Feels Right - by Kemi Adeyemi (Paperback)

About the Book

Kemi Adeyemi examines how Black queer women use the queer dance floor to articulate relationships to themselves, the Black queer community, and gentrifying neighborhoods in Chicago.

Book Synopsis

In Feels Right Kemi Adeyemi presents an ethnography of how black queer women in Chicago use dance to assert their physical and affective rights to the city. Adeyemi stages the book in queer dance parties in gentrifying neighborhoods, where good feelings are good business. But feeling good is elusive for black queer women whose nightlives are undercut by white people, heterosexuality, neoliberal capitalism, burnout, and other buzzkills. Adeyemi documents how black queer women respond to these conditions: how they destroy DJ booths, argue with one another, dance slowly, and stop partying altogether. Their practices complicate our expectations that life at night, on the queer dance floor, or among black queer community simply feels good. Adeyemi's framework of "feeling right" instead offers a closer, kinesthetic look at how black queer women adroitly manage feeling itself as a complex right they should be afforded in cities that violently structure their movements and energies. What emerges in Feels Right is a sensorial portrait of the critical, black queer geographies and collectivities that emerge in social dance settings and in the broader neoliberal city.

Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

Review Quotes

"What is innovative about Adeyemi's text ... is that she carves out a scholarly field that reflects her interest in queer nightlife in the most expansive definition of the phrase. ... Feels Right is a political project that aims to drive many Black queer women to return to nightlife even if their pleasure is contested on the dance floor and in the city."

--Marietta Kosma "European Journal of American Culture" (1/10/2024 12:00:00 AM)

"Feels Right is an invigorating addition to the growing scholarship elucidating the labor Black queer women perform to sustain and create Black communities. It inserts Black queer women into the scholarship on queer nightlife that largely focuses on white queer men. As a dance studies text, it exemplifies how to dance alongside and do ethnography with care and respect for the people who invite us into their communities. I am thoroughly struck by how Adeyemi rigorously operationalizes the theories she creates to describe the strategies Black queer women deploy to party and navigate within the trappings of neoliberalism throughout Chicago."--Raquel Monroe "Dance Research Journal" (12/1/2023 12:00:00 AM)

"By refusing the primacy of the explanatory and explicit event in academic writing, Adeyemi masterfully uses the structure of "feeling right" in Feels Right in Chicago to situate the forms of affect and politics that shape Black queer life at the level of the body and in social space."--Brittnay L. Proctor "Theatre Journal" (6/1/2024 12:00:00 AM)

"Scholars interested in topics of geography and space making, queer and Black politics, and queer theory will find Feels Right particularly appealing. . . . Throughout Feels Right, Adeyemi presents essential questions about queer nightlife, neoliberal politics, ordinary affects, mobility throughout city spaces (and academia), and experiences of burnout within radical politics and research."--Jordan C. Grasso "GLQ" (6/1/2024 12:00:00 AM)

"This book will be invaluable to anyone working in feminist studies, queer studies, performance studies, Black studies, and Black geographies."--Naz Oktay "Lateral" (5/20/2024 12:00:00 AM)

"Adeyemi's rich ethnographic observations on Black queer women's parties in Chicago demonstrate why the dance floor is much more than just a utopian promise of happiness within a hostile socio-political environment. . . . Through dancing and choreography, queerness is not only performed but also learned and experienced by people who may not have encountered it before."--Yener Bayramoglu "Ethnic and Racial Studies" (12/22/2022 12:00:00 AM)

About the Author

Kemi Adeyemi is Associate Professor of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington and coeditor of Queer Nightlife.