Theoretical and empirical inquiries into queer geographies have focused primarily on how white gay subjects navigate urban landscapes. Consequently, there has been little empirical work that examines (1) queer placemaking within Black and brown urban spaces; (2) placemaking among queer women of color; and (3) the relationship and interplay between urban and digital contexts as it relates to queer placemaking. Through multimethod qualitative analysis using interviews and urban and digital ethnography, this project explores how Black queer women navigate and respond to spatial marginalization in Chicago. Specifically, I examine the intersectional contours that shape Black queer women’s experiences living in Chicago, including the structural and cultural factors that limit and facilitate intimacy and community. I forward intimacy mapping as a critical intervention and methodological framework to empirically capture Black queer women’s intimacy practices at the intersection of the urban and the digital. In doing so, I focus on three distinct phenomena: online dating, pop-up parties, and social media groups. My findings illuminate how intimate infrastructures like mobile dating technologies function as digital pathways toward romantic, sexual, platonic, and communal pursuits. This study also demonstrates how Black queer placemakers strategically employ digital and urban placemaking practices to transform normative geographies into ephemeral erotic scene-spaces. Additionally, I find that Black queer women cultivate digital lifeworlds on social media platforms through collective vulnerability acts that congeal around Black lesbian love, sex, and relationships. When taken together, the findings contribute to understandings of the increasingly important role that digital technologies play in mitigating the spatial marginalization that intersectional queer subjects encounter in their pursuit of pleasure, intimacy, and community.

Creator

• Adams-Santos, Dominique

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-3ebg-zb95

Subject

• Sociology
• Gender studies

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:15633
• etdadmin_upload_831238

Keyword

• queer studies
• digital ethnography
• black queer studies
• urban ethnography
• sexuality
• black feminism

Date created

• 2021-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright