Embodying Hope on the Dance Floor

Under neoliberalism, the rights to the city, the ability to occupy space, and the opportunity to feel right in one's body are contested, and these fleeting experiences are implicated in questions of "who gets to simply stay alive within [the city's] bounds" (10). In Feels Right: Black Queer Women and the Politics of Partying in Chicago, Kemi Adeyemi shows how Black queer women utilize dance to assert their rights to the city. Notably, Adeyemi makes significant contributions to the literature on performance studies, Black feminist geographies, and queer theory.Drawing on Dwight Conquergood's methodology of performance ethnography, Adeyemi relies on extensive fieldwork within Chicago's Black queer nightlife (Slo 'Mo, Party Noire, and ENERGY) and interviews with organizers and attendees to unpack how queer Black women come together through dance and nightlife to assert, create, and maintain space within the gentrifying city of Chicago that, under neoliberalism, appropriates and disembodies Black and queer aesthetics. The performance of dance and organizing of parties, perhaps viewed by some as a gathering to let loose, opens the door to Black and queer politics that refrain from neoliberalism's speed and disembodiment to imagine instead a more accessible, community-oriented, and just experience.Scholars interested in topics of geography and space making, queer and Black politics, and queer theory will find Feels Right particularly appealing. Adeyemi's findings illuminate the politics of nightlife and coming together on the dance floor as resistance to exclusion and co-optation forced by neoliberalism. In chapter 1, Adeyemi uses the slowness of one party (Slo 'Mo) as a framework to discuss how Black queer parties rely on slowed-down tempos and sonics, counter to the acceleration and accumulation that is imperative of neoliberal governance. Black queer parties are acts of resistance that refuse the "consumption style endemic to (assimilation under) neoliberal capitalism" (49).Chapter 2 outlines how Black queer parties are an exhausting community-building practice that necessitates open communication between organizers and attendees. In a gentrifying city where feeling good and feeling right is a class- and race-based experience, Adeyemi describes another party (Party Noire) and its challenges to accountability as a foundation to understand the ways in which the neoliberal city is ever-impacting the politics and practices of queer Black nightlife. The dance floor becomes a space to embody Black joy, which is essential when understanding the conditions of the world outside its doors. In describing dance cyphers at Party Noire, Adeyemi articulates how the large-scale balance and communicative approach between organizers and attendees work on a smaller scale within each party: between the dancers and the surrounding crowd. Responsibility and accountability necessitate balance, support, and conversation to succeed. Thus the party (and the cyphers) offer insight into the queer possibility of community building antithetical to neoliberalism.Paying attention to the ordinary affects of Black queer parties, Adeyemi turns to their ordinariness in chapter 3 to critique the empirical drive to study "eventful happenings." The parties, like ENERGY, garner a sense of normalcy through their frequent repetition. Instead of thinking about each night party as a "rupture" of time and space, Adeyemi asks readers (and ethnographers in their work) to think "with the event" (99). By viewing the parties as not necessarily productive or doing something eventful, Adeyemi refuses to reproduce Black labor and instead focuses on describing the parties while maintaining an ethical distance. There is something to be known within our unknowing, and Adeyemi refuses the violence promoted by ethnographers that produces modes of surveillance, control, and, potentially, lies (109). Instead, Adeyemi draws out the broad texture of Black queer parties: both the abstract theoretical elements and everyday ordinariness they entail.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. Rather than pointing to a utopian way of world making, Adeyemi states that the Black queer dance parties in Chicago raise questions about who gets to feel right (and good), who gets to make and hold space, and who must experience burnout to hold space, all while being under the grip of neoliberalism. Indeed, race, sexuality, and feeling are all entangled with the city's structure, and dance offers an imaginative and material method to enact Black queer community building.Adeyemi's challenge to the optimism of utopian studies is perhaps short-sighted. While she argues that the dance floor may feel utopian, she simultaneously suggests that the prevalence of the real world, of gentrification and anti-Black racism, negatively impacts the possibility of Black joy and queer utopia. Adeyemi argues that the dance floor and embodiment of Black joy read less as an opportunity for prefigurative politics and more as an attempted escape from the real world outside the party doors. The final pages of Feels Right, however, pick up the utopian practice of imagination and hope as Adeyemi weaves quotes from several interviewees as they discuss what they wish for within Black queer parties. While these narrations speak to some of the difficulty of organizing parties under the "draining realities of life under neoliberalism" (133), they simultaneously critique current modes and open possibilities for how to move forward to a more utopian way of being.