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The Newark Experience

Queer Women of Color

"Of Black Lesbians," Hate Crimes, and Crime-Talk: The Sexuality of "Aggression" in the City"
IN Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas. Street Therapists: Race, Affect, and Neoliberal Personhood in Latino Newark. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2012, pp. 246-281. Rutgers-restricted Access
"Urban Erotics and Racial Affect in a Neoliberal 'Racial Democracy': Brazilian and Puerto Rican Youth in Newark, New Jersey,"
Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas. Identities 16(5), September 2009, pp.513-547. Rutgers-restricted Access
"Mobilizing After Murder: Black Women Queering Politics and Black Feminism in Newark"
IN Zenzele Isoke, Urban Black Women and the Politics of Resistance New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 97-120. Rutgers-restricted Access
"Can't I Be Seen? Can't I Be Heard? Black Women Queering Politics in Newark"
Zenzele Isoke. Gender, Place and Culture 21(3), 2014, pp. 353-369.
"I explore how black women embraced a set of oppositional spatial practices to resist the intersectional effects of misogyny, homo/transphobia, racism, and poverty in Newark, New Jersey. I reconstruct the creation of the Newark Pride Alliance, a local lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual and queer coalition that mobilized in 2003 and 2004, after the death of Sakia Gunn. Exploring migrations between ‘black women,’ ‘black queer’ and ‘black feminist,’ I examine how black women respatialized social capital and enacted resistance." Rutgers-restricted Access
"Erasing Sakia: Who's to Blame?"
Kelly Cogswell and Ana Simo. The Gully Online Magazine June 6, 2003.
"Small Murders: Rethinking News Coverage of Hate Crimes against GLBT People"
Kim Pearson. IN News and Sexuality: Media Portraits of Diversity. Sage Publications, 2006, pp. 159-190.
"This chapter examines how much attention the mainstream press paid to Gunn's murder, as well as the reasoning process behind the decisions journalists made about whether to cover her case and how." Rutgers-restricted Resources
"Sakia Gunn Is a Girl: Queer African American Girlhood in Local and Alternative Media"
IN Sarah Projansky. Spectacular Girls Media Fascination and Celebrity Culture New York, New York University Press, 2014, pp. 155-180.
Analyzes the coverage of Gunn's death in alternative and local media. Rutgers-restricted Access
"Lover: Newark, New Jersey""
Kristal Brent Zook. IN Black Women's Lives: Stories of Power and Pain. New York, Nation Books, 2006, pp. 29-48.
In depth look at Sakia's life and death, based on interviews with family and friends. Available?
"The Politics of Representation for Black Women and the Impossibility of Queering the New Jersey 4/7."
Christina Carney IN Wish to Live : The Hip-hop Feminism Pedagogy Reader. Ruth Nicole Brown and Chamara Jewel Kwakye, eds. New York, Peter Lang, 2012, pp. 71-77. Available?
Wolf Packs: U.S. Carceral Logics and the Case of the New Jersey Four
Leilani Dowell. (Ph.D. Thesis) City University of New York, 2019.
"Examines the case of the New Jersey Seven in order to investigate U.S. logics of carcerality in relation to the sexualities of queer black women, as those logics extend beyond the geographical and institutional site of the prison itself...A turn to Newark in Chapter 3 examines both the rhetorical production of Newark as violent ghetto and the elision of homophobic violence, even as the same neoliberal rhetorics of tolerance that conceptualize Greenwich Village are increasingly used in a Newark undergoing a "revitalization," while examining the practices of capitalist accumulation the promote both ghetto and rehabilitation, uplifting the voices of black queer women who have created a solid and impactful community there." Rutgers-restricted Access
Invisible Pathways: Entrepreneurship by Queer Women of Color in Newark
Kristyn Scorsone. Thesis (M.A.), Rutgers University Newark, May 2017.
"This thesis challenges ideas about gentrification and queer economic power by examining the oral histories of queer women of color who are engaged in entrepreneurial endeavors in the city of Newark, New Jersey."
Invisible Pathways: Public History by Queer Black Women in Newark
Kristyn Scorsone. The Public Historian 41(2), 2019, pp. 190-217. "This essay explores how contemporary black lesbian entrepreneurs in the city of Newark, New Jersey, are engaged in entrepreneurial practices that resist patterns of gentrification. I argue for expanding our definition of public history to account for the business practices and social structures that queer black women in Newark are erecting as a part of their survival." Rutgers-restriced Access
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