Visiting Assistant Professor, African American Studies
Keila Taylor (they/she) is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Puget Sound. They earned their BA and MS in Sociology from the University of Texas at San Antonio, where their earlier research centered Black feminist theory, intersectionality, and secularism. Keila’s current research sits at the intersection of Black queer studies, critical food studies, and feminist geography. Their work challenges conventional constructions of archives by centering the embodied, affective, and relational knowledge produced through Black LGBTQ+ food practices. They examine how Black queer people cultivate what they theorize as “Black queer food geographies,” everyday practices of nourishment, refusal, and worldmaking that emerge within contexts of food apartheid, gentrification, and neoliberal inclusion. These practices illuminate how Black queer communities creatively “make ways out of no way,” not only by meeting material needs, but by refusing dominant politics of visibility, respectability, and recognition. Across this work, Keila argues that food operates as an intimate infrastructure through which Black queer people imagine and construct more just food futures.
Dissertation: 'Errybody Gotta Eat': Black Queer Food Geographies and the Politics of Refusal