This dissertation investigates the place-making practices of African American lesbians in Atlanta, Georgia, from 1990 to 2010. For this project, I ask how African American lesbians claim space to examine how race, sexuality, and class shape their place-making practices. The study is situated in the city before and following the 1996 Olympic Games, which was a period of rapid social, economic, and political growth. The primary question posed in this study is as follows: How do African American lesbians claim space in Atlanta? This dissertation posits three arguments. First, African American queer spaces are transitory, reflecting the shrinking boundaries of black neighborhoods within the contemporary city. Second, these spaces are informed and forged by the sexual, racial, and classed identities of participants. Third, through their place-making practices, struggles, and contestations over public space, African Americans have transformed sites in the city into black queer cartographies. In this empirically informed study, I employ ethnographic research methods, participant observation, archival research, oral histories, and in-depth interviews. By positioning black queer cartographies within the larger schematic of African American life, this work extends current understandings of queer space and builds on the growing subarea of black queer geographies (McBride 2007; Bailey 2011; Eaves 2017). Multiple sites that reflect the transitory and clandestine nature of locating queer space are mentioned in the work. Within Atlanta’s neighborhoods of Midtown, Southwest Atlanta, and Westside, African American lesbians curated spaces that validated their identities and provided a sense of belonging during the period studied.

Reform within food justice initiatives calls for emergent strategies and practices that align with pursuits of justice, health equity, ecological sustainability, and collective social change. Examining historical and contemporary Black geographies of the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States offers valuable lessons on what grows and thrives in opposition to plantation logic. As both material and immaterial representations of the genesis of life, seeds serve as catalysts for understanding stories of praxis, where seedkeeping traditions and contemporary experiences radically reimagine and contest the imposition of colonial legacies. Theoretically grounded in Black feminist futurities, this research illuminated the relationship between radical tradition and radical imagination to understand the complex landscapes of Black liberation through stories of past, present, and future relationships to seeds. The everyday stories from Black seedkeepers articulate visions for equitable food systems and provide specific insights into how a seedkeeping praxis manifests and forms of community cultural wealth and self-determination that challenge the ongoing commodification of seeds. Focusing on the Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. where these geographies are deeply shaped by colonial sites with legacies of slavery, land theft, and a genesis of American agriculture that created the foundation for global capitalism, this project delved into the narratives of 17 Black seedkeepers from. By engaging with seedkeepers' memories and motivations this inquiry also lays the foundation for understanding how narratives articulate collective hopes for food sovereignty through seeds. / Master of Science in Life Sciences / Seeds hold the memories, stories, and imaginations of individuals that provide insight on the limitless potential to change. The idea of seedkeepers, as one word, combines the practice of saving seeds with the intention of growing them for the next harvest as well as the process of sharing the stories with these exchanges. This study explored he stories of Black seedkeepers in Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., focusing on the Mid-Atlantic region, a geography deeply shaped by colonial legacies of slavery, land theft, and agricultural practices foundational contemporary systems of extraction. Through in-depth narrative inquiry interviews with 17 Black seedkeepers, this research uncovers intergenerational knowledge exchange and seed-sharing practices that envision more just, equitable, and cooperative food futures. Grounded in Black feminist futurities and radical imagination, this study provides a whole-systems perspective on the complex landscapes of Black liberation through past, present, and future connections to seeds. Using narrative inquiry as a methodology, the researcher delved into the lived experiences and perceptions of these seedkeepers. Their stories revealed how seedkeeping practices can serve as learning spaces that cultivates new understandings and stories about invigorating new forms of social action, and nurture imaginaries that challenge how we grow and exchange seed, food and more.

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The sociocultural mythology of the South homogenizes it as a site of abjection. To counter the regionalist discourse, the dissertation intersects queer sexualities with gender and race and focuses on exploring identity and spatial formation among Black lesbian and queer women. The dissertation seeks to challenge the monolith of the South and place the region into multiple contexts and to map Black geographies through an intentional intersectional account of Black queer women. The dissertation utilizes qualitative research methods to ascertain understandings of lived experiences in the production of space. The dissertation argues that an idea of Progress has been indoctrinated as a synonym for the lgbtq civil rights movement and subsequently provides an analysis of progress discourses and queer sexualities and political campaigns of equality in the South. Analyses revealed different ways to situate progress utilizing the public contributions of three Black women interviewed for the dissertation. Moreover, the dissertation utilizes six Black queer and lesbian women to explain the multifarious nature of identities and their construction in place. Black queer and lesbian women produce spaces that deconstruct the normativity of stasis and physicality, and the dissertation explores the consequential realities of being a body in space. These consequences are particularly highlighted in the dissertation by discussions of the processes of racialization in the bounded and unbounded senses of space and place and the impacts of religious institutions, specifically Christianity. The dissertation concluded that no space is without complication. Other considerations should be made in the advancement of alleviating oppression deeply embedded in United States landscapes. Black women’s geographies offer epistemological and ontological renderings that enrich analyses of space, place, and landscape. The dissertation also concludes that Black women’s bodies represent sites for the production of geographic knowledge through narrating their spaces of material trajectories of interlocking, multiscalar lives.

This thesis explores the interweaving of colonial and post-colonial British and Jamaican Laws and the interpretive legalities of sexuality, compulsory heterosexuality, and queerness. The research project begins by exploring the ways in which the gendered colonial law produces black sexualities as excessive and in need of discipline while also noticing how Caribbean peoples negotiate and subvert these legalities. The work then turns to dancehall and its enmeshment with landscape (which reflects theatre-in-the round and African spiritual ceremonies), psycho scape (which retains African uses of marronage and pageantry as personhood), and musicscape (which deploys homophobia to demand heterosexuality), in order to tease out the complexities of Caribbean sexualities and queer practices. I couple these legal narratives and geographies with interviews and ethnographic data and draw attention to the ways in which queer men inhabit the dancehall. I argue that queer men participate in a dancehall culture—one that is perceived as heterosexual and homophobic—undetected because of the over-arching (cultural and aesthetic) queerness of the space coupled with the de facto heterosexuality afforded all who ‘brave’ dancehall’s homophobia. Queer dancehall participants report that inhabiting this space involves the tactical deployment of (often non-sexual) heterosexual signifiers as well as queering the dancehall aesthetic by moving from margin to centre. In so doing, I argue, queer dancehall queers transition from unvisible (never seen but always invoked) to invisible (blending into the queered space) while also moving across and through, as well as calling into question, North American gay culture, queer liberalism, and identity politics. / Thesis (Master, Gender Studies) -- Queen's University, 2014-01-30 13:32:15.082