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Full-Text Articles in African American Studies
Resistance/Refusal Of Violence In The Neoliberal City: Black Lgbtq+ Communities In Chicago And New York (1989 – Present), Marc Ridgell
Resistance/Refusal Of Violence In The Neoliberal City: Black Lgbtq+ Communities In Chicago And New York (1989 – Present), Marc Ridgell
Senior Honors Papers / Undergraduate Theses
Since the 1980s, Black queer and trans communities across U.S. cities have experienced racist and classist exclusion from gay neighborhoods, police and interpersonal violence in neighborhoods more generally, and medical racism in the HIV/AIDS crisis. Despite these forms of antiblack and anti-queer oppression, Black queer and trans people have performed acts of resistance and refusal to build community and experience better worlds. This research project examines how Black LGBTQ+ communities have responded to systems of racism, classism, queerphobia, and misogyny by claiming their “right to the city.” Specifically, this project explores how Black LGBTQ+ people in both Chicago and New …
Black Delilahs: Black Female Sexuality And Resistance In Progressive Era New York City, Kayla J. Smith
Black Delilahs: Black Female Sexuality And Resistance In Progressive Era New York City, Kayla J. Smith
Senior Honors Papers / Undergraduate Theses
Black Delilahs traces a history of policing and criminalizing of black women’s sexuality in Progressive Era New York City. By analyzing vaudeville posters, joke books, blues music, newspapers, vice committee records, and reformatory records, this project provides a historiography of respectability politics and the sociocultural norms and practices that limited American society’s freedom of sexual expression. It subsequently explores how working-class black women engaged with commercial, public, and private urban spaces normatively associated with vice, deviancy, and disreputability in ways that subverted these expectations of respectability and empowered them. These women used creative ways to express their sexuality within the …