“Errybody Gotta Eat”: Black Queer Food Geographies and the Politics of Refusal

Abstract

‘Errybody Gotta Eat’: Black Queer Food Geographies and the Politics of Refusal is a critical study of food, space, and survival that centers Black queer life. This dissertation utilizes Black feminist thought, Black feminist geographies, Black food geographies, queer of color critique, critical trans politics, digital food studies, and ethnographic methods to examine how Black queer people create nourishment, belonging, and care within food systems structured by racial capitalism, heteronormativity, anti-Blackness, and uneven access to resources. I approach food as a spatial and relational practice through which Black queer people negotiate safety, pleasure, memory, intimacy, and refusal. Drawing on four years of fieldwork in Seattle, including semi-structured interviews, participant observation, digital ethnography, informal conversations, and autoethnographic reflection, this dissertation asks: What becomes possible when Black queer food practices are understood as theories of place-making, survival, and world-building? How do Black queer people feed themselves and one another in cities that celebrate diversity while reproducing exclusion? What forms of knowledge emerge in kitchens, restaurants, gardens, digital platforms, chosen-family gatherings, and everyday acts of cooking, eating, sharing, and withholding food? I develop the concept of Black queer food geographies to describe the spatial and relational practices through which Black queer communities produce nourishment and belonging within hostile food landscapes. I also theorize quare food refusals as quiet, embodied, and often partially visible practices that reject dominant food justice frameworks organized around visibility, inclusion, nutrition, access, and institutional recognition. These refusals create alternative food worlds rooted in care, pleasure, opacity, self-definition, and collective survival. Across its chapters, this dissertation moves from Seattle’s public health and food policy landscape to the intimate food practices of Black queer Seattleites and finally to Instagram as a digital food geography. I argue that Black queer food practices challenge dominant understandings of food justice by showing that access is about safety, dignity, intimacy, memory, joy, and the ability to experience community on one’s own terms. Ultimately, this project reimagines food as theory, method, and critique, demonstrating that Black queer foodways offer vital blueprints for more nourishing and liberatory futures.