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Abstract
What does it mean for a black female to negotiate urban space? How is her body read, her politics enacted, and her agency understood and interpreted? How do black women use their bodies and identities to challenge structural intersectionality in US cities? To answer these questions, I explore how black women embraced a set of oppositional spatial practices to resist the intersectional effects of misogyny, homo/transphobia, racism, and poverty in Newark, New Jersey. I reconstruct the creation of the Newark Pride Alliance, a local lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual and queer coalition that mobilized in 2003 and 2004, after the death of Sakia Gunn. Exploring migrations between ‘black women,’ ‘black queer’ and ‘black feminist,’ I examine how black women respatialized social capital and enacted resistance. Through semi-structured interviews and frame analysis, I explore how black women forged new relationships between queer youth and black vernacular institutions, and created political spaces in which honest engagement of issues of gender violence, poverty, and power could take place.
¿No puedo ser vista? ¿No puedo ser escuchada? Las mujeres negras haciendo queer la política en Newark
¿Qué significa para una mujer negra negociar un espacio urbano? ¿Cómo es leído su cuerpo, realizada su política, y entendida e interpretada su agencia? ¿Cómo utilizan las mujeres negras sus cuerpos e identidades para desafiar la estructuralidad e intersectorialidad en las ciudades de EE.UU.? Para responder estas preguntas, exploro cómo las mujeres adoptaron un conjunto de prácticas espaciales oposicionales para resistir los efectos intersectoriales de la misoginia, la homo/transfobia, el racismo y la pobreza en Newark, Nueva Jersey. Reconstruyo la creación de la Alianza del Orgullo de Newark, una coalición local de lesbianas, gays, bisexuales, transexuales y queers (LGBTQ) que se movilizó después de la muerte de Sakia Gunn en 2003 y 2004. Explorando las migraciones entre “mujeres negras”, “queer negra”, y “feminista negra”, examino como las mujeres negras respacializaron el capital social y llevaron a cabo la resistencia. A través de entrevistas semiestructuradas y el análisis de marco, exploro cómo las mujeres negras forjaron nuevas relaciones entre jóvenes queer e instituciones negras vernáculas, y crearon espacios políticos en los que hay lugar para una honesta participación en temas de violencia de género, pobreza y poder.
我无法被看见、被听见？纽华克黑人女性的酷儿化政治
黑人女性协商都市空间意味着什麽？她的身体如何被解读？她如何从事政治？她的施为如何被理解与诠释？黑人女性如何运用她们身体及认同，挑战美国城市中结构性的多元交织性（intersectionality）？为了回答上述问题，我将探讨黑人女性如何拥护一组对抗性的空间实践，以反抗新泽西州纽华克市中厌恶女人、恐同症、畏惧跨性别、种族主义与贫穷之间多元交织的影响。我将重现纽华克骄傲联盟的诞生——Sakia Gunny死后， 一个 在2003及2004年由在地的男女同志、双性恋者、跨性别与酷儿（LGBTQ）动员组成的联盟。我透过探索“黑人女性”、“黑人酷儿”与“黑人女性主义者”之间的移动，检视黑人女性如何重新空间化社会资本并进行反抗。我透过半结构式的访谈及架构分析，探讨黑人女性如何打造青年酷儿与黑人地方组织之间的新关係，并开创性别暴力、贫穷及权力议题得以诚挚交会的政治空间。
Acknowledgements
There are several people who have supported this work over the years. First, I thank the women in Newark who agreed to go on record for this project. Second, I thank Roderick Ferguson, Dara Strolovitch, Kimala Price, Ruth Nicole Brown, and Jigna Desai for the helpful feedback on different versions of this paper. I also warmly thank the series editors, Marlon Bailey and Rashad Shabazz, and editor of GPC, Beverley Mullings, for their patience and enthusiasm in ushering this paper to its final form.
Notes
1. I use the term ‘queer black women’ to refer to self-identified ‘black women’ who transgress norms of heteronormativity in one or more of the following ways: (1) they love and stand in solidarity with black lesbians, gays, transsexual, and transgender people; (2) they take open political stances against sexism, homophobia, and gender violence (rape, gay bashing, domestic violence, and/or street harassment) that is perpetrated within the African American community in Newark; and (3) they openly reject hegemonic gender norms that require black people to perform respectability in public spaces.
2. Social capital typically refers to those features of social organization that enhance the possibility of cooperation and collective social action (Putnam Citation1993). Looking beyond the resources and capacities of individuals, social capital directs attention toward the common resources and capacities of communities made up of complex networks of human relationships. Some basic features of social capital include trust, rapport, and reliable means to interact and demonstrate positive norms of reciprocity with other community members.
3. I employ what Jack Halberstam has called a ‘scavenger methodology’ that uses multiple methods to produce knowledge about the political lives of queer subjects (Halberstam Citation1998).
4. I define black heteropatriarchy as the local convergence of processes of black racialization, heterosexualization, and patriarchy. For further discussion, see M. Jacqui Alexander's Pedagogies of Crossing (2005) and Lynda Hart's Fatal Women: Lesbian Sexuality and the Mark of Aggression (1994).
5. The term ‘aggressive’ is a self-acclaimed gender category of women of color in the northeastern USA, who often self-identify as ‘black’ and who have an androgynous, often marked masculine, self-presentations rooted in urban African-American vernacular culture. Interestingly, many ‘aggressive’ or ‘ag’ black women reject the label of lesbian as it does not adequately represent their distinctively racialized gender performances of sexual identity. In 2004, producer Daniel Peddle produced a documentary entitled The Aggressives that explores the experiences of aggressive women in New York City.
6. To tap into black women's spatial resistance, I interviewed 29 activists – black women who have been or continue to be engaged in political activism who were selected through the process of community nomination. I consulted with informants from each community of practice to identify potential interviewees. The activists who participated in this project are diverse in terms of their socioeconomic status, levels of educational attainment, and age. Six (21%) of the women interviewed were under 40 years of age, with the youngest being 24 years old. Twelve women (41%) were between 40 and 50 years of age. The remaining 11 women (38%) were 50 years or older; the oldest being 79. All of the women interviewed had completed high school, and 16 (55%) had completed an undergraduate college degree. Of those who had completed college, five had gone on to pursue professional graduate degrees. In this article, we hear from five gender transgressive black female activists who organized in the aftermath of Sakia Gunn's death.
7. It should be noted that Mayor James was convicted of only five counts of fraud and later served 27 months sentence in a federal prison.
8. In 2009, the city council was comprised of Ras Baraka (son of the esteemed activist poet Amiri Baraka a.k.a. LeRoi Jones), Donald Payne Jr (son of recently deceased U.S. Representative Donald Payne, representing New Jersey's 10th Congressional District), and Ron Rice Jr (son of New Jersey Congressman Ron Rice). These men's ties with African-American churches and community organizations including the Urban League, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, state and national Congressional Black Caucuses, and the Democratic Party are notorious. They wield considerable influence in the identification and selection of candidates for the Board of Education, the Zoning Board, and municipal council seats. All of these men are heterosexual, monotheistic, and generally mute on issues of gender and sexuality in their basic orientation and practice of politics.
9. Other scholars, including Cazenave (Citation2011), has referred to U.S. cities as ‘urban racial states’ which he defines as, ‘the political structure and processes of a city and its suburbs that manage race-relations in ways that foster both its own immediate interests, and ultimately, white racial supremacy’ (25). This perspective, while illuminating undermines the extent to which black agency, as a response to racial domination in cities, has reproduced structures of violence predicated upon heterosexual male political dominance.
10. Newark Pride Alliance website.
11. For more discussion about refuse spaces, see Out of Place: Homelessness, Mobilizations, Subcities and Contested Landscapes by Talmadge Wright (New York: State University Press of New York, 1997).
12. For example, while ignoring requests from activists to meet, Cathy Cuomo-Cacere made public statements in the New Jersey Star-Ledger claiming to have met with ‘members of the gay community.’
13.New Jersey Star-Ledger, ‘From loss, a lesson. District mourns loss with a day of tolerance.’ 9 May 2004.
14. The administration justified this decision by arguing that the rainbow was a form of ‘gang paraphernalia.’ See, for instance, ‘Student Orientation: More Teenage Girls are Testing Gender Boundaries’ by Crowley, Peggy. in New Jersey Star Ledger, 26 May 2004.
15. This ‘new racism’ includes contemporary manifestations of age – old racial ideologies facilitated by contemporary processes of globalization, transnational corporate hegemony, and the global proliferation of racial ideologies via mass media.
16. For a more general discussion on the deployment of identity, politics, and discursive practices, see Yuval Davis (Citation2011).
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Notes on contributors
Zenzele Isoke
Zenzele Isoke is assistant professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota. She recently published her first book entitled Urban Black Women and the Politics of Resistance (2012) with Palgrave MacMillan Press. Her new project ‘Unheard Voices at the Bottom of Empire: Translocal Sites of Black Feminist Resistance’ develops a black feminist ethnographic stance to explore diverse iterations of black women's activism in the USA and Dubai, UAE. Zenzele teaches graduate and undergraduate students in feminist theory and methods, black feminisms, women of color social movements, and hip hop feminisms.
