UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title The Collective Come-Up: Black Queer Placemaking in Subprime Baltimore Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7gx6v7s1 Author Whitley, Melissa Publication Date 2020 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles The Collective Come-Up: Black Queer Placemaking in Subprime Baltimore A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the Requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Gender Studies by Sa Whitley 2020 © Copyright by Sa Whitley 2020 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The Collective Come-Up: Black Queer Placemaking in Subprime Baltimore by Sa Whitley Doctor of Philosophy in Gender Studies University of California, Los Angeles, 2020 Professor Juliet A. Williams, Chair The Collective Come-Up: Black Queer Placemaking in Subprime Baltimore engages the experiences, community organizing, and alternative economic frameworks of black queer and transgender women in the age of “credit-led accumulation” and neoliberal urban planning projects that stimulate the gentrification of black neighborhoods.1 This black feminist ethnography, situated within the overlapping geographies of urban renewal programs, subprime foreclosure, and speculative urbanism, foregrounds the contested place in black queer spatial imaginaries of private property in a city with 30,000 vacant properties and lots.2 Specifically, I examine Brioxy’s black land movement in West Baltimore – an effort that seeks to forestall gentrification and “keep the hood black.” From black placemaking to “putting a stake in the ground” against gentrification, I consider how black queer organizers figure the post-crisis financial and real estate markets as sites of both subjection and possibility. Provocatively, the collective puts forth a collectivized model of black private 1 Susanne Soederberg, “The US Debtfare State and the Credit Card Industry: Forging Spaces of Dispossession,” Antipode 45, no. 2 (2013), 495, accessed on June 10, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467- 8330.2012.01004.x. 2 The City of Baltimore has 16,000 vacant buildings and 14,000 vacant lots. See “Frequently Asked Questions,” Vacants to Value, http://www.vacantstovalue.org/vtov_faq. ii property ownership as opposition to structural processes of gentrification and black displacement. At the same time, they engage in what I call speculative social reproduction across black queer households to confront the antiblackness of speculative finance capitalism. As a critical intervention, this dissertation discloses the ongoing violence of liberal property and propertied citizenship by contesting contemporary constructions of the subprime foreclosure crisis itself. This project centers archives of effects overlooked in standard accounts, including the life and death of a black transgender woman killed in a vacant residential property. In dialogue with queer of color analyses of capitalism’s contradictions, I characterize Baltimore’s landscapes of subprime architectures and consider the ways that decades of urban renewal and foreclosure policies regulate black trans life and produce untimely death. Case studies of black queer and trans placemaking compel us to consider the ways that black queer and trans folx aim to variously appropriate, disassemble, refuse, or “disidentify” with property and “propertied citizenship.”3 3 See José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) and Ananya Roy, “Paradigms of Propertied Citizenship: Transnational Techniques of Analysis,” Urban Affairs Review 38, no. 4 (2003): 463-491. iii The dissertation of Sa Whitley is approved. Sherene H. Razack Robin D. G. Kelley Uri McMillan Hannah Appel Juliet A Williams, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2020 iv TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures: vi Acknowledgements: vii Curriculum Vitae: x Introduction: 1 Chapter One: “We Call Them Bandos”: 40 Black Trans Fugitivity & Performance in Geographies of Foreclosure Chapter Two: “Won’t Be Gentrified Out of Our Space”: 87 Financial Pedagogies with Black Queer Properties Chapter Three: “A Rainbow at Midnight”: 118 Queering Juneteenth and Claiming Black Land Chapter Four: Foreclosing White Property: 148 The Politics of Black Queer Home, Garden & Real Estate Tours Coda: 187 Bibliography: 198 v LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. “#BuyBuild#Stay” (2018). 87 Image by Brioxy Figure 2. “Be Like Nia” (2018). 102 Photograph by B. Cole Figure 3. “Walker Marsh is Fighting Baltimore is Fighting Blight 107 with Flowers” (2018). Image by @themedicine.show Figure 4. Dovecote on the Map (2019). 128 Photograph by Sa Whitley Figure 5. Ejay with Civil Wrongs Juneteenth Tee (2018). 132 Image by Brioxy Figure 6. Rich Rocket of the Vintage Thrivals (2019). 146 Photograph by Sa Whitley Figure 7. Black Home on Juneteenth “Res Hill” Garden & Home Tour (2019) 148 Photograph by Sa Whitley Figure 8. “Property Brothers” and African Masks (2019) 149 Photograph by Sa Whitley Figure 9. “Defend the Hood! Stop Gentrification” (2018) 167 Image by Brioxy vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to acknowledge so many extraordinary people and communities that have supported me during the Gender Studies PhD program. My dissertation committee members – Juliet A. Williams, Sherene H. Razack, Robin D. G. Kelley, Hannah Appel, and Uri McMillan – have been tremendously inspiring and supportive. Thank you all for your stirring provocations and the groundbreaking work that you do. I appreciate the time you all spent with my chapter drafts and your meticulous engagement with my work. Juliet, my exceptional dissertation advisor, has been an anchor and a friend. Thank you for your mentorship, intellectual rigor, and generosity. I would also like to acknowledge my professor and comrade, Hannah, for inviting me to collaborate with her on a white paper commissioned by the Debt Collective and published by the Institute on Democracy & Inequality entitled, “The Power of Debt: Identity and Collective Action in the Age of Finance.” It was incredibly moving to have you as a friend and conspirator at the Undercommons Freedom School and in the Financial Futures Working Group at the aforementioned Institute. I am profoundly moved by all of the Gender Studies faculty – in seminars, at events and workshops, in archives, at protests, and in cafes. A Special thanks to Purnima Mankekar, Sarah Haley, Angela Y. Davis, and Mishuana Goeman. I thank you all for your affective and intellectual labor and your respective examples of feminist pedagogy. I also have warm appreciation for the Gender Studies staff – Samantha Hogan, Richard Medrano, Van Do-Nguyen, and Jenna Miller-Von Ah – who go above and beyond. Each of you make the ship sail smoother in your own remarkable and ardently dedicated ways. During the seven years of the PhD program, I am sincerely appreciative for financial support from the UC Consortium for Black Studies, Center for the Study of Women, and the Eugene V. Cota-Robles Fellowship through UCLA Graduate Division. I would also like to thank the UCLA custodial workers of Rolfe Hall and AFSCME 3299 for their labor and their inspiring vii labor organizing, and I am delighted to acknowledge my health care providers and community healing spaces. To the brilliant Gender Studies PhD students – past and present – your dedication to that werk, your support at conferences (on panels & the dancefloor), and the feminist and queer lifeways that you embody/practice fiercely inform my relationship to the academy and community building. Special thanks to Lina Chhun, Savannah Kilner, Bianca Beauchemin, Shondrea Thornton, Azza Basharudin, Preeti Sharma, Jacob Lau, Amanda Apgar, Sarah Montoya, Esha Momeni, Dalal Alfares, Nazneen Diwal, Jaimie D. Crumley, Taryn Marcelino, Angela Robison, Marika Cifor, and Freda Fair. My Gender Studies writing group with Mary Robbins and Rahel S. Woldegaber was not merely or principally productive. We made a virtual feminist home-space that was truly magical and affirming each morning. I have infinite gratitude to you both for sharing your brilliance, hours, recipes, laughter, and love with me throughout the pandemic. Across campus, I want to extend gratitude to other sweet, gifted, and grounding PhD students, who together formed a radical and inviting UCLA community: Natalie Bradford, Aditi Anand Halbe, Mary Senyonga, Nichole Garcia, Rose Simons, Kendy D. Rivera, Thabisile Griffin, Marques Vestal, LeighAnna Hidalgo, and many others. I was also deeply moved by the collaboration and fervent political community that I found in the Black Feminist Initiative Working Group, the Undercommons Freedom School, UAW 2865, and the team at College Academic Counseling including Brian Henry and the 2019-20 College Academic Mentors. In Baltimore, thank you to my fierce comrades, who have been meaningful collaborators and the best of friends to think and dream with. Special thanks to B. Cole, Aisha Pew, Dr. Shaeeda Mensah, Chesska O’Neal, Safa Batniji, Marcel Purnell, Rahma Haji, S Rasheem, P.J. Jerome, Jessica Sadler, Unique Robinson, Mo Speller, Andy Hines, Isabelle Brace, Marios Falaris, Anna Wherry, Sarah Roth, Heba Islam, Ryan Warwick, Andy Hines, Georgia McCandlish, Ava Pipitone, and Jamie Grace Alexander. viii I also want to express appreciation to departments in two academic institutions in Baltimore, Maryland. Thank you to the faculty, staff, and students of in the Department of Anthropology