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theses

This dissertation explores the lives of Black queer youth (ages 14-23) by attending to the quotidian experiences related to navigating race, gender, and sexuality normativity through queer cultural practices and performances shaped by life in an American city. Black young people, especially those living in urban and inner-city spaces, face structural and everyday forms of violence. Currently lacking are examinations of the effects of systemic and interpersonal violence on Black queer youth, particularly within the context of urban space. To investigate such questions, this project utilizes nearly two years of ethnographic fieldwork at the Meridian Center for LGBTQ Youth in a city on the East Coast of the United States. I use the concepts orientation and disorientation to explore the entanglements of embodiment, spatiality, and affectivity in the lives of Black queer youth. I braid queer theory together with queer of color critique, urban ethnography, and childhood and youth studies to elaborate and destabilize the current imaginings of Black queer youth in three key areas: the linkages between Black respectability politics and homonormativity that pivot on the dominant construction of youth; the gender performances of Black trans and genderqueer youth that are coded and recoded by affects associated with street sociality; and “the virtual street” that emerges primarily from the mediation of physical spaces and location-aware digital technology. By exploring the creativity of Black queer youth in the present—without remedying their past on behalf of an imagined, “better” future—I investigate how the youths’ gender and sexual performances reveal queer forms of self-care, survival, and collectivity in the midst of racial and sexual tumult inhering in normative investments in personhood and citizenship.

ETD_7363

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

Includes vita

by Stephen Bernardini

doi:10.7282/T3S184MB

ETD doctoral

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