Working the Door: Queer Nightlife Kinships
by Karen Jaime
5.5 x 8.5
ISBN 978-1-962365-09-3
For pre-order, please write to tim.roberts@np-press.org.
Working The Door: Queer Nightlife Kinships critically examines the racialized, gendered, and classed kinships developed by queer nightlife workers with each other and customers as a mechanism for queer sustenance and fluorescence. The book utilizes storytelling, poetry, critical analysis, and photographs to document and highlight the labor performed by door people outside of bars/clubs and the barbacks inside, rather than the more visible and celebrated labor of DJs, dancers, or bartenders. It examines the affective and economic structures of queer kinship beyond family of origin, or blood family, and proposes the portmanteau “framily,” or friends + family as a way to capture such communitarian connections within New York’s nightlife of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This study expands normative notions of family to include cross-racial, intergenerational, and multigender affiliation to form queer kinship. Lesbian butches, pre- and post-Stonewall and gender non-conforming queers of color are emphasized and prioritized as their patronage and labor are central to gay/lesbian/queer bars and clubs in NYC.
Find out more at https://www.karenjaime.com/
Karen Jaime (she/her/hers) is Associate Professor of Performing and Media Arts and Latina/o Studies at Cornell University. An award-winning scholar, professor, and author, Jaime’s research
interests lie at the intersection of performance studies, Latina/o/x studies, comparative ethnic studies, queer of color critique, and minoritarian aesthetics. In particular, Jaime’s work hinges on a broad theoretical inquiry into the rendering and consequential function of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality in performance, specifically as performance relates to queer minoritarian communities on stage, on screen, and in the everyday. Jaime is also an accomplished spoken word/performance artist who served as the host/curator of the Friday Night Poetry Slam at the world-renowned Nuyorican Poets Cafe (2003-2005). As a scholar artist, Jaime employs an interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary methodological approach grounded in the dialogic relationship between theory and practice as evidenced by her first monograph, The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida (NYU Press, 2021). In The Queer Nuyorican, Jaime argues for a reexamination of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe as a historically queer space, both in terms of sexualities and performance practices. Jaime’s writing has been published, or is forthcoming, in Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, e-Misférica, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, ASAP/J, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Performance Matters and in QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking. She has also co-edited an anthology celebrating the life and legacy of Nuyorican Poets Cafe co-founder, Miguel Algarín entitled Memorias de Miguel: The Hard Work of Love (https://memorias-de-miguel.hemispheric.org/). As a poet, her writing is included in The Best of Panic! En Vivo From the East Village, Flicker and Spark: A Queer Anthology of Spoken Word and Poetry, in a special issue of Sinister Wisdom: A Multicultural Lesbian Literary and Art Journal, “Out Latina Lesbians,” and in the anthology Latinas: Struggles and Protest in 21st Century USA.