All the Lesbians are White, All the Villages are Gay, but Some of Us are Brave: Intersectionality, Modernity, and Black Queer Women’s Scene Space in Washington, D.C.

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 sexualised spaces; to deal with the way race, gender, and class are mutually constituting of sexuality and therefore of social space (Somerville, 2000; Johnson, 2003; Collins, 2004; Cohen, 2005; Ferguson, 2005; Johnson and Henderson, 2005). Based on my ongoing ethnographic research2 with Black queer3 women (BQW) in Washington DC, I employ a framework of intersectionality to attend to the ways BQW talk about their experiences of race, gender, sexuality and class in ‘urban gay space’. By attending to spatial practices that BQW employ to make space in the city alongside the discursive practices they employ to discuss when they feel in place/out of place in the city, I argue that the dominant spatial orders which help to define the cosmopolitan urban landscape effect the way BQW ‘do’ race, gender, sexuality, and class. As Valentine suggests, ‘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, p.19).

Duke Scholars

Author Nikki Lane Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies