Kerby Lynch is a current PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. Kerby also holds a Bachelor of Arts in African American Studies with a concentration in Gender and Sexuality. Kerby's current dissertation is titled "In the (After) Life: Black Queer Spatialities under Regimes of Displacement, 1963-1989," which surveys the spatial practice of redevelopment in San Francisco during the 1950s until the 1980s. The focal point of Kerby's research aims to understand how political and economic determinants of the urban inform Black queer subjectivity in the city. Kerby hopes to become professor of Geography and Gender Studies in the near future.

Comments from Dr. Tiffany Willoughby-Herard on my 2019 Thinking Gender Panel Presentation:

Kerby Lynch’s “In The (After) Life: Black Lesbian Spatialities under the Emergence of Homonationalism” reads Pat Parker’s 1978 poem, Where Will You Be? both at the scale of a research agenda which demonstrates that the “dynamics of displacement are a form of the expanded reproduction [of] indigenous dispossession and black lesbian articulation seeks to point out how our willful unfreedom is a continuum of legacies of settler colonialism” (Lynch, In The (After) Life: Black Lesbian Spatialities under the Emergence of Homonationalism, 1) and also at the scale of an application of Puarian theory noting that “Queer politics are essentially uninterrupted US nationalist values, such as exceptionalism, histories of colonialism, and neoliberalism” (Ibid).

The goal of this is to render a Black lesbian analytic of space Parker’s poem demonstrates how desires for normativity and practicing for achieving respectability and acceptance are the real perversions, and will not protect. Noting that Puar’s “abroad” that needs domesticated queer politics to advance US empire can be found as cause and effect, “right here in my own backyard” is Lynch’s most generative insight for me because it speaks to the carcerality of the allegedly free space of interest group based queer politics. And Lynch’s reflection on “right here in my own backyard” reminds of a “black lesbian consciousness” that under constant threat of not being able to “live to tell about” its own existence pierced the breaches of time and used the most perverse associations, ties, and affiliations to be carried into the present—and called its account of the world free while calling the advice to assimilate, button up, fit in perverse.

Lynch is pointing to a set of ongoing “foundational moments… when we became the other”—often marked by “being without land” and “ephemeral landscapes of Black social death” (Ibid, 2).