Civic Intimacies

Black queer lives often exist outside conventional civic institutions and therefore have to explore alternative intimacies to experience a sense of belonging. Civic Intimacies examines how—and to what extent—these different forms of intimacy catalyze the values, aspirations, and collective flourishing of Black queer denizens of Baltimore. Niels van Doorn draws on 18 months of immersive ethnographic fieldwork for his innovative cross-disciplinary analysis of contemporary debates in political and cultural theory. Van Doorn describes the way that these systematically marginalized communities improvise on citizenship not just to survive but also to thrive despite the proliferation of violence and insecurity in their lives. By reimagining citizenship as the everyday reparative work of building support structures, Civic Intimacies highlights the extent to which sex, kinship, memory, religious faith, and sexual health are rooted in collective practices that are deeply political. These systems sustain the lives of Black queer Baltimoreans who find themselves stuck in a city they cannot give up on—even though it has in many ways given up on them.

“Civic Intimacies is a thoughtful, timely, and engaging critique that rethinks the category of citizenship not simply as the domain of those on the inside but as constituted through its outside, through those subjects or nonsubjects that are seen as the very antithesis of sovereignty, subjectivity, and citizenship. Van Doorn challenges hegemonic notions of citizenship while also demonstrating how Black queer subjects create new understandings of citizenship through political, social, and cultural work.”—Rashad Shabazz, Associate Professor in the School of Social Transformation, Arizona State University, and author of Spatializing Blackness: Architectures of Confinement and Black Masculinity in Chicago

Niels van Doorn, a former postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, is an Assistant Professor in New Media and Digital Culture in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam.