Please join the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies for the 2026 Sally M. Gearhart Lecture with Kemi Adeyemi, Associate Professor of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington, on “Bad Dance: Making Queer and Lesbian Community.”

To hear them tell it, studs are bad dancers: awkward, self-conscious, unsure of the steps, their weight, or what to do with their hands. They knock knees, can’t hold twerkers up, and aren’t smooth enough. These descriptions circulate as shared knowledge, shaping expectations about who moves well, who is in the middle of the club, who ends up on the wall—and who is worthy of partnership on and off the dance floor. 

This talk takes black queer people seriously as self-described “bad” dancers in order to think about the relationships between sexuality and movement, and the role of dance in shaping individual identity and collective life. I argue that narratives of bad dancing reveal how the meanings of lesbian and queer community depend upon the coordination of movement: shared rhythms that are embedded with expectations about racialized gender, sexuality, and desire. Focusing on moments when dance technique breaks down highlights how disillusionment and alienation are central, rather than incidental, to queer and lesbian dance floors—and disrupting the celebratory accounts of dance and sexuality studies can lead us to more nuanced theorizations of the politics of queer and lesbian life. 
 
Kemi Adeyemi is Associate Professor of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. She is the author of Feels Right: Black Queer Women & the Politics of Partying in Chicago (Duke University Press, 2022) and co-editor of the volume Queer Nightlife (University of Michigan Press, 2021). Her forthcoming manual, Writing About Black Art, is a 2023 recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Kemi founded and directs The Black Embodiments Studio, an arts writing incubator, public programming initiative, and publishing platform dedicated to building discourse around contemporary black art. 

The Sally Miller Gearhart Lecture Series advances lesbian history and culture, promotes dialogue about sexual orientation and gender identity, supports diversity and empowers lesbian voices in higher education.