Feeling Good in the Second City: How Queer Women of Color Take Pleasure in the Nightlife Scenes of Chicago's Hipster Gentrification

Feeling Good in the Second City explores how queer women of color engage sound and movement as methods of disrupting the white sociality of Chicago’s hipster gentrification. I define “hipster gentrification” as the particular ways that blackness circulates as an audio-visual branding strategy within the entertainment districts that accompany the (re)investment in housing, commercial, and entertainment stock that draws hipsters—white, young, economically privileged urban dwellers—to the near north west side of the city. In each chapter I describe a social dance scene (a series of “soul night” parties, a network of alternative queer parties, and a queer “slow jams” party) where the hypervisibility of black aesthetics physically and ideologically shapes how white people interact with the landscape, arguing that the racialized networks of music and movement staged therein reinforce a logic of removing black people to the physical and imaginative boundaries of the gentrifying neighborhood while further erasing the predominately Latin@ population.

Most critical to my research are the sonic and embodied ways that queer black and Latina women living in these neighborhoods subsequently theorize and mobilize black sound as a method of taking pleasure therein. Calling upon performance theories of the body, sound studies, ethnic, and urban studies, this work contributes to more nuanced understandings of how racialized ways of seeing and hearing the city impact ways of being in the city, and vice versa. Further pushing against literature arguing hipsterness and gentrification are wholly antithetical to the lives people of color, I center the affective and embodied worldviews of queer women of color in order to highlight the methods they have for creating space for themselves in neoliberal settings where they are the racial but not necessarily cultural minority.