Racialized Affect and Political Activism at the Intersections of Gendered and State Violence in Baltimore

'We're afraid for our lives. Anyone could see Camille and my fear, and for her…to be so racialized in it. I was very upset and very angry.' Baltimore resident Korey Johnson felt obligated to protect the Black man who had violated her even as she reckoned with a white woman's racist misrecognition of her own fear. Johnson's predicament of being caught between the axes of racialized and gendered violence presents a conundrum that is central to this dissertation project: the intersecting misrecognition of Black women's vulnerability and affect within and outside of their racial communities constrains their possibilities to seek repair and justice for harm. Through careful ethnographic study with Baltimorean anti-gendered violence activists, Black gendered violence survivors, and Black community healers, I aim to understand how they mobilize fear and grief to construct memorial spaces and community-based movements that engender liberatory futures. This project investigates the affective and political processes of memorialization and urban place-making to answer: How do Black women define their own political subjectivity at the intersections of anti-black and gendered violence? How does their political mobilization of emotions such as fear and grief transform gendered and racialized understandings of affect?