Get Yo' Life: Black Queer Placemaking
In Get Yo’ Life, R. J. Millhouse incorporates gender and sexuality studies, archival work, performance studies, and urban studies to craft a historical geography of Black queer public life and culture from the 1960s onward. He does so via case studies of two Brooklyn nightclubs, Langston’s Brooklyn and Happiness Lounge, as patrons fought to preserve their spaces and community in the face of gentrification. Introducing Black queer spatiality as an analytic method and a type of intersectionality-driven memory work, Millhouse teases out the nuanced functions of care work, performance, and kinship labor, along with attendant sensational, atmospheric, and nostalgic factors, as they inform Black queer placemaking practices. These practices—such as resource fairs, vogue competitions, and the appropriation of public parks as communal places—often face opposition from the police or well-to-do, mostly white, neighbors. Yet, they remain vital sites of Black queer agency. By focusing on the structural powers that condition the lives and placemaking and placekeeping strategies of Black queer people in Brooklyn, Millhouse reveals the ways in which people make and preserve place amid state-sanctioned displacement.
Bio
RJ Millhouse (he, him) is an assistant professor of urban design, environmental design, and interior architecture in The Design School at Arizona State University. His courses focus on design for human behavior; design thinking; design criticism; and diversity and design at the undergraduate and graduate levels. As an interdisciplinary scholar, his research focuses on the impacts of development on marginalized communities across urban environments. Most recently, he was a fellow at the Institute for Public Architecture where he held exhibits, design talks, and served on juries at Pratt Institute, The New School, and the AIA New York. He has organized design and urban planning panels focused on gentrification, accessibility, and economic deprivation across South Phoenix, the U.S., and abroad.
Praise for this book
Get Yo’ Life powerfully demonstrates how Black queer people challenge exclusion, antiblackness, and queerphobia through their resistive placemaking efforts. Synthesizing ethnography, archival research, personal insight, popular culture, and theory, Millhouse has produced a deeply persuasive argument.
Rinaldo Walcott Author of The Long Emancipation: Moving Toward Black Freedom
Millhouse archives the spaces that once catered to the needs and desires of Black queer people and the behaviors that foster Black queer community, often under duress. Get Yo’ Life makes an important contribution to Black studies, spatial justice studies, and the study of New York City’s queer history.
Marlon B. Ross Author of Sissy Insurgencies: A Racial Anatomy of Unfit Manliness
