Abstract
Niels van Doorn’s Civic Intimacies: Black Queer Improvisations on Citizenship takes readers into the complex lived realities for young Black queer Americans in the city of Baltimore. The book had a special interest for me, being myself a product of neighboring Baltimore county and having spent ample time in the city. Van Doorn’s view of the city and its relationship with its Black LGBTQ citizens is one that begins to answer a question raised by sociologist Amy Stone (2018): What are the lived experiences of Black LGBTQ persons in Black-majority cities of the United States? Civic Intimacies sets out to explore the ways Black queer citizens of Baltimore struggle to make ends meet and to assert a new citizenship and personhood in contemporary times. This focus of the text comes as almost a surprise for the author, who reveals that, upon beginning to study the LGBTQ community in Baltimore, race, racism, and anti-Blackness shifted the foundations of his “colorblind queerness.”
Van Doorn’s foray into the lives of Baltimore’s Black populace is thus one of happenstance. His time spent as a postdoctoral scholar at Johns Hopkins University provides the backdrop for his entrée into the Baltimore scene. In the earliest empirical chapter, the author explores the tenuous and almost parasitic relationship between Johns Hopkins University (and Hospital) with Baltimore’s Black population. The reader experiences Baltimore from the vantage point of the author, who traces the university’s history from his own view of the city from the campus medical center. One of the most compelling pieces of the work is the author’s reflection on the ways that Johns Hopkins and the local city government have become so intrinsically tied. Specifically, van Doorn highlights the partnership between the government of former mayor Martin O’Malley and the university, whereby numerous Black communities were destroyed and displaced for the sake of community development. For a city plagued with a reputation for poverty and violence, the complicated relationship between the renowned university and its surrounding Black communities has been underexplored by much scholarly and media writing. Perhaps the best-known of Johns Hopkins’s grievous acts is the case of Henrietta Lacks’s cell biopsy. Yet other acts of removal, displacement, and disempowerment have plagued the Black community at the hands of the university; and the author’s introspection about his role as its ambassador while studying these communities is well done.
The author’s discussion of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) at the end of Chapter Two illustrates the complex relationship that Black queer men have with sexual healthcare and community. In some ways, van Doorn is right to question the logic, efficacy, and morality of a prevention campaign based on getting both HIV positive and HIV negative persons on antiretroviral medication. However, missing from the chapter was a clear indication of just how much the local discourse espoused an eschewing of previously touted prevention strategies (e.g., routine testing, condoms, and so forth). The lack of evidence about how the local health department and community PrEP administrators either abandoned condoms or emphasized the use of both PrEP and condoms fails to serve the author’s critical perspective on the biomedical intervention.
For all of the book’s efforts in engaging with Black queer communities, it fails to adequately address sociological scholarship in this area. I found myself wondering how the chapter on Black queer religion would have been better informed by the work of Richard Pitt (2009; 2010), how the sections on family should have engaged with work on Black lesbians by Mignon Moore (2010; 2011), and how sections on identity expression and community involvement by Black queer men pair with work by Marcus Hunter (2010). To be sure, the lack of engagement with these scholars’ work is a glaring oversight by the author. Van Doorn’s desire to explain the theoretical insight of intimate citizenship almost seems to clash with the ways his respondents envision their own lives. The underlying premise of the book, that “Black queer community [members] exist outside conventional civic institutions,” is brazenly at odds with the trends of the literature in this area. That is, as Black queer sociologists have shown, Black queer community members are often fully integrated within churches, families, clubs, and Black neighborhoods, which contributes to and defines their struggles with social acceptance and stigma. To this end, it is unclear how the book pushes forward sociological discourse on Black queer lives without fully engaging with what is already known.
Some of the most poignant and revelatory moments in the text come from the author’s self-reflection on the challenges and self-described “failures” of the work itself. Van Doorn poses a series of questions to truly probe the potential impact or lack thereof of his work on the actual communities and individuals he studies. He asks, “In other words, what does it mean to ‘do justice’ to such practices? Does it require taking the accounts of my interlocutors at face value and thus giving up on the notion of citizenship because they had? . . . How relevant is the notion of ‘doing justice’ to those I have studied, given that the resulting work can do very little, if anything, to support the survival—let alone flourishing—of Black queer collectivities?” (p. 184). The author admits that his theoretical insights into citizenship stand in stark contrast to the views of his respondents, who did not believe they themselves were struggling with notions of citizenship. From this tension, the reader will undoubtedly come to question just how important it is to reshape the narratives of marginalized populations into frames for the academy no matter how out of step it may be from its source.
All in all, Civic Intimacies raises many questions for ethnographers and social scientists more broadly about the role of our research in the lives of our participants. How critical is it that those we study can comprehend the final products of our work? If one of our interlocutors cannot understand their lived realities within the text, have we truly accomplished anything at all? Van Doorn’s descriptions of the failures of the work and his own shortcomings in the dissemination of his findings are perhaps the greatest takeaway for those who study populations where there is no vested interest. While these criticisms of Civic Intimacies, both author-admitted and reviewer-derived, are strong, van Doorn’s monograph will shape future research for those studying race and sexualities, especially for researchers who aim to study populations with whom they have no shared identity.