These connections serving as the foundation for her black LGBT social network of whom there were none among her classmates and friends from work.

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Of her leisure time in BQW scene space, Amber described, like others, the primacy of house parties. Amber explained that she had a general distaste for house parties in D.C., because of the expectation that guests were supposed to bring something. Where she was from making sure the guests were comfortable and taken care of was the primary responsibility of the party’s host. For her, having to bring something as a guest did not produce a particularly warm or inviting environment, and didn’t follow the rules of hospitality that she was used to. I asked

Amber to tell me about other places that she liked to hang out in D.C., and she immediately mentioned a party at Aqua Club and Lounge (located in Northeast D.C.) which occasionally hosts a BQW scene space organized by Onyx Entertainment. In Example 5.1, Amber makes three discursive moves that are particularly relevant to an analysis of class in scene space. She describes aspects of the scene space created at Aqua that mark the space as ratchet, and as the previous chapters have argued about the way BQW orient toward the familiar in scene space, she points out those aspects of herself which position her as belonging to the ratchet scene space at

Aqua. Lastly, she defines ratchet and provides clues to how hers and other definitions circulate within scene space.

Example 5.1 - Amber, “The Divide”

01 NL: Tell me about Aqua. 02 Well, first off, if you gonna have strippers, I'm need to be able to see them. 03 You can't see strippers on the floor. 04 Let me say, I definitely live in this.. 05 My grandparents, my father’s parents are very educated. 06 My mother’s parents are.. um, 07 I don't think my grandparents, well my mother’s siblings 08 I don't think any of them have a college degree. 09 So I've always lived in this divide of 10 I see rings on every finger, 11 and I know you're in public housing. 12 So I've always lived just on this cusp of everything and it's kinda weird.

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13 And so I kinda still bask in that. 14 Where I'm like, Imma go to Busboys and I'm going to have tomato soup 15 and I'm do a research [project] and I'm going to kick it, 16 but in the same sense I wanna walk out here with my Jordan’s on and my hat 17 and I want to look gangsta like, per se. 18 I've always just had this divide. 19 And so Aqua at moments would give me what I need, 20 to be like, "Okay I got enough ratchetness." 21 People dancing and twerking sweaty and hot, 22 you sliding on the floor. 23 You know probably you shouldn't be there 24 somebody probably gone fight, 25 and there might be some gun shots 26 but I love it. 27 And then in the same sense, 28 I want to go to events like yesterday at the HRC [there was an] event, 29 you know it’s going to be nice, 30 where you know people are going to behave themselves. And all those things. 31 So I've always just the divide. 32 Sometimes I just need it. 33 NL: What is ratchet? 34 Amber: What is ratchet? Ooo. What is ratchet? 35 Ratchet is something that can embarrass you if it was seen in the wrong context. 36 That's what I think ratchet is. Just embarrassment. 37 Um, at moments it can be seen as.. 38 Ignorant. ignorant behavior, or ignorant circumstances, 39 but that just depends on who you're asking and what the moment is. 40 Is it ratchet to have strippers at the club? 41 Probably, if you're at a really sophisticated ball gown club 42 you probably don't any strippers at the club, 43 but if you're at Aqua and it's $20 to get in 44 and its a showcase its okay to have strippers at the club. 45 I don't know. I think we all need that though. I think that… what I've noticed, 46 I know in Columbus that's what we did. That's where we went. 47 There wasn't an upper, higher level of elite I guess you could say 48 when it came to the black lesbian crowd or whatnot. 49 Everyone was kinda just cool with everything. 50 Rather than here, I feel like there's, there's levels to this. 51 Hands down. And Aqua is probably on the lower level. 52 I don't know about Lace, but some other places 53 I probably never been to are up here [gesturing: each hand held flat and parallel to the other on different planes, one higher than the other]. 54 I think to go to the Stadium on a regular basis 55 you at the high level cause you gone drop some money 130

56 to get into Stadium and the people. 57 So, I think ratchet is just something you might be embarrassed about, 58 that you might be embarrassed if you were to tell somebody 59 who wouldn't necessarily be in that circle. 60 I got a little ratchet in me. 61 I support it.

Amber begins by critiquing the party at Aqua: “first off, if you gonna have strippers, I'm need to be able to see them” (5.1:02). Her critique is not about the presence of strippers, but about her being unable to see them because they perform on the dance floor rather than a stage.

According to Amber it wasn’t necessarily ratchet to have strippers at Aqua where you had paid

$20 which was a premium amount for most BQW scene spaces and they advertised an exotic dance showcase (5.1:40-44). In D.C. exotic dance performances where women dance for other women oftentimes took place in the midst of the partygoers—not on stages (Carnes 2009). This is in part because many of these parties did not take place in strip clubs. Even when they did, I noticed that some performers, particularly doms (masculine presenting women), would begin their performance in the midst of the crowd making their way to the stage. Many of my informants discussed strippers and lip sync performers (akin to drag performances) as regular features of BQW scene spaces in D.C. during the late 1980s well through the early 2000s. Carnes has argued that exotic dance performances, where black same-gender loving women dance for other black same-gender loving women, produce a particular kind of relationship between the performer and the audience effectively queering the “traditional” relationship set up in a strip club where women perform for a heteromasculinist gaze on a stage. In contrast to Carnes (2009),

I am not interested in whether or not BQW were “queering” exotic dance as much as I am interested in how BQW put ratchet sexuality and sensibilities to work in scene spaces. What was

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“ratchet” for Amber wasn’t that there were strippers at Aqua, but that she was unable to see the strippers because the organizers held a dance showcase without a stage.

Beginning at line 5.1:04 Amber layers within her evaluation of Aqua a discussion about what she calls “the divide” which both explains why she was at Aqua in the first place and why she evaluates it the ways she does. Amber explains that she comes from a racially segregated city and multi-classed family background such that she describes living in a divide (5.1:09). On one side, family members lived in public housing and lacked college educations (5.1:06-08). On the other they were “very educated” (5.1:05) and wore “rings on every finger” (5.1:10). This divide

Amber describes is very much a clash between the sensibilities of the black working-class and of the black lower-middle class. This same divide effects the way she understands and navigates the

BQW Scene in D.C.

Karyn Lacy’s study of the black middle-class in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. is instructive here. One of the things that she notes about the spatial practices of the black middle- class is that constant movement between white and black “worlds,” characterizes their everyday lives (Lacy 2007, 151). The black queer middle-class too spends much of their time moving between sets of racialized and sexualized social spaces each with their own unique sets of rules of behavior. The LGBT scene in D.C. is racially segregated and segregated along lines of class.

The racial, gendered, and class based politics of scene spaces has been well documented (Bell and Valentine 1995, Binnie 2004, Browne and Bakshi 2011, McDermott 2011, Visser 2008a).

Amber’s ability and willingness to perform in a way associated with her presumably more educated, and more financially fit side of the family (“rings on every finger”), rather than the undereducated and poor side of the family allows her entrée into homonormative white space.

She cites the Human Rights Campaign (5.1:28) and Busboys and Poets (5.1:14), an upscale 132

coffee house that caters to D.C.’s professional hipster elite, as spaces that contrasts with the party at Aqua. It is her “other” side that allows her to enjoy Aqua, to wear Jordan sneakers, and a fitted baseball cap to produce a “gangsta” aesthetic all of which are linked to the negative images of lower-class blacks (5.1:15-16). Aqua was a space where as Amber says, “you know probably you shouldn’t be there” (5.1:23) because none of its features follows a set of homonormative/middle-class/white norms (Stallings 2013). However, there was something uniquely rejuvenating about ratchet space; not being able to see the strippers’ performances, potentially being witness to a fight or worse, the dancing, the twerking, and otherwise “bad” black behavior, would give her what she needed (5.1:19). Amber basks in is this divide—the play between the two, and more specifically in having the ability to act right when necessary and to act up when necessary.

According to Amber, ratchet is located within three interconnected frameworks. First, ratchet is located within a set of optics. Ratchet is about the potential to be embarrassed if your behavior seen out of context (5.1:35). This means that ratchet greatly depends on who is doing the looking, and where the ratchet behavior occurs (5.1:39-43). Second, there is a hierarchy of

BQW scene spaces where on the bottom are spaces seen as ratchet. And at the top, at least for

Amber, are spaces where one is expected to spend a lot of money, like the strip club Stadium for example (5.1:50-56). For most of the women in my sample, the “Ladies Day” parties hosted by

Onyx Entertainment at Stadium would be characterized as a part of the “ratchet scene.” For

Amber though it constituted a space where one had to have money in order to enjoy such spaces regularly. Lastly, Amber describes ratchet as a necessary suspension of the rules; something that we all need (5.1:45). While there might be levels of status among scene spaces as Amber suggests, I found that the different scene spaces, “ratchet” or “professional,” were not mutually 133

exclusive. During my fieldwork, I often saw the same people across various kinds of spaces. I would see the same person one week at a happy hour catered to professional women, and the next week I'd see them at Stadium. It is clear that Amber was not alone in seeing “ratchet” scene spaces as rejuvenating. I spoke to women in ratchet scene spaces who were there specifically because they wanted to dance, have fun, and “get their life”13 after long weeks at work. All three of these frames were evoked across my sample. In what follows, I provide further discussion of each pulling examples from formal interviews.

5. The Optics of Class in Scene Space

At the time of our interview, Timi was 32 years old. The daughter of Nigerian immigrants, Timi is first generation American, born and raised in Maryland, halfway between

Baltimore and Washington, D.C. She owns an apartment in Northeast D.C. and explained how she was able to purchase it with help from local non-profit organizations, because upon returning to D.C. after living in New York City, she says, “I was broke.” Her need for assistance in purchasing a home and her general lack of economic capital at that time, did not stop her from identifying with middle-class notions of propriety and respectability. She viewed herself as a woman with class, and so in the example that follows Timi describes her dislike about scene space in the early 2000s.

Example 5.2 - Timi, “Southeast Tracy”

01 Like .. that was there was al=ways this assumption that for

13 A slang term made popular by Tamar Braxton in the reality television show Braxton Family Values meaning find, locate, and take possession of a reminder of the joys in life.

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02 the queer .. scene, boys .. or girls ... 03 no one's going to come out unless, you know, 04 some girl was dropping her panties on the floor. 05 Which I found . 06 Which my circle of friends found . 07 Like, you come to party, you're looking good and you're 08 looking sharp and then you . 11 Umm, so places like Datalist were exciting 12 … because they finally listened to us 13 .. what we had been saying. Like give us a 14 place, where all the women can meet. 15 Laid back. Chill and know that it’s about engaging 16 and you know, we don't have to come out 17 and see panties droppin.

Where ratchet looks a mess, professional looks sharp. Professional women not only know how to act, but they also act the part—dressing, behaving, and talking in ways that demonstrate their ability to be in various kinds of social space. Timi is a “professional” woman with particular tastes. “Professional” here refers not only to the type of work that that she and her friends do though it is likely in an office setting with business attire, but also to the kind of tastes and judgments that they have (Bourdieu 1984). Professional women were the antithesis to

“Southeast Tracy,” which she offers as a generalized caricature of a woman from Southeast D.C., an area of the city most noted for its working-class black population and high-crime rates. This is where Bourdieu’s notion of class is particularly helpful. If class were viewed as only a matter of economic capital, then it would not follow why Timi found “Southeast Tracy” (5.2:09) so off- putting. Instead, it is the volume and composition of Timi’s cultural, social, and symbolic capital which distinguish her from “Southeast Tracy” and others who might be similarly situated to her

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along lines of economic capital, but who do not perform in what she refers to here as

“professional” (Bourdieu 1984, 1986).

Timi found it “personally insulting” that it was assumed that she would not attend a party unless “some girl was dropping her panties on the floor” (5.2:04). Timi wants to be clear that she and her friends wanted a “professional place, where all the professional women can meet”

(5.2:13-14). Timi contrasts the professional women who are “looking sharp” (5.2:08) or well put together, with an image of “Southeast Tracy” dropping “her thong” (5.2:10), the naked body of an urban poor black women used in order to highlight her negative judgment of parties where stripping is viewed as out of place, as well as a black woman’s naked body. In so doing, Timi highlights the way both ratchet and professional are set within an optic of class distinction. She wanted to be in a space where her performance of black female sexuality was the primary organizing feature and could be seen. When referring to “Southeast Tracy” in line 4.2.09, Timi hyperbolized a black D.C. accent. The switch to this accent emphasizes her difference from

“Southeast Tracy,” by indexing Southeast Tracy’s hypersexual, undereducated, and underclass social position. While she doesn’t use the word “ratchet” here, Timi does use the image of

“Southeast Tracy” in much the same way—as an index finger to point out what was wrong with this hypersexualized performance of black lesbian sexuality.

6. Status and Hierarchy in the Production of BQW Scene Space

Jay produced the Intertwine party in the early 2000s at Datalist that Timi refers to in the example above and in Example 3.1. Below Jay describes her entertainment group’s strategies for cultivating the “professional” scene space for BQW in D.C.

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Example 5.3 - Jay, “Everybody didn’t get a flier”

01 You're like now thrown in a room with all these beautiful 02 progressive, gainfully employed women 03 it was different than what a Delta was bringing. 04 You know what I'm saying, so it was a different 05 type when a woman approached you at Intertwine compared to at the Delta, 06 you know 07 It'll be a little bit different 08 NL: @ 09 Jay: @ What, 10 "No. I'm not. Mmm mm. No, I learned to stop doing that." 11 NL: @ 12 And because we were going for certain type of women 13 Everyone didn't get a flier. 14 NL: So tell me about that? What kind of women were y'all looking for? 15 Jay: Definitely 24 and up. And we had a dress code. 16 Couldn't wear jeans. And then eventually we laxed on that, 17 to you had to pay extra to wear jeans. 18 And that was really done to prevent the dumb girls 19 who come up there with the pants sag gin' and… you couldn't wear baseball caps 20 Um, so eventually we became known as the boojie crowd. 21 Which I mean I can own it. But we did have a certain look. 22 And in four years we never had a fight.

Similar to Timi’s “Southeast Tracy,” Jay provides a colloquial rendering of the voice of a woman asking if she would buy her a drink at the Delta to distinguish the kind of space created at the Intertwine party. Being selective in the type of people they invited, and having a strict dress code that ensured that people were dressed in a way that would prompt their best behavior. In an effort to prevent the same kinds of crowd that might be seen at the

Delta, a black gay club in Northeast tucked in the basement of a small shopping center,

Jay’s group worked diligently to “prevent the dumb girls who come up there with the pants saggin” (5.3:07-08), these women presumably the source of fights and otherwise “bad,”

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“ghetto,” and “ratchet” behavior. Further, it is the distinction between the two spaces, the set of dispositions that divide them which are most important.

Jay describes the Intertwine party as a room full of “progressive, beautiful, gainfully employed women” (5.3:01-02). Delta on the other hand was different. They were the type of women who were bold enough to ask if a woman were going to buy her a drink, “You gone buy me a drink?” (5.3:06). They were young, and therefore presumably underemployed.

Also, they were the “dumb girls” who wore their pants sagging, common among young black men (5.3:18-19). The failure of the feminine women to act “ladylike” and the failure of the young masculine women to dress appropriately marked them as subjects who were not of the “boojie” crowd. According to the dress code, however, if they were willing to look the part of the “professional” woman, they could enter. Here, self-presentation was the disciplinary practice employed to get women to act right, and a willingness and ability to do so would have been required to gain access to what had been created as an exclusive kind of

BQW’s scene space.

Example 5.4 - Sade, “I Learned Pretty Quickly”

01 Cause I learned pretty quickly that I didn't like the ratchet scene. 02 Cause I would look at the flyers and they would just not appeal to me. 03 […] 04 Vicki is her name and she would do the Soft and Wet Afternoons […] 05 and it was just like stri=ppers and it was a lot of like girls who like 06 real it was like strict like strict dom-fem set up. They were real young, 07 and like the girls were like dudes and they would be like you know 08 imitating you know straight culture, where as at these other events 09 it was more of a mixture. Where as there were woman who had sort of. 10 you know felt comfortable in their skin, who were professional women 11 so you couldn't really wear a cap and stuff, you know, 12 you couldn't really do all that stuff. You could still wear a tie and 13 a bow tie, keep it professional but um, it was more that crowd 138

14 and that's where I felt more comfortable.

I did not prompt Sade's discussion of ratchet. Instead, we were talking about her entre into the Scene in D.C. and the kinds of spaces that she was going to after she had moved to D.C. from her hometown of New York City. Sade learned "quickly" she says that she did not like the “ratchet scene” (5.4:01). Sade describes the “ratchet scene” pointing to the particular objects and themes within the space: “strippers” (5.4:05), “strict-dom fem set up” (5.4:06), “young” (5.4:06), “girls were like dudes” (5.4:07), and an overall sense of the imitation of what she calls straight culture (5.4:09). This she contrasts to the elements of a

“professional” women’s event: “more of a mixture” (5.4:09), “comfortable in their skin”

(5.4:10), and you “couldn’t wear a cap and stuff” (5.4:11) but you could “wear a tie and bow tie, to keep it professional” (5.4:13). This is where she felt more comfortable. Similar to Jay’s discussion of the dress code, we see that for Sade, the optics of the ratchet scene were particularly unappealing. What’s interesting here is that she depicts the ratchet scene where “the girls were like dudes,” as a space where women were imitating “straight culture.” It is important to note that a strict dom-fem set up doesn’t necessarily go away in the “professional” women’s environment. In the BQW professional scene space baseball caps are replaced by bowties (5.4:13). Later in our discussion, Sade talked about the tendency in D.C. for gender presentations to be polarized a sentiment shared by many of the women in my sample. What is most interesting about Sade’s evaluation here is its similarity with lesbian-feminist disparaging views of black gay women’s feminine and masculine gender presentations, most popular in the 1970s (Moore 2006).

In her study of gender presentations across working class and middle-class lesbians in New York City, Mignon Moore found three different kinds of gender presentations 139

among black gay women as opposed to the dichotomous “butch-femme” that most often was assumed to be norm in black gay women’s cultures. The first, femmes or feminine women, are described as wearing dresses and skirts, form fitting clothes, low cut shirts, blouses that reveal cleavage, jewelry, and high heels. Moore makes clear that when she uses “femme” she means only to discuss the way women presented themselves aesthetically. That is being femme did not relate to personality or gender ideologies (Moore 2006, 124). The second type of gender presentation was the gender-blender, who as the name suggests borrows elements from both masculine and feminine styles to create unique looks (Moore 2006,

124). Sometimes labeled “soft-studs” in D.C., they preferred to wear women’s clothing but in less feminine ways. Alternatively, they might opt to pair men’s wear with less masculine, or form fitting pieces. In some cases these women might wear a little make-up. While related to androgynous gender presentations, Moore (2006) draws a distinction between minority women’s “gender-blender” styles since the point is not to de-emphasize gender, but to highlight specific parts of a woman’s masculinity and femininity in ways that are unique to her. Within the mainstream, these women may not be read as lesbians, due to the increased variation of women’s dress. They may simply look like “tomboys” or women who are simply less feminine. Lastly, Moore (2006) describes the transgressive gender presentation. These women tended to wear men’s clothes and shoes exclusively. Their clothes were never form fitting. In D.C., these women would be called “doms” or “studs,” and in white lesbian communities, “butch.”

Similar to the findings in my sample, Moore (2006) found that class greatly influenced the way that gender presentations were discussed within the women in her study.

Some middle-class and highly educated women tended to avoid labels of their gender 140

presentation such as “femme” and “dom,” and if they did not avoid the labels, they would discuss “toning it down” for work, opting to wear women’s clothing even if in slightly less feminine ways. Black women have often felt it necessary to silence certain parts of their sexuality in order to be viewed as acceptable and respectable (Hammonds 1994). As Moore puts it rather succinctly:

In the case of nonfeminine lesbians, cultural notions of black female sexuality may inhibit their freedom of gender expression in certain contexts and disrupt the image of middle-class respectability they have achieved through other symbols of their socioeconomic mobility. As black women, many feel that they have to work harder to be accepted in mainstream society, and admitting a nonfeminine gender display categorizes them as “other” in yet another way by confirming pejorative conceptualizations of the black bulldagger and other stereotypes of black female sexuality (Collins 2000). (Moore 2006, 131)

Among several of black middle-class women there was a particularly harsh critique of “femme” and “dom” gender presentations associated with hip-hop youth culture. In

“dom” presentations it was “caps” or baseball hats (5.1:16; 5.4:11), “sagging jeans”

(5.3:08), and the “gangsta” aesthetic that Amber describes (5.1:17). Black gay women’s appropriation of an aesthetic propagated by black and Latino men, especially those associated with hip-hop cultures, might have been viewed as “imitating” a kind of masculinity that was disrespectful to women (Moore 2006). Masculine presenting women, such as Jay, distanced themselves from these versions of “dom” which might index low- class and otherwise unprofessional ways of being. Femme presentations that were viewed as inappropriate were those where women showed “too much” skin, wore “too much” jewelry,

“too much” weave, “too many” trendy clothes at once, and heels that were “too high”. They lacked restraint or discretion, and sometimes borrowed from the styles of famous “ratchet” women such as rapper Nicki Minaj. These were the women of the ratchet scene, and these

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were the women Timi, Sade, and Jay wanted to distance themselves from, while Amber thought of herself as belonging both to the ratchet scene and the professional scene because of her ability to transform. Below, I draw attention to the need for the “professional” black middle-class queer subject to transform.

Example 5.5 - Renee, “Couldn’t Transform”

01 I didn't like Fab, just because I felt like the women there 02 weren't the kind of women I was looking for. 03 NL: Describe what they were like. 04 R: They were a little young, a little bit ratchet. Um [@], 05 not that-- not polished at all. Just kind of party type. And ^I mean 06 I know that the kind of people who go to clubs are party types but they 07 were-- I just remember feeling like, "Uh, I prolly won't come back here 08 cause I don't feel like this is a good kinda of like ^pool for me to be in." 09 […] 10 NL: When you say they were kind of ratchet can you tell me what you mean by that? 11 R: I mean, they just didn't seem like the type of women who could.. Uh 12 transform into other environments.. You know what I mean.. 13 And I think… ^Yeah, I mean, that's kinda all I could say. They just didn't 14 seem like the kind of polished you know [2s pause] 15 career.. type of women.. And ^you can't really know that 16 without talking to somebody, but I didn't get the vibe that this was 17 the best DC had to offer in terms of lesbians.

Renee makes two evaluations of particular interest: (1) the scene space—Fab Lounge, and (2) her overall impression of the scene based on her assessment of the women there.

According to Fairclough “how one represents the world, to what one commits oneself, e.g. one's degree of commitment to truth, is part of how one identifies oneself, necessarily in relation to others with whom one is interacting” (Fairclough 2003, 166). Renee not liking Fab meant that unlike the women there who did like Fab, she was not “the party type” (5.5:06), she was not

“ratchet,” and she was able to “transform”, being flexible in the way that she manipulated the

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city scape—“transform into other environments” (5.5:12). I draw attention to this notion of being able to transform because it resonates with the way Amber described her own movements through the city space. It required a transformation from someone who could go to an HRC event, and then later go to the strip-club. The constant need for, and, perhaps, desire of BQW to move in and out of various kinds of social spaces was unique to women in my sample who lived in what Amber describes as the divide, of having family that was working-class and themselves being upwardly mobile. The difference between them, however, is that Amber desired the movement between the spaces, and Renee, only the spaces that were sophisticated and

“professional” where there were women with careers (5.5:15). It is clear that Renee does not seek to denigrate the women she’s referring to here as “ratchet,” but she did feel that this was not the right place for her to be. Further, “it was not the best that D.C. had to offer in terms of lesbians” (5.5:17). This was the most common way that I saw women discuss the ratchet scene, as a collection of parties that simply did not reflect their interests, and was therefore at the bottom of their hierarchy of scene spaces. Nonetheless, ratchet scene spaces were the most common parties and as some of my informants made clear, it allowed for a sense of relaxation and release from normative constructions of their being and behavior:

Example 5.6 - Anna, “Sometimes You Need Ratchet”

01 NL: Have you ever heard of the term ratchet? 02 Anna: Yep, yep. 03 NL: What does that mean? And what is its relationship to kinda like, 04 black queer scene stuff. 05 Anna: Yeah, so. I've heard the term ratchet. 06 I've may uttered it on an occasion or two. Um... 07 Ratchet has its place. I feel like sometimes you want to be a little ratchet. 08 You want to go out and not care how your hair looks, 09 what clothes you have on, 143

10 or if you have a stank attitude or not. 11 Um... I think that um... 12 Sometimes ratchet has a longer um has more longevity 13 in the party scene than boojie or posh or just a regular bar, 14 because you know that the drama will probably be up. 15 Maybe a fight or two. Somebody getting cursed out possibly. 16 Somebody wearing something where you're like, 17 "Ooo girl, do you see what she got on?" @ 18 "Oh my god! How she leave the house like that?" @@ 19 Um, I mean when I think about what I would consider ratchet 20 those are the events and parties that are still going on. 21 The people who who are involved in a ratchet nightclub or night, 22 um, I think have a little more, I don't want to say loyalty, 23 but um, they maybe have more invested. Um, 24 they might be closer to the club owner, 25 than someone whose doing it on a strictly business deal. 26 I feel like the nights I've gone to that were quote unquote more upscale, um, 27 those parties are based off of contracts with the club 28 and you know making things appear on paper proper 29 and you know giving women an expectation of a level of service 30 and attention to detail. 31 […] 32 Anna: I mean, it's funny to me because 33 everyone says they don't want to go to a ratchet party. 34 By everyone I mean everyone I know. 35 Everyone I roll with. But at the same time... 36 those are the same people who like are going to be fickle if it rains 37 and not go out. Those are the same people who 38 if something better comes up, if someone decides 39 they want to go bowling instead, or... 40 Go away to Deep Creek for the weekend, they're down for that. 41 You have a lot of people talking about other cities' Black Pride, or 42 Women's Weekends that are ratchet, ^but you're going to them.^

Anna was a producer of scene spaces in D.C. and had been throwing parties since 2004, but was far less active throwing parties in the past 2 to 3 years. Her entertainment group was among those that hosted Ladies Takeover events. Before defining ratchet, Anna, like Amber,

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suggests that it is something that can be had—something that at certain times you may actually want (5.6:05). And like Amber, Anna suggests it has an optic component—one that operates as a lack of inhibition of certain codes of behavior, specifically those associated with appearance. So women might want to be in a place that, in contrast to the Intertwine party where there was a dress code, they could go out and “not care what your hair looks like, or what clothes you have on” (5.6:08-09), or worry about your overall disposition, “if you have a stank attitude or not”

(5.6:10). These things, Anna implies, are necessary from time to time, as mechanisms of release.

When discussing what one can expect of ratchet parties, Anna contrasts ratchet parties with

"quote unquote upscale parties" (5.6:26)

Anna distinguishes between ratchet and boojie parties, noting that these ratchet parties tend to last longer and be more solvent. The expectation is that these parties also have the potential to be sites of violence, both verbal and physical. The people at these parties may also be dressed in ways that may be thought of as inappropriate, like the femme and doms discussed by

Timi, Jay, and Sade, prompting such sentiments such as “Ooh girl, do you see what she got on?”

(5.6:17). These parties, where you don’t have to worry about what you’re wearing or your attitude or your behavior, tended to have a more stable following. My own research suggests that these parties were certainly the most attended, but they were also the most likely to change locations at the last minute, they were the most likely to charge a hefty cover, and accept cash only at the door rather than accept credit cards in advance.

As Anna explains, the biggest difference between a boojie party and a ratchet party, is that at boojie parties—where perception and expectations are being managed; where the optics of middle-class values must be evident—there are formalities to work out between party promoters and club owners based on strict contracts which very likely include bar minimums and 145

percentages on entrance fees. These kinds of parties, more upscale parties, often require lots of people to be there to make it worthwhile for both the club owner and the promoter, but were often in danger of not being able to achieve the attendance. As a result, the parties were usually one-off or short lived. Anna would go on to explain that the middle-class, more professional crowd was especially fickle—making it less worthwhile to promote parties especially for them, precisely because they don’t go out as often, were more likely to balk at the sight of rain (line

5.6:36), or are the first to do something else if the opportunity arose. While they professed not to want to go to a ratchet party in D.C., they would travel to Black Pride or Women's Weekends in other cities that were deemed ratchet mudding their own distinction between ratchet and professional.

There was something especially funny going on as Anna points out (5.6:32). In fact, the both of us shared laughs throughout much of our conversation, because we knew that the same people who said they did not like ratchet parties still went to them, or had gone to them in the past and had a good time (5.6:06-07). The real difference, it seemed, was in how one perceived themselves in relation to everyone else there. Statements like, "Ooo girl, do you see what she got on?" (5.6:17), functioned as discursive practices that reinforced the distinction between those people, objects, and scene spaces that were ratchet and those individuals who did not perceive themselves to be ratchet even if they sometimes went to ratchet scene spaces. The logic goes something like this: "I can be professional and go to a ratchet spot, but if I see you in a ratchet spot, you just ratchet."

Seeking further clarity about the distinction between ratchet and professional, or boojie

(its loosely derogatory synonym), I asked Anna to tell me what a boojie party in D.C. looked like, and her description is told in the form of ‘advice.’ She describes what I might expect in 146

being in such a place, and in so doing describes the accouterments of black queer middle- classness.

Example 5.7 - Anna, “A Boojie Party”

01 NL: What does a boojie party look like? 02 Anna: Everyone's going to be coming straight from work, 03 it'll probably be a happy hour. 04 It's going to be networking there. 05 Um, there's going to be some dancing 06 but not too much because everyone still has on their work clothes. 07 If you are dancing there, you're doing it to impress someone. 08 It may or may not be the person you're with. @@ Um, 09 you should probably bring business cards. 10 You might maybe want to introduce yourself with the Ph.D. 11 "Doctor, doctor, actually." 12 You're definitely going to ask someone what they do. 13 Where they live? 14 NL: That’ll probably be the first thing that you ask. 15 Anna: "Oh, so what do you? Oh were you at” 16 insert another boojie party 17 or based on their age maybe, "Did you used to go to?" 18 insert another boojie party that no longer exists 19 because you stopped going to it and then they stopped having it. 20 @ You're probably going to make sure you reference someone 21 you might know in common 22 who maybe has a fictional elevated status in the community to you. 23 "So I think I know you through" insert that person here. 24 @@@ Are any of these resonating with you? 25 NL: @@ 26 Anna: Yeah, so... 27 NL: So there's less pretense involved when you're dealing with a non-boojie party? 28 Anna: Yeah, and also like but... at the... 29 it's funny because you would think that at a boojie party 30 you would make more money because people are trying to impress each other, 31 but really the ratchet party is probably going to bring in more bar sales 32 because people are going to pop bottles for no reason. 33 NL: @

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34 Anna: Uh huh! You're gonna be at the bar with a bottle. 35 You know, get Moet, for no reason except that it's Saturday, 36 and we're alive. Yeah. 37 Meanwhile at the boojie party, 38 everyone's planning to pay their mortgage tomorrow. @@ 39 They're like, "Absolutely not. You know what I could do with that money? 40 I could reseal my roof" @ 41 NL: “Get new tires for this car I'm driving.” 42 Anna: Exactly @. It's fun. It's all fun.

Anna's description of a boojie party in Example 5.7 allows us to consider in more detail what I consider to be some of ratchet's antonyms: "boojie," "classy" and "professional." The first thing Anna notes is that a boojie party will likely be a happy hour. The Intertwine at Datalist, for example, was a happy hour that ended around 9pm when the club’s regular, mostly heterosexual black patrons would come in and “re-claim” the space. Drink prices are cheaper during happy hour, Anna reminds me, but also around the time that one might be getting off of work therefore, they'd have the clothes to prove that they do indeed work in an office setting. My field notes suggests that "What do you do?" was high on the list of questions that I was asked when introducing myself to new women in professional scene spaces, especially those who had lived in D.C. for more than a year. In contrast, among those who had recently moved to the area and working-class black women, I was hardly ever asked what I did for a living. Instead, I was asked about where I hung out. Framed in the context of "networking" as Anna and Amber do, they felt that asking about someone's career or “what they do” was really a means of sorting out the amount of cultural capital that one might have, their status in the Scene, and sorting out the value of their connection to you. Networking appears here in Anna’s discussion as a suspect form of building relationships. Amber would also describe her suspicion around the term ‘networking,’ and the difficulty in building relationships that felt as if they were based on insincerity. In lines

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5.7:20-23 Anna provides an example of "networking" through namedropping, and we share a laugh. Anna ends by saying that it “is all fun.” Indeed, while there are differences among the kinds of parties and the ways in which they maintain boundaries of class behavior, Anna’s description of ratchet parties and boojie parties displays a deep complexity in the nature of black queer working-class sensibilities and black queer middle-class, upwardly mobile sensibilities.

At first glance it would seem that these kinds of scene spaces exist as opposites, but as evidenced by both Anna and Amber, “we all need a little ratchet some times.” It is not just black queer working-class people who are at ratchet parties. On the contrary, there are women who are middle-class who are there too, and it is precisely those women who are upwardly mobile, but whose families might be working-class—that often find themselves enjoying the comfort and sense of release that comes with being in ratchet scene spaces. Ratchet scene spaces offer BQW the unique opportunity to create spaces that allow for their unique self-authorship outside of the normative prescriptions of “proper” behavior. They not only get to bend the rules, but they also get to bend and twist other normative formations. In the ethnographic moment I analyze in the next section, we see how the black ratchet imagination allows BQW to make claims about their desire and agency within the mainstream context of black space.

As I have described them both ratchet and professional are deployed by BQW to do what sociologists would call boundary work, what sociolinguists call stance taking, and what linguistic anthropologists have referred to as working out issues of moral geography. In Example 5.2

"classy" was used by Timi in concert with "professional" to refer to the kinds of scene spaces that were finally beginning to emerge in the early 2000s as a response to the general displeasure of BQW who did not identify with "Southeast Tracy." As professionals, they wanted to be scene spaces where the spatial boundary would reflect the symbolic boundaries between the differently 149

classed BQW in the community. What was desirable in a professional scene space was knowledge of and proper displays of decorum and respectability, evidence of a career, rather than just a job. Having a job was appropriate only if it was paired with a long-term academic pursuit such as working toward a doctoral degree as long as you could answer questions such as

"So, what are you planning on doing with that?" in a way that demonstrated the pursuit of the degree would lead to gainful employment in the long-run. You had to be "going somewhere," and you had to be able to demonstrate that even if you lived in a "divide," you had the correct configurations of economic, cultural, and social capital to transform into professional scene spaces.

7. Ratchet BQW Scene Space

A simple, but heavy beat, a melodic baseline, and an infectious hook best characterize ratchet music. Ratchet music often makes references to strip clubs, strippers, even going so far as to mention specific names of certain strippers; sometimes there is a discussion of particular sexual acts, there is always mention of money being exchanged for sex, tipping women for their service, reference to general “bad,” inappropriate behavior like illicit drug use, public drunkenness and hypersexual Black women, often whom have sex with other women. What remains constant in ratchet music is a critique of boojie, black middle-class notions of propriety, and an insistence on the hypersexual body.

It is not a coincidence that songs intended for strippers to dance to or for women to dance like strippers to, frequently reference women who have sex with women. Stripping and the strip club are important locales within the constellation of BQW’s scene space, and there are a number of famous stud acts in and around the DMV area with frequent showcases in and around the city.

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I would go so far as to say that black lesbian and bisexual women are important figures in most strip clubs. In D.C., Stadium, a popular strip club in the world of strippdom, plays host to a

Ladies Day party every month. Several of the venue’s dancers are lesbian and bisexual women.

A Black Pride Celebration in Atlanta, for example, would not be complete without a tour of its most famous strip clubs, all of which “go lesbian” for the day to host the black lesbians who travel far and wide—to see some of their most popular performers, many of whom are bisexual and lesbians themselves. All of my informants who lived in D.C. during the early 2000s, describe the average club environment as featuring performances by women who were stripping for other women (see Carnes 2009).

The strip club, like hip-hop pornography, signifies “the benefits of heterosexist playerdom, proffers a sense of luxury, abundance, and sexual possibility that is consciously figured within a sexual marketplace” (Miller-Young 2007, 275). The sexual marketplace of hip- hop assumes particular relationships between men and women, men and men, and women and women. In the sexual marketplace of hip-hop, women are typically vying for men’s attention according to mediated rules of “the game.” This game is not one-sided; it is not a game where women lack agency or where they are foreclosed possibilities of receiving pleasure through the enactment of hypersexuality. In what follows, I examine what happens to hip-hop, its attendant discourses of black women’s sexualities, and black queer women’s deployment of hypersexuality when they enter scene space.

I wore my blue button up and a vest, tight blue jeans, a pair of boots and a black blazer with the "Elixher" button. When I arrived there wasn't anyone else coming into the venue and the bouncers were out front chatting apparently about a woman who had a bag of weed removed from her person by one of them. The security guy who frisked me was saying that it was illegal for her to be in possession of the weed in the first place, so she had better not come back for it. As he's frisking me--still carrying on the conversation with his fellow security/bouncer folks (about 4 of them) he said something like, "It's 151

March 2nd. I ain't letting nothing go in March." To which someone else responded, "You know what you should do. Take it and go sell it." I interjected that that was also illegal and what I would do if I were him was "smoke it." I said this in a hushed tone, gesturing that I was aware that this too would be illegal, but far less likely to get you in too much trouble. The security guy acted as if he'd misheard me. "What's that?" I repeated, at this point realizing that he was only feigning that he didn't' understand me. So I was like, "I mean, I wouldn't do that… I'm just saying." We shared a laugh and I proceeded inside with a smile on my face and a general amicable disposition. When I walked in, I noticed two women behind a glass counter. There were velvet ropes laced in the entrance, probably in case there was a larger crowd. It prevented you from walking directly into the space. There was also a separate entry way to the back of the club, probably the VIP section, where you had to wait to be seated. One of the two women, whose name I inquired about--Shayla--had a head wrap on and a noticeable DC accent. She said, "Oh my god. You are so pretty. And little like me." I said thank you and asked if they were the ladies that organized the event. Shayla responded that they were apart of the crew, but that I should speak with Pooh and another name I didn’t catch, but they were the two people who put it on and they'd be back to the front later if I wanted to come back. I assured her that I didn't want anything weird, but she said, "I have an open mind." I paid the $15 entrance fee and changed out $20, getting singles. I walked in, about 8pm at this point and the space was fairly packed. I was surprised at how dense the club was.

Excerpt from field notes March 2, 2013

There were four poles at Stadium. One at the center of the club was the main stage. There were two bars on either side of the main stage, and on the other side of the two bars there were two smaller stages. Not only were there traditional stripper poles on each of the stages, there were also a network of poles built into the ceiling above the main stage and just above the bars and two smaller stages to accommodate more acrobatic performances as well as “Coyote Ugly” inspired moves on the bar itself. The DJ booth was a nest facing the main stage. As it was situated above the main floor, I imagined that the DJs had a birds-eye view of the entire club.

There was also a stage to the right of the DJ booth directly in front of a U-shaped booth, presumably set up for small parties. On the other side of this booth was a door leading to a back patio area with outdoor furniture used for smoking. The VIP areas were situated behind the bars, main stage, and its two smaller stages. There were also even more private spaces with 4’1/2”

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partitions behind the VIP area, presumably the club’s “Champaign rooms” for private lap dances.

Tables and booths with tiny square shaped end tables lined the perimeter of the club facing the stages.

In addition to Stadium’s regular performers the Ladies Day party featured erotic dance performances by visiting performers some of whom were “studs.” I noted that some women were closely watching the performances, some were tipping, some were not, others were chatting and flirting, drinking, trying to get the attention of the bartender, and a few people are dancing. With a drink in my hand, I migrated from one side of the club to the other. I walked around getting a sense of the space, and speaking to women that I knew, making small talk when possible, moving along when it was not. The Ladies Day party is a noticeable mix of women paying careful attention to the women dancing on stage, and those who were only passively participating in watching the dancers. A person might shift from one mode of engagement to another based on the woman on stage, or the song that plays. What was apparent, however, from watching some women be generally at ease and others appear to have their focus and attention elsewhere than the stage, was that not every woman there had come to spend hard earned cash on dancers, and not everyone there seemed especially at ease. Some appeared to be there because their friends implored them to. On this particular night, there was no other party or event being hosted on the

Scene that I knew of. This means that if someone had plans to go out and visit with friends in a space with other BQW, it was likely they would be attending that party whether they were “into” strip clubs or not, or whether they had the discretionary funds to spend on tips for the dancers or not.

About half way through my ethnographic experience, something happened. I was perched somewhere between the small stage on the right and the small stage next to the DJ booth. Crowd 153

favorite Sparkle left the stage, and staff members quickly sanitize it so that the next performer can take her place on the main stage. As she took the stage the DJ played the remix of Chief

Keef’s “I Don’t Like.” The moment the beat dropped, the entire club took on a new character.

Everyone was jamming, including me, paying more attention to their own internal groove than the dancers on stage. The hook of “I Don’t Like” came next:

Example 5.8 – Chief Keef, “I Don’t Like” (hook)

A fuck nigga, that’s that shit I don’t like A snitch nigga, that’s that shit I don’t like A bitch nigga, that’s that shit I don’t like Sneak disser, that’s that shit I don’t like

The content of the song expresses various visceral dislikes specifically about certain kinds of men. In the hook, Chief Keef, says he doesn’t like people who are generally uncool, think here middle-class “boojie,” (“fuck”), people who tell your business, usually to a third party who holds some kind of power (“snitch”), men who are not properly masculine (“bitch”), or people who will talk about you behind your back as opposed to bringing their concerns to you directly (“sneak disser”). Then the DJ skipped right to Kanye West’s verse. At this point, almost everyone in the club was singing along, and the DJ cut the volume to the song as the whole club rapped louder than the music that was coming out of the speakers:

Example 5.9 – Kanye, “Girls kissin’ girls”

01 Girls kissin’ girls, 02 /cause it’s hot right?/ 03 But unless they use a strap-on 04 then they not dykes 05 ^They ain’t about that life^ 06 ^they ain’t about that life^ 07 We hangin’ out that window 08 it’s about to be a Sug night 154

The DJ brought the music back on line 5.9:07 and cut it back to the hook just as the gunshot sound effect in the middle of Kanye’s verse bumped at the end of line 5.9:08. I was left with the sensation that something had just occurred that could have only occurred in a ratchet scene space and it was directly related to Kanye West’s verse in the song.

Kanye does several interesting things in the verse that makes it well suited for re- appropriation by a BQW’s audience. It starts with his intonation on “cause it’s hot right?”

(5.9:02). He shifts into what might be thought of as a linguistic representation of a “white girl,” slightly altering his tone and saying what otherwise could be said as a statement, as a question, a stereotypical rendering of the way that white women, especially “Valley girls,” speak: in questions. This move calls for a reading of his statements to follow against the normative framework within the sexual economies of desire within hip-hop where a “girls kissing girls” are

“freaks” whose main interests are in gaining men’s attention and satisfying men’s putative desires. He distances himself from that reading and highlights the distinction between these

“girls kissing girls” who feign sexual interest in other women because they believe a man will find this attractive and those women who engage in actual erotic and sexual encounters with women, because they want to. I emphasize Kanye’s recognition here of female sexual agency because it is different than the way that most women who have sex with women are treated within hip-hop, and also because outside of the context of a strip club, occupied by BQW,

Kanye’s lyrics could very well be read according to the way that most “girls kissing girls” are treated in hip-hop, or ignored all together, because it doesn’t fit within the discursive frame of hip-hop. For example, Atlanta rapper, Gucci Mane’s song “Freaky Girls,” is framed around an imagined conversation with a “freaky girl.”

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Example 5.10 – Gucci, “Freak Girls”

01 Don't be conceited, girl. 02 I know you'll eat a girl, 03 I know your secret, girl 04 But I'm gonna keep it, girl 05 Oh, you's a college girl? 06 Come be a Gucci girl 07 Oh, you's a Gucci fan? 08 Let's go to Gucci land 09 You diggin Gucci man 10 Cause only Gucci can 11 Drop a stack, pop your back with a rubber band 12 You diggin Gucci, Gucci 13 Let's do the oochi-coochi 14 Oh, that's your girlfriend? 15 Why don't you introduce me.

Gucci Mane’s “freak girl” is a college girl, who secretly has sex with women (5.10:02-

03), but really wants to have sex with him (5.10:07)—presumably for money (5.10:11). His reference to dropping “a stack” of dollar bills implies that she is a stripper, or at least dances like one, and has a girlfriend who will also have sex with him (5.10:14). In this case, this girl likes girls, but really wants Gucci Mane. When “girls kiss girls” in hip-hop, it is generally for the pleasure of men. And for heterosexual women who aren’t sexually attracted to women, the implication that the have to oblige having sex with women in order be sexually attractive is problematic, but also just as common in hip-hop. For example, the chorus of Usher’s “Lil’

Freak” is rather pointedly about a woman who would feign interest in another woman for the pleasure of the male protagonist, presumably Usher himself.

Example 5.11 – Usher, “Lil’ Freak “(chorus)

01 If you fuckin with me 02 Really fuckin with me 156

03 You’ll let her put her hands in your pants 04 Be my lil’ freak, yeah

In order to be incorporated as a legible body, black same-gender loving women’s bodies are almost always positioned in relation to men’s gazes and their putative desires for women who are also attracted to other women, but only insofar as their attraction to the woman is for the pleasure of the man. Women who act out of their own pleasure and desire within the framework of hip-hop are acting outside of the racialized gender scripts of hip-hop, and yet the song has a contradictory message, or yet a slippery one to say the least. One the one hand Usher is telling a woman that the only way that she can be with him is if she agrees to have sex with him, but also other women. On the other, Nicki Minaj, who is featured on the song and in the music video adaptation is given the ability to speak and act of her own accord, and the strength of her lyrics is that it dances ambiguously between performing the role of the “lil’ freak,” while making claims about her own sexual pleasure.

Example 5.12 – Nicki Minaj, “Excuse me little mommy”

01 Excuse me little mommy, 02 but you could say I'm on duty. 03 I'm lookin’ for a cutie, 04 a real big ol' ghetto booty. 05 I really like your kitty cat, 06 and if you let me touch her 07 I know you're not a bluffer 08 I'll take you to go see Usher. 09 I keep a couple hoes 10 Like Santa I keep a Vixen 11 Got Dasher, Dancer, 12 Prancer, 13 Dixon, Comet, 14 Cupid, 15 Donner, Blitzen. 157

16 I'm hotter than 17 A hundred degrees 18 A lot of bread 19 No sesame seeds 20 If I'm in yo’ city 21 I'm signin’ them tig-o-bitties 22 I'm plotting on how I can take Cassie 23 a-way from Di-ddy 24 Them girls want a Minaj/ménage? 25 Yeah, they wetter than the rain then! 26 Usher buzz me in! 27 Everybody loves Raymond!

Minaj complicates a reading of this verse as simply her performing her “duty” for the pleasure of the black male gaze where she asserts that she’s “plotting on how she can take

Cassie/a-way from D-iddy.” Cassie, the long-time girlfriend of hip-hop mogul, Puff Daddy (P.

Diddy); visually supported in the music video accompanying the song by Minaj who points decidedly at Usher as she makes the statement about “stealing” away a man’s woman.

Minaj further complicates matters by inserting a series of boasts about herself in lines 9-

28. In lines 5.12:09-10, Minaj draws again upon the metaphor of women are products where she asserts that she “keeps a couple hos.” “To keep” in HHNL is to not only possess some thing— generally an object of desire and often times a woman—but it also means to maintain possession over that thing. In addition, you keep multiple ones for use any time you want. She adds that she

“keeps a couple hos/like Santa, I keep a vixen.” This line is complicated because not only has she drawn on simile to compare herself to Santa Claus, a white male pop cultural icon, but she also collapses one of Santa’s reindeer into a HHNL term for a video model, a video vixen. Thus,

Minaj’s employment of the verb “to keep” here refers to her ability to have, control, discard, and replace a woman strictly for the purposes of sex. The connotation is not that she shares these

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women with men, or that she “keeps” these women specifically for the male gaze. On the contrary, she keeps them for herself and enjoys marking them for her own consumption by signing their breast (5.12:21), a gesture often associated with white, male rock-n-roll artists of the 1980s. In effect, Minaj, like Kanye, points out the sliver through which an authentic same- sex desiring woman could claim authority in hip-hop.14 Such a move is important in considering what the BQW in my ethnographic encounter did with Kanye’s lyrics in the strip club.

There were close to 200 Black lesbian, bi, femme, bois, doms, and queer girls rapping these lyrics, Kanye effectively “tuned-out,” silenced as the DJ cut the song to allow the voices of the women to be heard in its full tenor. Laura Ahearn has argued that the focus of linguistic anthropological analysis should not necessarily be on searching for definitive interpretations of social practices, texts, and contexts, but rather our goal should be to “look for constraints on the kinds of meanings that might emerge from an event” (Ahearn 2001, 112). The context of the strip club setting, full of ratchet BQW set up the constraints for the interpretation of Kanye

West’s lyrics.

The BQW who were singing along, “They ain’t about that life! They ain’t about that life!” were agreeing with Kanye that living a life structured around being black, female, and queer marked an experience that was decidedly based on a representation of black female sexuality as deviant and as bad “they not dykes,” a pejorative term. They distinguished themselves from the heterosexual women who would show up there later with their friends, who

14 Nicki Minaj has made clear that she is neither a lesbian nor bisexual. In these and other lyrics we see her “queering the mic” (Lane 2011) a practice where black women say what might otherwise be thought of as queer in order to make claims of authenticity as rapping subjects. It is a practice that I demonstrate can be found in many black female rappers’ work.

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would feign sexual interest in the strippers in order to seen as “hot” to the heterosexual men there. “Girls kissing girls” weren’t dykes, only women who “use a strap-on,” because to engage in a sexual practice with a woman outside of the pleasure of men is to live a life in the margins.

However, there is still something especially sweet about the margins, “We hanging out the window it’s ‘bout to be a ‘Suge night’.” Kanye is referring not only to Suge Knight, a hip-hop mogul and gangsta, but also to Shug Avery who plants a delicate, powerful kiss one night on the lips of the protagonist Celie Harris in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.

These women had taken Kanye’s rhyme and used it to make a very bold and very ratchet claim about their authenticity as same-sex desiring women and about their agency, both of which are typically foreclosed in and outside of the discursive environment of hip-hop and black sexual politics. Shimizu argues that “the bondage of hypersexuality in representation need not be reviled, because if normalcy signifies the rigidity of the status quo, perversity may be the opportunity to critique normative scripts of race and sexuality in representation” (Shimizu 2007,

57). Indeed, the perversity of BQW stripping for other BQW who were singing along to a song about strap-ons and dykes marks the undoing of a politics of respectability and homonormativity.

The Black Ratchet Imagination makes it possible to remold what might otherwise be discarded, such as a popular rap song disparaging “fuck niggas," or boojie black people and lyrics by Kanye

West about "girls kissing girls" into a statement about the presence, authenticity, and power of

BQW to make space for themselves in black cultural politics and black public space.

8. Conclusion

The way ratchet was deployed in my sample was along a continuum. On one side, ratchet was seen as a condition of youth culture, and belonging to women who were not educated, or

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who had tastes and dispositions tied more distinctly to hip-hop culture. As the examples I offer here illustrate, women who defined ratchet in this way discussed not feeling comfortable in

“ratchet spaces,” because they could not identify with the women in those spaces. The most conservative of this viewpoint, used ratchet as a reference to individuals, spaces, and behavior that were uncouth. Often the converse of ratchet, “professional” appeared, and therefore in the deployment of ratchet we begin to see the “homonormative strivings” (Ferguson 2000, 2005b) of the black middle-class queer subject. On the other side of the spectrum, ratchet was used to describe a way of being that refused the normative prescriptions of black or white middle-class culture; ratchet spaces served as a refuge from constraints of normative structures, and offered a space of self-authoring and re-imagination of the rules of behavior and the rules of hip-hop

(Miller-Young 2008, Stallings 2013). Ratchet spaces for these women lacked the pretense of other kinds of scene spaces. Within each of these women’s definitions and deployments of ratchet, we see them actively reshaping black sexual politics, the heteronormative strivings of which has actively negated the existence of black queers for too long.

BQW are situated within the dominant ideologies of racism, sexism, heteronormativity, and homonormativity such that they are typically invisible in many analyses. This is in many ways surprising given that BQW are at the margins of race, gender, and sexuality and therefore their narratives offer compelling insights into the interconnectedness of racialized, gendered, and sexualized experience. However, this may in part be related to the fact that BQW are generally invisible and illegible in the American mainstream. As black women they face the challenge of being situated within the American mainstream as at best, “atypical,” and at worst, abnormal

(Collins 2000, Harris-Perry 2011). As black women who skirt the black heteropatriarchal politics of respectability, black same-sex desiring women fall outside of the of racialized gender script of 161

proper black womanhood and therefore are often marginalized within black cultural and sexual politics as well (Fogg-Davis 2006, Isoke 2014, Richardson 2003). Though, within the American mainstream as Cathy Cohen (1997) argues, both homosexual and heterosexual black women occupy the same denigrated position within the American mainstream as abnormal women who are unable to enact proper modes of womanhood.

I talked to more black queer middle-class women with impulses to avoid ratchet aspects of black lesbian, gay, bisexual women’s behavior, than those who had embraced it. There’s was a kind of homonormative script, a “Talented Tenth” script, which holds that the best of us have to be the ones that get recognized first before the most ratchet of us. Vershawn Ashanti Young argues that class has had an increasingly significant effect on the African American experience since desegregation, "yet the increased influence of class on African American identity has benefited the middle class, if not politically and socially, certainly economically, more than it has helped the poor and lower classes” (Young and Tsemo 2011, 3). In contexts where black people predominate, class becomes rubric by which one's position gets assessed, and a filter through which they come to view their experience. As homonormativity slices up black queer communities into the haves and have nots, ratchet still sits within the borderlands creating spaces and opportunities for the release from the pressures of having to perform black middle-classness, and maintaining environments that are mixed-class. Ratchet does quare work by calling out those conservative, assimilationist impulses within black queer communities and making space for diversity not only in black queer spaces, but also mainstream black places.

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CHAPTER 6

CONCLUSIONS: OR WHAT WE LEARN WHEN WE STUDY BLACK QUEER WOMEN’S

SPATIAL AND DISCURSIVE PRACTICES IN D.C.

1. Purpose of the Dissertation

Black queer women’s lives, linguistic practices, and relationships to (and in) space are rooted in the constant negotiation and contestation with systems of race, gender, sexuality, and class and how, when, and where those negotiations take place give us clues as to when and most importantly where and how categories of difference make a difference. The research question that guided this project was: What are the spatial and discursive strategies that Black queer women (BQW) in D.C. employ to address their social and cultural exclusion from American popular culture and the urban landscape? I was interested in the specific ways that black queer women in D.C. use the rapidly changing urban landscape; how despite there being no black lesbian bars, no black gay clubs, they have participated in the development of D.C. in the black queer imaginary as a Black Gay Mecca. The question seems a simple question of geography— what are the places where one can find BQW? Where are these places in the city and what do these places tell us about them? However, I quickly learned that neither a map nor a discussion of “lost” black lesbian spaces would do justice to the issues and questions of cultural and geographic knowledge of black queer women in D.C. Black queer women living in the DMV have produced various types of black queer spaces across the city especially parties, performances, workshops, happy hours, festivals, seasonal gatherings such as the events held during Black Pride, and sporting events including women’s professional basketball and football.

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These spaces, along with the social networks of BQW who create and inhabit them, make up what is colloquially referred to as the Scene.

Throughout the dissertation, I have described the Scene as the primary way that BQW in

D.C. physically and symbolically secure social space. This is especially informative in the context of a city where despite the large number of black queer women, black queer stories remain marginal and where only certain (white, usually gay) forms of LGBT space making are valued—ones that send both rainbow flags and property values flying sky high. The Scene is produced by a network of black queers who “hold space open” for those whose racial, gendered, and sexualized experiences in the urban landscape are often fraught with various experiences of exclusion. BQW consistently navigate places like the street or their workplaces where they must behave in particular ways that deny that their non-heteronormative sexuality informs their

Blackness. In contrast, the black queer spaces that BQW create for themselves and one another, which I refer to as scene spaces, are contexts where they bear witness to one another’s existence, bringing to light the normative discourses which predominate about the invisibility (and

[im]possibility) of black same-sex desiring women.

Drawing from over 19 months of formal ethnographic research and formal ethnographic interviews with 40 women in Washington, D.C., I have sought not only to map the geographies of BQW’s leisure in D.C., but also to consider the discursive practices that assign value and meaning to those geographies. In order to understand the geographies of BQW, I had to develop a theoretical frame that could shift and move with it. I rely on two key forms of analysis: (1) leaning on the important work of cultural anthropology and critical geographies, especially those dealing with racial and sexual politics of space, I examine the production and maintenance of scene spaces, despite the multiple ways that minoritarian subjects are marginalized in the city’s 164

landscape; (2) using linguistic theories of affect alongside queer theoretical approaches to the study of affect, I analyze discourse about the Scene and self that allows BQW to make sense of multiple, sometimes contradictory normative practices related to race, gender, sexuality, and class. In the next section, I elaborate on the 4 main findings that my ethnographic research and analysis produced.

2. Key Findings

There are four key findings that this dissertation has laid out:

1. The Scene is both a spatial and discursive formation that relies on discourses of belonging, comfort, and safety.

2. The texture of scene space produced particular kinds of affectations connected with pleasure and pain—together exposing the boundaries of racialized heteronormativity and homonormativity within the Scene and the city.

3. For some BQW, being in scene space produces a unique sensation of belonging, a sense of being "in the right place," based on an imagined set of shared experiences of blackness woman-ness, and queerness.

4. The form and composition of scene spaces vary, and in D.C. the variations tend to expose classed ideologies operating in the Scene.

Through my treatment of each of the main findings, I discuss how each finding contributes to answering the research question. I also discuss how each extends and complicates the underlying assertion that I carried throughout the dissertation project: by addressing BQW’s spatial and discursive practices in the urban landscape we learn where and how categories of difference make a difference. I will address each of the main findings in turn, and in the remaining sections, I will draw from those findings to address some of the broader implications the research findings.

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Key Finding 1

The Scene is both a spatial and discursive formation that relies on the production of a particular set of affectations around belonging, comfort, and safety.

In Chapter 2 and Chapter 3, I gave examples of BQW finding and "orienting" to the scene. In Example 2.2, Elliot, tells her “orientation” story. Elliot grew up in Washington, D.C. but had gone away to college in a nearby city. She tells the story of going on a social networking site while still away from D.C. and changing her location on the site to D.C. so that she could meet other BQW who were living in D.C. When she returned to D.C. to live permanently, she set up a face to face meeting with one of the women that she’d met online. The interaction that she describes is one where she sought the help of another BQW to find and locate her place within the Scene. Elliot orientated, quite literally, toward D.C.’s BQW’s Scene by positioning herself such that she could find it. Sabrina (Example 3.1), on the other hand, was oriented to the Scene by a cousin who was "in the life," and who had connections to the Scene. Other women spoke of family members or friends from college introducing them to the Scene. What makes Sabrina's orientation to the Scene so interesting was that she knew so many of the women there already.

Her first time in scene space was characterized by her surprising familiarity with the women there. And though she was familiar with them, because she had not yet oriented toward her own same-sex desire, the Scene was foreclosed to her. The word “orientation” has two meanings.

Getting “oriented” means that one receives an introduction, such as the one Sabrina received by her cousin and the one Elliot received at BusBoys. It means that you learn the ropes, in this case where the black queer women are, but the rest of the work—the work of connecting—is also a matter of orienting, or positioning oneself in relation to another such that you feel like you are in the right place. It was Elliot's conversation with her confidant where they shared a moment of

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"real talk," which produced a sensation of her being "okay" in D.C. And for Sabrina, it was her coming to terms with her own sexuality, which allowed her to finally orient toward the women who she had grown up with. Both forms of orientation are important because both speak to the way information travels through and within the Scene, and how these moments of information sharing allow connections to be made within the social networks that inhabit and maintain scene space. When I asked women about their first times in scene space, they told me stories of orientation—who introduced them to their first scene space, how they got connected to other women in the scene, and how they turned toward their own same-sex desire. Women also talked about the way scene spaces impressed upon them a sense of belonging; a sense of safety or a sense of being “okay.” The ability for scene spaces to create the sensation of being “okay” was not ubiquitous, but that it was experienced at all made it such that many BQW felt like the Scene in D.C. was where they had in the words of an informant named Be “had found their tribe.”

Key Finding 2

The texture of scene space produced the affects of both pleasure and pain—which together exposed the boundaries of racialized heteronormativity and homonormativity within the Scene and the city.

Research interested in sexualized space typically agrees that spaces are actively produced and sexualized (Bell and Valentine 1995, Binnie 1997, Browne 2007, Browne and Bakshi 2011,

Held 2009, Houlbrook 2001). Similarly, geographers interested in race agree that spaces are racialized (McKittrick 2006, Neely and Samura 2011, Pile 2011, Price 2009). Increasingly recognized is the fact that spaces are simultaneously racialized, gendered, sexualized, and classed (Bailey and Shabazz 2014, Garrett 2013, Isoke 2014, Johnson 1998, Kuntsman and

Miyake 2008, Livermon 2013, McGlotten 2014) Following Browne and Bakshi who read space

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as “performative and becoming,” I have considered how enactments of race, gender, sexuality, and class work together and within differing sets of ideologies to produce different kinds of scene spaces, each with their own textures (Browne and Bakshi 2011, 180). The textures of scene spaces produced sensations. Being in scene space was a deeply sensory experience—some spaces were loud, crowded, hot, and sweaty, others were empty, spacious, and quiet. They were also affective. Producers of scene space always discussed the kinds of experiences that they wanted their guests to feel and the lengths that they would go to ensure that it could be achieved.

Similarly, women who spent time in scene space often talked about the way spaces made them feel; how the DJs, a club’s décor, the music, drinks, the price of drinks, and conversations with other women would affect them.

In Chapter 3, I offer two excerpts from my field notes. In the first, I’m waiting in line with my wife and two of our friends for a party taking place at Love Nightclub. I describe some of the discourses and spatial practices that rubbed up against us and produced particular kinds of sensations. We had to wait in the cold in one of two lines which clearly indicated that there were two different kinds of patrons, gay ones and straight ones. The presence of BQW temporarily exposed the ongoing heterosexualization of the street and the club. There was a posture of intimidation on the part of heterosexual black men and women there, highlighted by us witnessing the public shaming of a bisexual friend of the group of women who ended up in the wrong line. The party’s hosts had implicitly promised us respite from these forms of verbal assault, but could not guarantee such an experience on the street itself. However, just as R&B, hip-hop, soul, afro-punk, Santeria, women flirting, women using men’s rooms, women dancing together, drinking alcohol, getting really drunk, smoking hookah even though you don't smoke, are apart of the texture of scene spaces, so too are various forms of discrimination one 168

experiences while waiting in line, riding the metro wearing a bowtie and lipstick, walking to the little house on the corner in hopes of arriving safely. All of which produce particular kinds of sensations while being in scene space, and the sense that other women might have shared these experiences both pleasurable and potentially traumatic are what link them in the scene space.

Ann Cvetkovich proposes that “affective experience can provide the basis for new cultures” (Cvetkovich 2003, 7). Curating an archive of lesbian trauma, Cvetkovich argues that

“an archive of feelings,” particularly one of an affect such as trauma which is so “unspeakable and unrepresentable […] puts pressure on conventional forms of documentation, representation, and commemoration, giving rise to new genres of expression” (Cvetkovich 2003, 7). Like

Cvetkovich, the material in which I analyze emerges out of cultural spaces themselves ephemeral, fleeting, and difficult to put neatly into words. Yet, they are still encoded in text. For

Cvetkovich, an archive of feelings is a collection of cultural texts encoded with feelings and emotions: “encoded not only in the content of the texts themselves but in the practices that surround their production and reception” (Cvetkovich 2003, 7). Scene spaces form a way of life for many black queer women. While Cvetkovich approaches the production and analysis of lesbian trauma, my dissertation has been an exercise in the production and analysis of black queer women's pleasure. Scene spaces are built around the erotics of black queer women.

Women wanted to be in spaces were they felt comfortable and safe to flirt, to meet other women, to be connected not only for friendship, but also for the possibilities of romantic encounters. In scene spaces it was safe to dance to with one another, and buy one another drinks. It was also safe, as my field notes suggest, to talk about how your mother had gone too far by reaching out to your ex-boyfriend on Facebook trying to get him to "take you back," or how your family's homophobia still meant that you needed to keep your "business" out of the street. 169

The texture of scene spaces, it is worth noting, also could produce the sense that you were not in the right place. That is, certain aspects of texture rendered them as spaces where some

BQW were not comfortable. There were some aspects of the texture of scene space that rubbed women the wrong way. In Chapter 4 I give an example of Tomar who describes going to a scene space and being told that she "didn't have to talk that way." Other women also described experiences of feeling out of place, almost always in relation to their class or age, in scene space.

Timi, for example, discusses parties such as those where women were stripping and lip-synching as being ones where she not only felt uncomfortable, but also upset at having to see these performances when what she really wanted to enjoy being around other black queer women like herself, professional and classy. Though these types of parties were quite common in the early

2000s, there were considerably fewer of these parties during my research. In response to these sensations of discomfort of middle-class women, several happy hours and parties catering to the ways that middle-class women wanted to socialize. What is most important to note here is how differently organized spaces tended to expose the boundaries of class that existed within the

Scene.

Key Finding 3

For some BQW, being in BQW scene space produces a unique sensation of belonging, a sense of being "in the right place," based on an imagined set of shared experiences of blackness woman-ness, and queerness.

In spite of the differences between BQW, the Scene exists as it does because of belief that there are some experiences that BQW share. Nowhere was this made clearer than in the narrative of Kay (Example 4.1). Recall that Kay listed several feelings she associated as distinctive to being in a space where the majority of the women there were queer of color--

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feelings that did not have a single, clear term to describe them—including "not having to explain yourself," "an understanding of different elements" and “not just one, not just two but a whole variety of people who [understand] with their own differences." Other women similarly tried to capture the complexities of their feeling "good" around other BQW, and many described the sensation as simply, "feeling like home."

What is interesting about scene space and the linguistic practices women employed to describe them, was that they each required an analytic approach that allowed all of an individuals' identities to be “done” at the same time, and to differing degrees. The things that often went unsaid in scene spaces, were the very experiences that BQW shared—their race, gender, and same-sex desire. As Kay says “even though you're not the same person/and you don't have the same experiences/and you may think of yourself completely differently than they do/[…] there are just certain things you just don't have to explain” (4.1:02-04). Kay describes the aspects of her identity and her life, that could go unspoken when in the midst of other black same-sex desiring women; things that were visible and yet, unspoken in scene space. In this context, having those things visible, but the norm, and having them go unspoken, produced feelings of comfort and safety that was not the same when she was with white gay women where their inability to understand the unique experience of being a person of color in the world didn’t allow her to connect with them in the same way. Similarly, black straight women were unable to understand her life as a woman who dated women. The things that could go unspoken with queer women of color—were the very things that when in the context of white women and black straight women, were the aspects of her self that became hyper visual to her: her race and her sexuality.

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In other words, there’s a complex relationship between what goes unsaid and what becomes visible in scene space, and they relate directly to the ways that black queer women imagine their connection to one another. By not having to explain your experiences of the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in scene space, there’s literally the space to talk about all of the other things. That’s what feels "good" about being in scene space. One of the interesting things that emerges in the context of a sense of shared experiences based on race, gender, and sexuality among BQW in scene space is that other forms of difference tend come to the fore.

Key Finding 4

The form and composition of BQW scene spaces vary, and in D.C. the variations tend to expose classed ideologies operating in the Scene.

The word ratchet came up in all but 4 of my formal interviews, but where ratchet didn’t come up—its converse, professional did. I found that BQW defined and developed ratchet and its converse professional, as they worked out their own classed positions within scene space and within the context of the urban landscape. Some BQW used ratchet as a means of distancing themselves from what they understood to be inappropriate representations and performances of black queer women’s sexuality. Others used ratchet as a way of talking about theirs’ or others’ purposeful performances of black queer women’s sexuality that is both suspicious of and a rejection of a set of normative rules for black female sexuality.

Anyone could be ratchet, but not anyone could be professional. This is a necessary distinction. Professional women could and would go to ratchet parties or do ratchet things, like getting very drunk or high, buying tables and bottle service to celebrate that it was Friday, going dancing at a ratchet party just so that they could wear their most outrageous outfit, or going to 172

see strippers perform. Getting ratchet was about not following any rules of decorum. It was a relaxation of the rules that they had to follow at work, for example. At work, they had to dress a certain way, wear their hair a certain way, talk a certain way, but in ratchet scene spaces, none of those rules applied. Getting ratchet, as I have described it here, is not a form of "slumming." This was not black women going to clubs to see what the "others" do. Getting ratchet, as Anna and

Amber explained, was something that was necessary. It is no wonder why as Anna pointed out, ratchet parties tended to be the most successful. Not only did they draw a younger crowd between (21 years old and 26), they were also places where anyone needing a bit of ratchet in their lives, could go and "get their life."

Some of the black queer middle-class women that I spoke to talked about avoiding ratchet music or parties, and if they did listen to ratchet music or go to ratchet spaces, it was framed as a "guilty pleasure." Other black queer middle-class women enjoyed ratchet music and parties on occasion—when they wanted to dance or needed the sensation of release. There were more who shunned ratchet music, places, and people than those who embraced all things ratchet.

There reasons for disliking ratchet ranged from it simply not falling within their aesthetic tastes of music, to an embrace of what might be described as a homonormative script within what in

Chapter 5 I refer to as a “Talented Tenth” frame. In this view, it is the best BQW, the most able to perform the standards of black beauty, decorum, and middle-classness who should be recognized and made visible, ahead of the most ratchet among us. In this way, an ideology of racialized homonormativity circulates in the Scene. Ratchet spaces, however marginal within this view, still manage to be the most visible forms of scene space. It also remains one of the few opportunities in the Scene to be in a mixed-class environment. Ratchet, I argue, does quare work. It calls out conservative, assimilationist impulses within black queer communities. It’s a 173

reminder of African American linguistic practices of bending and twisting the norm. It celebrates both the erotic and the hypersexual, obscuring the lines between. It is highly contagious and infectious; you want it, even if you aren't supposed to. And does not judge you when you do have it. The politics of respectability is deeply embedded within black cultural life, and so it is not a surprise that it would appear within BQW’s discourses of self and space. Ratchet demonstrates BQW’s engagement with post-modern, post-racial, post-feminist cosmopolitan ideologies that hold that they are supposed to be comfortable everywhere as long as they’re willing to act like they belong. However, ratchet doesn't belong to stories of progress and it is a purposeful lack of pretending to belong that makes so many uncomfortable.

3. BQW “Saying Place”: Language, Affect, and the Unsayable

As McKittrick has argued “acts of expressing and saying place are central to understanding what kinds of geographies are available to black women” (McKittrick 2006, xxiii). Throughout my dissertation I have used BQW’s acts of “saying place” to analyze the way race, gender, sexuality, and class manifest in said spaces. I have asked how BQW's situated language use, or language use within a particular social and cultural context (Duranti 1997, 3-4) allows them to engage in active projects of self-making and space-making. Language use shapes and is shaped by both cultural and socio-spatial realities.

Critical theorists often rely on texts to search for the way affect moves in and through carefully cultivated archives. Curating an archive of lesbian trauma, Cvetkovich argues that an archive of feelings, particularly an archive of an affect such as trauma which is so “unspeakable and unrepresentable… puts pressure on conventional forms of documentation, representation, and commemoration, giving rise to new genres of expression” (Cvetkovich 2003, 7). Cvetkovich

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goes on to say that “affective experience can provide the basis for new cultures” (Cvetkovich

2003, 7). Considering texts in relation to the practices that inform their utterances and receptions is not unlike the anthropological study of language. One of the primary assumptions on which my project is based is that BQW do things with language, and one of the things that they do is make space for themselves. In making space for themselves, they have created a vibrant culture and collection of scene spaces.

In Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, McKittrick

(2006) analyzes an archive of black women’s trauma of being “out of place,” or “in the wrong place at the wrong time." Using texts such as slave narratives, drawings of the interior of slave ships, and novels, McKittrick suggests that black human geographies present an especially ripe space for teasing out the connections between history, blackness, race, and place. Here, I have suggested that by focusing on black queer geographies we can further expound upon the way race, gender, sexuality, and class manifest spatially and discursively. Throughout the dissertation, I have carefully selected and cultivated a set of texts which I analyze using a multidisciplinary reading strategy rooted in linguistic anthropology. Interested in situated language use and the ways black queer women put to language to use both in the Scene and about the Scene, I have suggested that an intersectional analysis that looks at when, where, and how certain aspects of self are un/spoken and made in/visible, allows us to understand the true complexity of individuals as they navigate social space. Geographies are socially and culturally mediated ideas about space and place. Thus turning to the geographic stories of BQW in

Washington, D.C. allows us to understand that which maps of discrete places in D.C. where black queer women go, simply cannot convey. I have therefore established how BQW's Scene in

D.C. produces a set of sensations, attendant feelings of comfort or discomfort; senses of being in 175

“the right place” and “out of place” for BQW. My dissertation models a way of doing an intersectional analysis that attends to the linguistic and spatial dimensions of the connections between race, gender, sexuality, and class. In focusing on language use and spatial practices, I was able to consider where and how BQW understood certain kinds of differences, make a difference. Before, I close I want to make note of two limitations and areas of future study that these limitations have inspired.

4. Limitations and Areas of Future Study

I noticed early on in my fieldwork that a major limitation was taking shape. I spoke to very few women who were working-class, unemployed, under-employed, or poor. Most of the people I interviewed had college degrees, or advanced professional degrees. Even those who did not, held steady employment in technical jobs or were in school full-time. Regardless of the way that women self-identified their class backgrounds, I found that the discourses of middle-class decorum tended to pre-dominate the way my informants self-identified (Chapter 5). Thus, while there were few occasions where I was able to interact with working-class and poor women in scene space, I found my research to be revelatory of the way black homonormativity had created hierarchies not only based on economic capital, but also cultural and social capital. Many scene spaces, especially public and semi-public ones, required access to some forms of excess income-

-paying entrance fees, paying for drinks, transportation, or parking. This does not include potential costs of childcare for women who were mothers. Scene spaces such as house parties were more likely to be the most reliable and most affordable scene space options for women who did not have the economic capital to take trips, go on cruises, or go out to the club weekly. House parties during my time in the field were exclusive in that accessing them relied primarily on

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connections within the social networks that would host them. So that if working-class, and underprivileged women were socializing primarily in house parties, I did not make the right connections to really consider their experiences of the Scene in depth. Further research into this area should continue to address the class differences among black queer women, seeking more voices from women who are working-class.

Another limitation in this project is that it does not include a discussion of the vibrant black queer women's arts and music "scene," nor does it explore the rich cultural texts that BQW have been producing about the Scene in D.C. During my time in the field two YouTube web series that represented BQW's Scene in D.C. emerged. Another important area of future research will consider what happens when BQW produce self-representations the Scene. How do BQW's cultural texts represent the spatial and discursive practices of the BQW Scene in D.C.? This is at once a query about the kinds of representations of BQW’s lives that are presently available in the

American visual emporium and a statement about the D.C. specific cultural idioms from which

BQW draw in order to imagine, or what Ellen Lewin (1996) might describe as “invent,” black queer women’s culture in Washington, D.C.

Lastly, I talk very little about sex, though I studied sites of pleasure and eroticism. I was studying sites infused within a set of black queer erotics. My own field notes capture moments where I was in or on my way to scene spaces that were animated by certain forms of eroticism. I talk very little about sex, but this dissertation is very much about the places people went to find sexual partners. The last area of future research might be related to how black queer women talk about sex and related to issues of self-representation, how is black queer women's sex "screened" in D.C.?

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5. Conclusion

Black queer spaces are the result of a black queer spatial imagination making due where ideologies of racism, sexism, and homophobia shape the available spaces where one can simply be. BQW in D.C., like other Black queers, have had to make other places to be and have done so by creatively repurposing public and private spaces, and by creating various kinds of public, semi-public, and exclusive black queer spaces. Scene spaces take their shape from the active production of the sense of “something shared” and discourses about feeling “at home,” but also from the possibilities of the erotic encounters that are not only permissible in these spaces, but the very core of what animates them.

Despite the increase in the deployment of the terms “queer” and “intersectionality” to refer to the kinds of analyses undertaken in social sciences and humanities where interest in race, gender, and sexuality remains steady, the lived experiences of black queer women in the United

States remain understudied and under-theorized. The absence of BQW is in many ways related to the absence of lesbians in discussions of sexual geographies more broadly (see Browne 2007), queer people in African American Studies (see Ferguson 2000, McGlotten 2012a, Richardson

2003), and issues of sexuality in Black Women’s Studies (Fogg-Davis 2006). Our knowledge of

BQW, who are situated, more or less, at the crossroads of these broad bodies of literature, suffer the most from these “blind-spots” in the literature. And yet, as my dissertation has shown, BQW and the spaces that they create for one another are ripe for intellectual engagement. They are vibrant, have particular histories, and their compositions speak to the complicated lives that

BQW lead—full of contradictions, but nevertheless full.

One of the main contributions I believe this dissertation makes to the field of Linguistic

Anthropology is demonstrating the utility of using Black Queer Theory as a lens to analyze race, 178

gender, sexuality, and class. And what I contribute to the field of Black Queer Studies is making ethnographic engagement with black queer populations a priority. To borrow from the apropos statement of our time, how will black lives matter to black queer theory? E. Patrick

Johnson has argued that queer theory has placed far too much emphasis on text and not enough

“on the street, or anyplace where the racialized and sexualized body is beaten, starved, fired, cursed—indeed, when the body is the site of trauma” (Johnson 2001, 5). Johnson does not fetishize our ability to accurately render the "body" through ethnography, nor does he balk at

"text," but he does emphasize a much-needed discussion on the direction of Black Queer Studies in the future. An increased attention to the ethnographic in Black Sexuality Studies, including the ambitious work on black women in pornography of Mireille Miller-Young, the ethnography about the ball scene in Detroit by Marlon M. Bailey, and the ethnographic work on black queers in Cuba from Jafari S. Allen have all demonstrated the richness that bodies, as sites of trauma and sites of pleasure, can bring to the study of black sexuality. Since the late 1990s, studies of language and sexuality particularly those from the anthropological perspective have emphasized the need to understand text in relation to the lived social contexts in which those texts emerge. In this dissertation, I have sought to make black same-sex desiring women's bodies matter—that is rendering them both materially and discursively using the city of D.C., Chocolate City, the Black

Gay Mecca, as a backdrop. I do this not just for the purposes of description, not an attempt to make them visible and have that stand as a political statement—but to suggest that when we pay attention to where differences between black women, between lesbians, between black people matter, we can witness the way race, gender, sexuality, and class actually operate in our everyday lives.

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APPENDIX A

INTERVIEW SCHEULE A - ORAL HISTORY

I. Biographical Information and Early Childhood At the conclusion of this line of questioning, we should understand where the person grew up; what early childhood and perhaps adolescence looked like, and we should get a sense of how they viewed the city at this time in their life. If they did not grow up in D.C., we should skip ahead to the time they moved to D.C. making note of the year. • Where were you born? • What year were you born? • Do you have any siblings? • Where did you grow up? • (Grand tour) Tell me about the neighborhood where you grew up. • Tell me what you remember most about life in the city as a child? • Where did you go to school (elementary/middle/high)? • What kind of work did your parents do? • Where did your parents grow up? • [If not DC] • When did they move to D.C.? • Do you know why did they move to DC? • Did your family ever relocate to other parts of the city? • Did you have family that lived in D.C.?

II. Being Gay in D.C. in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. At this point, we should shift toward more grand tour questions about their earliest memories about being gay in D.C. What they did, where did the gays hang out? Be sure to establish a time line with the respondent asking about specific decades where appropriate. When were their earliest memories? • What are some of your earliest memories of being gay/lesbian in D.C.? • Where did the lesbians/gays hang out? • Clubs: • Where were they located in the city? • Demographics: Who went to these clubs? • Bars: • Where were they located in the city? • Demographics: Who went to these bars? • Parties: • Where, when, who threw them? • Do you remember your first experience at a gay/lesbian club/bar in D.C.? • What was that like?

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• Do you remember any occurrences of violence or discrimination against gay/lesbians during this time? • What, if anything, changed in the scene? • Tell me about Pride. • The first Black Pride was in 1991 in Banneker Park. Do you remember that? • What do you remember about being gay in D.C. in the 1990s? • Where did people hang out? • What kinds of things did people do? • What did you do? • How did the HIV/AIDS epidemic affect the Black gay and lesbian experience in D.C.?

IV. Present • Where do you live now? o [If D.C.] Where in the city do you live? o [If not D.C.] Where in (Maryland or Virginia) do you live? • Why did you leave the city? • Do you still have family in the area? o [If yes] Where? o [If not D.C.] Why did you leave the city? • What kinds of changes have you noticed in the Black gay and lesbian community over the past decade? Over the past two decades? What’s different? • Are there places where Black gay/lesbians congregate in D.C. now? o Where are those places? o Have you ever visited those places? o Are they different than they were when you were growing up? • What’s different about the city than when you were younger? • Were there changes in the area that had an impact on the way that you socialized with other Black gay/lesbians? • Do you think white gay/lesbians had a different experience in D.C. than you did? o What do you think those differences are?

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APPENDIX B

INTERVIEW SCHEDULE B – PRODUCERS

I. Biographical Information • What year were you were born? • Where did you grow up? • Could you please describe your race and/or ethnicity? • Could you please describe your sexuality/sexual orientation? • When and where and how did you come to the knowledge that you were attracted to women?

II. How did you get started producing scene space? This line of questioning is meant to glean what (internal and external forces) compelled her to start producing events, and those reasons that maintain her interest in doing so. At the end of this line of question, I should know when and why she started to produce events. • What made you start putting on these events? • Why do you continue to do it?

III. How do you produce the BQW “Scene”? The purpose of these questions is to understand the minutia that goes into planning an event. Questions regarding choosing venues, music, and locations—presumable where women of color who partner with women would feel safe—and building ambiance. Additionally, questions regarding the subtle or overt ways that marketing takes place. • What’s the first step in planning an event? • How do you find the places where you can put on these events? • Have you ever faced any challenges? • What are some of the considerations you make so that your audience will be comfortable? • Have there been any changes in D.C. that effect the kinds of spaces you create?

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APPENDIX C

INTERVIEW SCHEULE C - PARTICIPANTS

• What year were you were born? • Where did you grow up? • Could you please describe your race and/or ethnicity? • Could you please describe your sexuality/sexual orientation? • When and where and how did you come to the knowledge that you were attracted to women? • Is it important for you to have friends/acquaintances who identify as same-sex loving, or queer? Why or why not? • Do you have a close circle of friends? • Are any of those friends queer? • Would you say most of them were queer? • Are any of those friends people of color? • Would you say that most of them were people of color? • How would you characterize your close circle of friends? • When considering how to spend your free time, do you have an affinity for events/spaces where there will be other women who partner with women? • How have you met partners in the past? • Do you have friends who are single? • If not, do you find that odd? Were all of them always coupled? • If so, are they actively searching for a partner? • Have you ever felt uncomfortable, out of place in settings: • That were predominately white/hetero like bars/clubs? • That were predominately black/hetero like bars/clubs? • That were predominately black gay/lesbian like bars/clubs? • That were predominately white gay/lesbian like bars/clubs? • How would you describe being in a space full of Black women who partner with women? • Do you remember your first experience in a setting such as the one I described above? What was that like? • (If respondent identifies as bisexual) When in spaces that are predominately lesbian, do you feel a particular pressure not to discuss having attraction for men? • Do you find that there are distinctions between queer women? If so, could you describe what those distinctions may be? • Would you say that there is clear division along the lines of CLASS within the scene? • Would you say that most of the women in your immediate social circle have a similar class position as you? • Did they mostly attend college; have relatively stable work and housing situations?

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APPENDIX D

LIST OF FORMAL INTERVIEW INFORMANTS

INTERVIEWEE Category Date of Interview (YR-MN-DY)

Jude Participants 14-04-02

Dominique Participants 14-04-01

Mary Participants 14-03-28

Kay Participants 14-03-25

Khadija Participants 14-03-24

Tiffani Participants 14-03-12

Amber Participants 14-02-17

Shanika Participants 14-02-07

Monique Participants 14-01-31

Elizabeth Participants 14-01-26

Maegan Participants 14-01-19

Kennedy Participants 14-01-17

Pchas Participants 13-11-08

S Dot Participants 13-08-09

Lisa Participants 13-07-15

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Nancy Participants 13-07-01

Tomar Participants 13-06-25

Alaire Participants 13-06-24

Thea Participants 13-06-21

Elliot Participants 13-06-20

Carmilia Participants 13-06-12

Renee Participants 13-06-11

Timi Participants 11-10-14

Anna Producers 14-02-17

Amina Producers 13-11-12

Sheila Producers 13-11-09

Sade Producers 13-11-06

Shannon Producers 13-10-15

Breeze Producers 13-09-18

Nikisha Producers 13-09-17

Jay Producers 13-08-06

Be Oral Histories 15-05-04

Alyssa Oral Histories 14-04-08

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Dappho Oral Histories 14-03-19

June Oral Histories 13-10-30

KeKe Oral Histories 13-10-26

Sabrina Oral Histories 13-08-19

Lynell Oral Histories 12-10-10

Toni Oral Histories 12-04-06

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APPENDIX E

TRANSCRIPTION CONVENTIONS

Speaker (initials) Y:

Omitted text from transcript […]

Indication of noted action [gestrues]

Overlapping speech indicated by […] brackets on two separate lines [[…]]

Quoted or reported speech “…”

Laughter @

Inaudible

Short pause (less than 1 second) ..

Pause (1 second) …

Rise in pitch ^…^

Drop in pitch /…/

Breathy quality of voice

Exaggerated Colloquial, AAVE pronunciation

Rhythmic quality of voice

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