Feels Right

“Feels Right approaches the nexus of race, pleasure, geography, and capital in innovative and important ways. Kemi Adeyemi’s prose crackles with essential sensory details and the organics of life. Her argument is a necessary extension of work on Black life and death and the ways the tensions between the two find articulation in cities and neighborhoods, on streets, and in the spaces of everyday life.” - Aimee Meredith Cox, author of Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship

“In this incredibly beautiful and important work, Kemi Adeyemi addresses the erasure of Black queer women’s stories, histories, and spaces by recovering the complexity of their lived geographies. Feels Right is a fantastic read that transports readers into their world that was—and one yet to come.” - Jen Jack Gieseking, author of A Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queers

“Adeyemi’s rich ethnographic observations on Black queer women’s parties in Chicago demonstrate why the dance floor is much more than just a utopian promise of happiness within a hostile socio-political environment. . . . Through dancing and choreography, queerness is not only performed but also learned and experienced by people who may not have encountered it before.” - Yener Bayramoglu, Ethnic and Racial Studies

"What is innovative about Adeyemi’s text ... is that she carves out a scholarly field that reflects her interest in queer nightlife in the most expansive definition of the phrase. ... Feels Right is a political project that aims to drive many Black queer women to return to nightlife even if their pleasure is contested on the dance floor and in the city."  

“This book will be invaluable to anyone working in feminist studies, queer studies, performance studies, Black studies, and Black geographies.” - Naz Oktay, Lateral

"Scholars interested in topics of geography and space making, queer and Black politics, and queer theory will find Feels Right particularly appealing. . . . Throughout Feels Right, Adeyemi presents essential questions about queer nightlife, neoliberal politics, ordinary affects, mobility throughout city spaces (and academia), and experiences of burnout within radical politics and research." - Jordan C. Grasso, GLQ

"By refusing the primacy of the explanatory and explicit event in academic writing, Adeyemi masterfully uses the structure of “feeling right” in Feels Right in Chicago to situate the forms of affect and politics that shape Black queer life at the level of the body and in social space." - Brittnay L. Proctor, Theatre Journal

"Feels Right is an invigorating addition to the growing scholarship elucidating the labor Black queer women perform to sustain and create Black communities. It inserts Black queer women into the scholarship on queer nightlife that largely focuses on white queer men. As a dance studies text, it exemplifies how to dance alongside and do ethnography with care and respect for the people who invite us into their communities. I am thoroughly struck by how Adeyemi rigorously operationalizes the theories she creates to describe the strategies Black queer women deploy to party and navigate within the trappings of neoliberalism throughout Chicago." - Raquel Monroe, Dance Research Journal

"Kemi Adeyemi’s Feels Right moves deliberately through varying degrees of ease and challenge across Chicago’s Black queer dance floors, providing a sustained analysis of understudied communities that also models new ways of doing performance ethnography." - Ariel Nereson, The Drama Review