Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

Christopher Smith, University of Toronto

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Description:

Session Organizers: Christopher Smith, LaToya Eaves, Watufani Poe and Rae Rosenberg

This series of panel sessions expands on conversations that occurred in the AAG 2018 panel session, “Tracing Black Queer Geographies.” This session aims to extend the conversations that occurred in our panels, among scholars whose research attends to the relationship between Black LGBTQ subjects and the spaces they inhabit, challenge, and (de)construct. We invite a consideration of the fruitful opportunities that may arise when Black and queer geographic analytics are held in a sustained and combined conversation. Black and queer geographic analyses attune themselves to spatial formations that do not immediately or necessarily register within a diagrammatic imperative. However, when these two bodies of geographical work merge in co-constitutive dialogues, the frameworks and conceptualizations that emerge reveal new ways of thinking through Blackness, sexuality and gender, and senses of place.

We invite panelists to consider the following questions, among many others: how might a Black queer geographic analysis attend to the concomitant manner in which capital enables and simultaneously displaces Black queer and trans spatial embodiments and formations? How do Black queer and trans diasporas register as “globally scattered populations not necessarily visible through diagrammatic representation; the Black Atlantic” (McKittrick, 2017)? How has a potential homo-masculinist tendency in early Black queer theorizing obfuscated informative critical hermeneutics such as Black feminist theorizing of space? How might literary and cinematic archives offer spatial clues to theorize Black queer and trans geographies?

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda