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Rendering a neighbourhood queer
Abstract
This paper traces, and is the traces of, a collective project to render a neighbourhood queer. It is a project that emerges from queer social relations. Academic research and knowledge generation are approached collaboratively by working with queer-identified residents from west-central neighbourhoods in Toronto, Canada who volunteered with the Queer West ShOUT Youth Program. Within the context of two participant-facilitated discussion events, we discursively and artistically investigate queer world-making in the neighbourhood of West Queen West. Through collective mental mapping and photovoice renderings we interpret the queering of urban space as a queer utopian impulse. We critically examine the ‘concrete utopia’ of Queer West Village and question its resonance in the lives of ShOUT volunteers. Theoretically inspired by Muñoz, our ‘a/r/tographic’ mode of inquiry and critical praxis are a rendering of ‘queer futurity.’ We draw on our past to critique our lived present so as to imagine future potentialities. We do so in order to argue that it is vital that the queerness we individually and collectively strive for at the spatial scale of the neighbourhood, such as the process of place-making itself, is grounded in material experience yet remains provisional and an ideality that motivates us.
... De nombreuses analyses sur la transformation de la géographie LGBTQ ont tenté d'élucider l'incidence de l'embourgeoisement des villages gais sur le déplacement des commerces et des ménages LGBTQ et le « dégaiement » ou la perte de consommateurs LGBTQ au profit de non LGBTQ (Doan et Higgins, 2011 ;Ghaziani, 2014 ;Ruting, 2008). D'autres ont associé le « dégaiement » des villages aux transformations générationnelles et idéologiques chez les jeunes quant à leur identité, la communauté et l'idéal urbain (Andersson, 2011 ;Bain, Payne et Isen, 2015 ;Brown, 2006 ;Nash, 2013aNash, , 2013b. ...
... La formation récente de quartiers dits « queers » n'est pas seulement le produit du « dégaiement » et de l'embourgeoisement des villages gais. Plusieurs travaux suggèrent que la recherche d'autres quartiers est aussi liée à une forte dé-identification de sous-populations LGBTQ aux villages gais, surtout chez les jeunes, les « post-gais 4 » et les populations trans et queers (Bain et al., 2015 ;Brown, 2006 ;Brown, 2014 ;Doan et Higgins, 2011 ;Ghaziani, 2014 ;Gorman-Murray et Nash, 2017 ;Nash et Gorman-Murray, 2014). Tandis qu'en principe l'acceptation sociale accrue des LGBTQ signifierait un sentiment 2. « La vision urbaine » est traduite du terme urbanism de l'anglais. ...
... This literature, which prioritised examining the spatialities of homophobia (Binnie & Valentine, 1999) and the 'heterosexualisation' of space (Oswin, 2008), has been intersectionally uneven (Brown, 2012). Indeed, although geographers have understood everyday spaces as underpinned by heterosexuality, binary-gendered expectations, and normative femininities and masculinities (Browne & Brown, 2016), GoS 0 focus has been located in urban 'gayborhoods' (Ghaziani, 2019; see e.g., Bain et al., 2015) and implicitly white spaces (Oswin, 2008;Rosenberg, 2015). As such, GoS has understood 'the hetero/homo binary as the primary defining spatial moment' (Nash, 2010, p. 584). ...
In this paper, I explore how trans people's lives have been conceptualised and researched in human geography. I begin by contextualising trans people's lived experiences in Britain, before recognising trans studies as a distinct field that must continue to shape geographies of trans lives and ontologies. I then consider more recent research in queer geographies which foregrounds trans lives under the ‘trans geographies' banner. I examine how space has been conceptualised in such research and demonstrate the methodological and conceptual absences and failings and problematic approaches that geographical research often perpetuates, arguing that work remains to ensure our research works with and is responsive to or developed by trans people. The paper concludes by calling upon geographers to recognise the diversities and potentialities of trans people's everyday lives and develop intersectionally‐attentive and reciprocal geographical research around trans lives, bodies, and spaces.
... It's in every country around the world.' These practices are more akin to the types of practices noted in queer-friendly neighbourhoods (Gorman- Murray and Waitt, 2009) where the LGBTQ2S identities are but a component of a more 'cosmopolitan' and 'progressive' neighbourhood identity and subtle practices are used to 'render a neighbourhood queer' by imagining it otherwise (Bain et al., 2015). Rather than producing the region's 'second gay village', activists involved in REN envision the entire municipality as a queerfriendly suburb. ...
Scholarly understandings of LGBTQ2S activist geographies are largely informed by a metronormative analytical lens that inadequately captures the shifting landscapes of sexual diversity in Canadian city-regions. The gap between the available services in peripheral municipalities and the rising demand from their growing LGBTQ2S populations has mobilised fractured groups of activists to lobby for policy, programming and service changes. This paper examines sexual politics in suburban civil society, focusing on the grassroots organising of not-for-profit activist groups as they interact with local government outside of the electoral process. It compares LGBTQ2S activist practices in two neighbouring, although differently sized and demographically divergent, peripheral municipalities in the Vancouver city-region: Surrey and New Westminster. A comparative case study approach reveals how LGBTQ2S activists work through variations in suburban political opportunity structures, resource landscapes and inter-organisational relations resulting in differential practices of mobilisation and collective action. In contrast with an urban legacy of insurgent practices of LGBTQ2S resistance, suburban LGBTQ2S activisms primarily centre on enactments of local resourcefulness, community resilience and institutional reworking within more dispersed resource landscapes.
... Another examined the identity of a Canadian neighborhood, where participants and volunteers from a queer youth program created a collective map that included locations and spaces meaningful to their own identity formation and experiences. Participants used photovoice to produce a visual representation that represented an understanding and imagining of the neighborhood as a queer space (Bain, Payne, & Isen, 2015). ...
While experiencing homelessness, queer youth are subject to stereotyping, discrimination, and violence that affect their ability to achieve independent living and actualize goals. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ)‐identified youth of color are at greater risk for homelessness when compared to heterosexual counterparts. This study explores lived experiences of queer‐identified youth of color who are currently experiencing homelessness. Using photovoice methodology, a group of 4 participants drawn from an Atlanta‐based service provider for LGBTQ youth were engaged in a series of focus groups to discuss meaningful photographic images and give voice to shared homelessness experiences. From their individual and collective narratives, three key themes were identified: becoming aware, managing inner struggles, and recognizing personal strengths. The participating youth marked the conclusion of the project by presenting to youth service practitioners a poster board display of photos that visually represented areas of concern and opportunities for ongoing advocacy to benefit this underserved and often misunderstood population. This study also reports on this poster board display and the outcomes identified by the participating young people for better supporting homeless LGBTQ young people.
... Across the North-South divide, urban socio-spatial polarisation has deepened and LGBTQ+ activists confront the privatised narrowing of public space; the precarity and lack of social services; racialised exclusions from LGBTQ+ places (Rosenberg, 2017;Ruez, 2016); and heightened social control through policing of gay villages, bathhouses (Bain and Nash, 2007) and gay pride events. In the context of contemporary entrepreneurial governance, the homonormativity of the LGBTQ+ movement is institutionally reinforced by government, philanthropic and faith-based funding, disincentivising confrontational political models and encouraging reliance on non-profit organisations and grassroots volunteers (Bain et al., 2015;Bell and Binnie, 2000). While activist allies may be motivated by commitments to civil rights and principles of justice, their support may augment exclusion by neglecting the needs of less commodifiable and multiply disenfranchised 'others'. ...
This article introduces the special issue on placing LGBTQ+ urban activisms. It argues that place provides a vital framework for considering a more decentred and transversal representation of such activisms, creating potential for the consideration of smaller and more peripheral locations and alternative visions of the more familiar and iconic cities that have been centres of LGBTQ+ urban social movements in the global North. While inspired by the anti-colonial, subaltern and feminist ethos of what Derickson terms ‘Urbanisation 2’, the article makes the case for adopting a middle ground – Urbanisation 1.5 – based in material realities that shape both the practice and inquiry into contemporary LGBTQ+ urban activisms. It begins by reviewing and dismantling established histories and theories of LGBTQ+ urban activisms, queerly calling into question the employment of urban theories that emphasise spatial hierarchies and linear temporality. Next, the article proposes alternatives, suggesting a shift towards recognising the contingencies and multiplicities that come together in and across urban places. The third section emphasises the critical continuities and ordinary entanglements involved in remembering, being and doing urban LGBTQ+ activisms in place. It concludes by encouraging the employment of elsewhere and otherwise as a critical urban strategy for igniting further inquiry into the politics of LGBTQ+ activisms in urban studies.
... Many of these women presented as masculine of center, and through photovoice, they were able to have control of how they expressed their experience as lesbian women. As with the others, Bain, Payne, and Isen (2015) used photovoice as a medium through which to reimagine a neighborhood in Toronto, Canada as a queer utopia. ...
Given the increase of gun violence in the United States, teachers are left with the added obligation of helping students process traumatic events. The present study seeks to address the following questions: What are some ways in which students process grief through arts-based methods? What can we observe through photovoice, a community-based method that uses photography, about the perceptions of six LGBTQ + students at a predominantly white institution after the Pulse Massacre? The study consisted of semi-structured focus group interviews with these students, all of whom spent a week creating photos in response to the tragedy. In order to understand the depth of how stories may have oppositional counter-stories, we look to narrative inquiry and find intersectionality and colorblind intersectionality at play. Implications for practice, policy, and research are included.
... Photovoice has been used effectively in many other instances as a community-based participatory research method to help intervene in specific issues or dynamics. Photovoice has been especially powerful in reimagining urban planning (Borowiak et al. 2018), immigration issues in Europe (Rania et al. 2014), children's perception of space (Burke et al. 2016;Greene et al. 2013;Fusco et al. 2012), gender and homelessness (Fotheringham et al. 2014), sexuality and space (Bain et al. 2014), racialization processes (Pérez et al. 2016;Goessling 2018) and public health (Sanon et al. 2014) amongst many others. ...
What does it mean to conduct community-based and praxis-oriented research at a time when those whose lives you study and with whom you work are the subjects of increasing levels of xenophobia, marginalization, and demonization? How does one conceive of research ethics, of the relationship between the roles of scholars, teachers, and citizens in light of such dynamics? In what ways can scholarship help to intervene in the world around us, in particular to improve the perception and amplify the voices of marginalized groups and individuals? This paper considers these issues in the context of research ethics and the growing field of community geography. I draw in particular on an example from a multi-year study of refugee resettlement in non-traditional destinations across the US. When the study began, refugee policies and settlement patterns were little known to the general public in the US. Since then, refugees and migration more broadly have become increasingly prominent and controversial worldwide. In this paper I explore some of the challenges regarding collaborations between university researchers and community partners, highlighting the tensions exposed through the use of the visualization technique known as Photovoice, meant to provide alternative perspectives on ideas for urban change amongst participants. I also consider some ideas for steps to address these challenges, including the building of networks and training for researchers and formalized partnership processes for community groups.
... LGBTQ organising has frequently worked in similar ways, emphasising community building alongside advocating for social change (Bain et al., 2015;Brown 2007;Browne 2007Browne , 2011Doetsch-Kidder, 2012;Gould, 2009;Hanhardt, 2013;Podmore, 2015;Podmore and Chamberland, 2015;Rouhani, 2012). Explicitly queer organising, especially organising aligned with anarchism and post-anarchism, is generally more interested in 'small, modest attempts to reengage their ''power-to-do''' than in identity-based politics (Brown, 2007(Brown, : 2687. ...
This article explores a small city’s response to the inauguration of Donald Trump in January 2017. Love, Resilience, Action Ypsilanti (LRAY) focused on community-building and the social justice history of Ypsilanti, Michigan to create a queer-affirming feminist event that intentionally referenced and diverged from national Women’s Marches. In exploring intersectional social justice organising by a queer-dominated feminist group, I argue that organisers’ emphasis on communal care in combination with direct action reflected an affinity-based understanding of community characteristic of this particular small progressive rustbelt city. This example demonstrates the importance of including small cities in urban LGBTQ research.
... Neighbourhood transformation is also the topic in Queer West Village, Toronto. Here place is re-imagined via a queer youth programme involving people who are trans, intersex, questioning, and two-spirited (Bain et al., 2014). Queer villages, then, may simultaneously be dominated by gay men yet also be depicted as a place of LGBTQ diversity (Podmore, 2013). ...
This report considers gender diversity across a range of spaces and places. I note that while the notion of gender has been troubled, there exist opportunities to trouble it further. I highlight the scholarship that has sought to deconstruct genders, and the binary framing of man/woman and male/female roles and relationships. The queering of sexuality has meant that geographers are now tracing the ways in which lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer (LGBTIQ) bodies experience and live their gender beyond normative binaries. Research concerned with relational gendered subjectivities within LGBTIQ communities is discussed , and I flag the trend that this research may conflate gendered experiences while privileging sexual subjectivities. Finally, I turn to the recent interest by geographers who – drawing on queer and trans* theories – argue for new and innovative understandings of gender diversity.
In this chapter, I examine the immigrant history and context of Vermont’s largest city, Burlington. I begin by discussing the context of refugee resettlement outside of the large metropolitan areas that have traditionally been the destination of immigrants in the US, with particular attention to refugee resettlement in the US over the 2012–2016 period. Next, I provide an overview of Burlington. In the third section of this chapter, I look specifically at the neighborhood known as the Old North End within Burlington, one of the main refugee enclaves within both the city and the state. I close the chapter with a discussion of Burlington from the perspective of some of the refugee-background residents themselves, using the results from a Photovoice project I have conducted with community organizations in order to gain greater insights into the neighborhoods that newcomers live in and their relationships with of these places.
Seven collaborators in this project used PhotoVoice, a visual participatory action
methodology, to explore the complexity of violence as it is lived, represented, and (re)defined in the context of queer non/monogamous communities in Lethbridge, Alberta. Critically engaging with the themes of neoliberalism, oversimplified positivity discourse, and the intersections of power and identity that often shape spaces of non/monogamies, collaborators considered prevailing narratives of violence within their communities, and how these narratives challenge or sustain conventional gender-based heteronormative models of relationship violence. Through the participatory process, collaborators troubled what constitutes and qualifies violence, how violence is talked about, and made more explicit connections between interpersonal, community, and state violence. The visual and participatory approach was instrumental in reconceptualizing and making meaning from the complexities of violence in their lives and their communities; in particular, image-based storytelling challenges the role of language in facilitating and constraining the
(un)speakability of violence.
This paper uses mixed methods to scavenge and analyse lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer and two‐spirit (LGBTQ2S) resources and visibility in public library branches on the periphery of the Vancouver city‐region in the suburban municipalities of Surrey, Burnaby, and New Westminster. It argues that in Canadian suburbs, where access to LGBTQ2S community resources are limited, libraries are simultaneously key public sites of engagement for LGBTQ2S people and places where they continue to face dominant socio‐cultural power relations of hetero and cis‐normativity that determine the availability, visibility, and accessibility of queer materials. Scavenging for queerness within virtual and material library spaces, this paper demonstrates that suburban libraries hold the promise of information and equity while also reinforcing LGBTQ2S absence, invisibility, and exclusion. The promise of social inclusion is carried forward by a few insider activist and ally librarians who act as political change agents within library systems and specific branches by creating queer‐friendly collections, spaces, and programming. Libraries can be key public sites of engagement for LGBTQ2S people, but the availability, visibility, and accessibility of their queer materials is geographically variable. Using a case study of three suburban municipalities in the Vancouver region, this paper uses mixed ‘scavenger’ methods to evaluate and compare how peripheral library systems meet the civic promise of inclusion for their LGBTQ2S citizens.
This paper adopts a spatial-temporal lens to examine mainstream print media representations of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer and Two-Spirit (LGBTQ2S) suburbanites in Canada’s largest metropolitan areas in the 1990s. Due to major changes in Canadian gay rights legislation, the 1990s were a decade when the spatial and temporal reproduction of heteronormativity was contested, including in suburban areas. Through a focus on the metropolitan periphery, this paper argues that LGBTQ2S people and their politics were discursively positioned in print media coverage as spatially unexpected and temporally disruptive of heteronormativity. Drawing upon a suburban LGBTQ2S print-media database from 1985 to 2005 (n = 1300), an analysis of aggregate patterns is provided and three exemplary case studies of suburban ‘moral panics’ detailed from within case-study metropolitan areas of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. The paper concludes that the greatest public debate in the print media was generated when queers intruded upon institutions that were central to the reproduction of heteronormative futures, that is, the institutions that are the very foundation of suburbia such as recreational spaces, religious institutions and schools. © 2018
Gay bars have long been understood as havens from heteronormativity. However, a shift towards greater LGBTQ tolerance has led to more heterosexual involvement in these once marginal places. Such shifts towards ‘post-gay’ identity politics have called into question the queerness of many LGBTQ-oriented social outlets. This paper illustrates how rhetorical marketing and aesthetic choices lead some venues to develop reputations as questionably queer spaces—reputations that are created and negotiated by patrons as they evaluate these venues’ ultimate functionality in relation to their own increasingly uncertain ideals about the form and desirability of queer spaces. By examining how divergent configurations of queerness mediate the ambivalence many LGBTQ people feel about these places and the straight people who occupy them, we can further our knowledge about how queer space operates today without getting trapped within the homonormative/queer dichotomy that limits much pre-existing research.
Despite renewed interest in suburban studies and a decentring of geographies of sexualities, the queer suburban remains a neglected arena of inquiry. This article argues for greater attention to ‘queer’ suburbanisms to deconstruct suburbia as implicitly heterosexualized. It critiques the persistent heteronormativity of key concepts – suburbanization, suburban diversification and suburbanisms – in Anglo-American-Australian suburban studies. It then remaps the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer (LGBTQ+) urban by highlighting inconsistencies in queer metronormativities critiques and evaluating census studies and gay ethnographies to decentre the queer metropolis. The article concludes by complicating how queer metronormativities conceive of their margins and destabilizing the sexual contours of heterosuburbia.
This viewpoint describes changes in the way that gender and sexual identity are perceived by various disaster risk reduction stakeholders in the city of West Hollywood, California, USA. In general in Europe and North America, and elsewhere, the trend has been for so-called ‘vulnerable’ groups or groups of people with ‘special needs’ to be seen after a time as groups of people with agency, with ‘special contributions’ and with capacities in relation to disaster risk reduction. This transition from ‘victim’ to ‘stakeholder’ has been observed as regards women, youth, the elderly and people living with incapacities or disabilities. The important contribution of our viewpoint is to document a similar transition or evolution of roles for lesbian, gay, bisexual, intersex, transgender and queer (LGBITQ) groups in the city of West Hollywood. The broader context of the city’s site, situation, demography, exposure to hazards, civic culture and the organisation of public safety is also described.
This article critically examines the play of power in the co-production of scholarly knowledge in the context of a queer, feminist Participatory Action Research (PAR) project. By unpacking the power relations inherent in crafting a narrative of a collective project for a broader audience, we consider the conflicts, silences, and erasures that we experienced as participants, gatekeepers, and co-authors. We analyze iterations of a co-produced conference and journal article papers to recall the power dynamics that framed and reframed the outcomes of this project. In so doing, we critique what ‘co-’ and ‘with’ actually mean in the practice of publishing queer feminist PAR. We argue that there is an accelerating process of de-participation and exclusion that can work to erode the progressive, inclusive politics of feminist participatory methodologies.
This article contributes to the growing body of literature linking migration to coming out among gay, lesbian, and other queer individuals. Much of the extant literature frames or imagines these migrations as journeys between sets of oppositional spaces. The common metaphorical trope of moving from inside to outside of "the closet" is frequently equated with moving from a conservative country to a more liberal one or from the homophobic countryside to an accepting metropolis. This discourse abstracts the role of place in coming-out migrations and flattens the complexity of the challenges and concerns that drive them. This analysis of migration narratives among 24 self-identified gay men living in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, frames coming-out migrations as emerging from the complex interplay of individuals' needs and desires and the networks and institutions they occupy in places (i.e., the social dynamics of places) and not just a flat "mismatch" between one's sexuality and a place's containerized attributes or characteristics. The discussion elaborates on motivators for coming-out migration influenced by the social dynamics of the places that respondents were both situated in and seeking out. These include moving to advance gay life courses perceived to be stunted, moving to seek anonymity during the coming-out process, and moving to lessen the imagined social and familial burdens associated with coming out.
Gay villages have been developing as a feature of Western cities since the 1980s. By the 1990s, their markets diversified and expanded and they were redefined as 'queer' sites. While the incorporation of lesbian nightlife into gay villages played a pivotal role in this diversification, their participation has received limited attention in the urban studies literature. This paper, therefore, uses a case study of Montréal to analyze the relationship between lesbian identities and the production of commodified 'queer space' in the city's Village gai in the 1990s. In contrast with the literature that stresses their exclusions, I argue that this site was productive in terms of reworking lesbian identities. I begin by examining the development of the gay village as a location for lesbian nightlife in the 1990s. Next, I analyze the changing content of lesbian bar advertisements that came with this relocation. Finally, I use in-depth interviews with lesbians regarding their perceptions of the Village, its nightlife spaces and emerging Village lesbian identities. The paper finds that although lesbians often felt marginalized in gay village space, this site was central to the production and expression of new forms of lesbian identity in the 1990s.
Since the 1950s neighborhoods associated with lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) subjects and communities have become part of the urban landscape in many cities of the Global North. In Australia this is evident in Sydney, where particular inner-city suburbs are bracketed with 'gay', 'lesbian', and 'queer' sexualities. These sexual-spatial relations are multiple and changing, with current fears about the decline of 'traditional' gay village spaces coinciding with the emergence of alternative LGBTQ neighborhoods. This paper reinterprets these transformations, departing from notions of the 'demise' of gay spaces, (re)conceptualizing Sydney's LGBTQ neighborhoods as mobile and relational moorings that are not fixed and immutable but repeatedly reconstructed and regrounded from flows of people, knowledge, and capital. Moreover, such mobile practices and representations connect places, symbolically and materially constructing them in relation to each other. Consequently, rather than reading through narratives of 'demise' and 'emergence', we suggest Sydney's LGBTQ landscapes are embedded in, and (re)constituted through, a 'politics of mobility'. We examine the physical displacement, representations of mobility, and embodied mobile practices underpinning these changes in inner-city Sydney. In doing so, our purpose is to make conceptual and practical connections between the significance of 'place making' and 'mobility' to LGBTQ lives, communities, and politics. This discussion encourages geographers of sexualities to consider the multiplicity of LGBTQ mobilities, and equally prompts mobilities scholars to be cognizant of sexual and gender politics in processes and outcomes of mobilities.
In this commentary. I reflect on the contribution of this special issue of Geoforum to the sexuality and space literature. I begin by situating it at the interface between critical queer geographies and geographies of sexualities. I then highlight three important themes that (re)emerge from these contributions that point to both continuities with past research and new directions for the study of geographies of sexualities.
This paper examines the complex, creative, and contradictory processes of making queer space through an analysis of the rise and demise of the Richmond Queer Space Project (RQSP), a queer-and anarchist-identified organization in Richmond, Virginia, US. I begin by synthesizing emerging perspectives from anarchism, queer theory, and the conceptualization of queer space in geography. Then, I observe the practices through which RQSP members created a queer space; their location politics in a small-city context; and the contradictory politics of affinity and identity that led to the group's demise. My goal is to seriously consider the complexities and contradictions of queer anarchist spatial formations and to develop a perspective on queer space that is simultaneously critical of its composition and supportive of its potential for creating liberating, pleasurable spaces of relating with others. Theoretically, I argue that anarchist and geographic perspectives on queer space have much to learn from one another: queer anarchists can benefit from the critical perspectives on queer space-making developed in recent geographic work, and geographers can benefit from a deeper awareness of the positive, creative space-making processes through which alternative non-hierarchical spaces can be imagined and lived.
Changing political, social and economic circumstances operating across a
variety of scales are transforming the socio-spatial landscapes for Lesbian, Gay, Bi,
Trans and Queer (LGBTQ) people in Toronto. While the established gay village
continues to be the imagined and material centre of political and social life for the
LGBTQ community, various groups are increasingly utilizing other locations in the
downtown core but outside the Village, particularly an area know colloquially as
‘Queer West.’ This paper argues that for some queer women/gender queers
individuals, the Village is not viewed as a desirable location for social or political
organising given perceptions the area is dominated by largely white, middle class,
gay men. Further, the possibilities, potentials and limitations for queer
women/genderqueer individuals to take up alternative locations are constituted
through complex social relations and include notions of what ‘queered’ and
‘queering’ space entails and participants’ own imagined sense of place and
reflecting aspects of their own classed, racialized and gendered positioning,
This article explores a particular moment in the history of Toronto's gay movement politics when the movements' ideological perspectives on the nature of gay and lesbian identities and associated spaces shifted dramatically from the so-called liberationist stance of the mid-1970s to the so-called ethnic minority approach of the late 1970s. This occurred within the context of a particular series of events that prompted gay activists to rework their conceptualization of gay and lesbian identity in order to be recognized as legitimate participants in certain pivotal, public proceedings. Far from being a well-thought-out and deliberate shift in political strategy, the ‘minority' argument was, in many ways, a reflexive and unexamined response to unanticipated circumstances. Toronto's gay activists, in representing gays and lesbians as a minority fundamentally altered meanings associated with both gay and lesbian identities and with the spaces dominated or controlled by gay and lesbian interests.
Boul. St-Laurent is a commercial artery in inner-city Montréal. Often characterised as the border zone of a multicultural and bilingual city, it is a place where a variety of populations and activities come together. It is also a central activity space for residents of the Plateau Mont-Royal District, an area of the city with a significant population of lesbian residents. Using qualitative interviews with lesbians who live in this district, the author examines how this neighbourhood shopping street facilitates lesbian patterns of social interaction, place making and expressions of desire. Most previous research on how lesbians establish a presence in urban space focuses either on the exclusion of lesbian subjectivity from heterosexual spaces or patterns of residential and institutional clustering in urban neighbourhoods. The objective of this article, however, is to focus on an area of the city that can be described as a 'space of difference' and examine how its heterogeneity accommodates lesbian visibility, especially among the lesbians themselves.
There is a substantial body of literature on arts-based forms of research demonstrating scholars’ endeavors to theorize the production of the arts as a mode of scholarly inquiry and as a method of representation. However, if arts-based research is to be taken seriously as an emerging field of educational research, then perhaps it needs to be understood as a methodology in its own right. This entails moving beyond the use of existing criteria that exists for qualitative research and toward an understanding of interdisciplinarity not as a patchwork of different disciplines and methodologies but as a loss, a shift, or a rupture where in absence, new courses of action un/fold. This article proposes an understanding of arts-based research as enacted, living inquiry through six renderings of a/r/tography: contiguity, living inquiry, openings, metaphor/metonymy, reverberations, and excess.
In the past forty years, gay and lesbian populations have established a visible presence in many cities, but recent gentrification has put pressure on LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered) neighborhoods. This article uses a case study of the Atlanta metropolitan area to examine the effects of resurgent gentrification on LGBT neighborhoods. The study finds that rising housing values have dispersed the LGBT population, and former LGBT neighborhoods have become less tolerant of LGBT people and the businesses that anchor the LGBT community. The article considers ways that planning practice might seek to preserve LGBT-friendly neighborhoods and the people and institutions that depend on them.
Drawing on recent work that examines the contingent, personal nature of queer migration, this paper provides empirical support for recent claims that coming-out journeys are more complex than the linear, often rural-to-urban typologies that have framed them during the past two decades. Since coming-out journeys are rarely elaborated beyond a conceptual level, overly teleological understandings involving homophobic, rural places, inclusive urban homelands, and one-time, linear ‘flights’ and ‘escapes’ persist. Employing the migration narratives of 48 self-identified gay men who settled in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, and Washington, DC, USA, this paper challenges the linearity and finality of coming-out migration by highlighting particular segments of the journey. These include short-term trips to scout the gay life potentials of places, migrations that result in a degree of re-entry into ‘the closet,’ relocations that allow men to test or try on different places and identities, and moves (or imminent moves) that ‘trigger’—rather than stem from—a coming-out process. Taken together, these segments suggest that coming-out journeys are ongoing, relational, and often discontinuous journeys influenced by both queer individuals' intersectional subjectivities (e.g., age, race, and class) and the social contexts of the places they encounter.
Queer youths and queer youth-related issues are under-researched in geography. I contribute to the existing literature by investigating how adultist practices can both constrain and empower queer youth within the context of schools. Issues involving adolescence and sexuality are complex, and these nuances become more pronounced with regard to nonnormative sexual identities and expressions. Using interviews with adult queer youth advocates in Toledo, Ohio, I look at the ways in which adults construct uncertain, anxious and contradictory ‘safe spaces’ that can work to constrain/restrict queer youth but also to empower and/or facilitate queer youths' negotiation and navigation of other, predominantly heterosexist social spaces.
This case study examines Ottawa, Canada, a ‘government town’, as both a destination for mobile gay men and a place where their conduct historically has been regulated by the government and military institutions located there. By placing the findings of 24 in-depth qualitative interviews with self-identified gay men in a Foucauldian governmentality framework, I argue that the government town is a powerful attractor for gay men in terms of economic opportunity and official prescriptions of nondiscrimination and acceptance, but is also a site where gay men and gay communities are regulated into certain modes of conduct. In particular, this article finds that Ottawa, as both a historic center of antigay activity and a more recent center of an LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered) rights-seeking agenda in Canada, encourages practices that are based on discretion, gender normalization, and maintenance of the status quo. The article argues that these practices – with some notable exceptions – have led to a fragmented gay community characterized by economic and professional stratification, out-of-town consumption of gay culture, and a lack of recognizable social, political, and geographic focal points for gay men. It also posits that the mechanisms through which governmentality is leveraged are particularly central to the experiences of sexual minorities in places like Ottawa, where government institutions are especially dense or thick.
Scholarship on queer geographies has called attention to the active production of space as heterosexualized and has levelled powerful critiques at the implicit heterosexual bias of much geographical theorizing. As a result, critical geographers have begun to remark upon the resistance of gays, lesbians and other sexual subjects to a dominant heterosexuality. But such a liberal framework of oppression and resistance is precisely the sort of mapping that poststructuralist queer theory emerged to write against. So, rather than charting the progress of queer geographies, this article offers a critical reading of the deployment of the notion of `queer space' in geography and highlights an alternative queer approach that is inseparable from feminist, materialist, postcolonial and critical race theories.
This paper examines the politics of pleasure at the site of the carnival. Carnival spaces have long been celebrated as subversive where both sexualized and gender boundaries are contested and rendered contingent. The place and performance of ‘party’ in the spaces of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer (LGBTQ) Prides in Dublin and Brighton and Hove are the focus. Specifically, I address the parade through each city and the ‘party’ after this parade. Drawing on empirical research (221 self-reporting questionnaires undertaken by non-heterosexual women and qualitative research with forty-nine women) the paper examines the messy (re)constitution of Pride spaces through politics, fun and commercialization. I argue that the tensions between politics, the party and payment offer nuanced conceptualizations of Pride spaces in ‘liberal’ societies. Hedonistic Pride spaces, whilst challenging heteronormativity, are sites of fun. I argue they are best conceptualized as ‘parties with politics’, once again moving discussions of political action between the politics–party binary. In conclusion, I suggest that, alongside discussions of discriminations, abuse and prejudices, examinations of ‘sexual deviancy’ should include fun and partying in the performance of politics. Here, hedonism and enjoyment are read as central to a party with politics and thus the (re)constitution of sexed spaces, bodies and identities.
Over the last two decades, urban researchers have investigated how gender shapes gay and lesbian geographies in major post-industrial cities. These studies demonstrated that while gay men have often produced highly visible territorial enclaves in inner-city areas, lesbian forms of territoriality at the urban scale have been relatively ‘invisible’ since their communities are constituted through social networks rather than commercial sites. Contrasting the patterns produced by these two populations in the inner-city areas of post-industrial cities during the ‘queer’ 1990s has created a gender-polarized and historically specific interpretation of their patterns of territoriality and visibility that may differ significantly from those of earlier periods. This paper, therefore, provides a long-range historical geography of lesbians in a major metropolitan area through a case study of Montréal's lesbian bar cultures since 1950. The focus of the analysis is on the preconditions that led to the establishment of the city's lesbian commercial enclave in the 1980s and the factors that led to its decline in the 1990s. This case study, therefore, outlines the shifting character of lesbian territorial practices at the urban scale in Montréal since 1950. It illustrates that in Montréal lesbian territoriality and visibility have been strongly impacted by local neighbourhood dynamics, internal ideologies, and political and spatial relationships with gay men. Ultimately, these findings suggest that contemporary lesbian visibility at the urban scale may have been undermined by an increased identification with the ‘queer’ forms of community and their territorialization in Montréal's gay Village.
In this paper we examine the tensions inherent in the queer politics of Canada's first women-only bathhouse event, the ‘Pussy Palace’. Organized by the Toronto Women's Bathhouse Committee (TWBC), this event is designed to provide women with a ‘safe’ and ‘supportive’ space in which to explore alternative gendered and sexualized identities. We draw on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with organizers, sponsors and participants of the Pussy Palace to consider how the process of ‘queering space’, which is often interpreted as libratory, can paradoxically discipline gendered and sexualized selves. We argue that queer identities and spaces can be distinct from and oppositional to gay and lesbian identities and spaces. With this argument we contribute to a substantial body of geographical literature on sexualities, and to more recent critical work on queer geographies.
Defining the concept of neighborhood has long been a goal in urban research. In this paper, I trace the various meanings of neighborhood articulated by scholars, from neighbor-hood-as-community to functional and demographic typologies, to examinations of the effects of residential environments on human behavior. In identifying the myriad meanings of neighbor-hood, this paper highlights the contingency and flexibility of the concept. I argue that it is pre-cisely because of its blurriness and flexibility that neighborhood has salience: The concept of neighborhood is primarily a social and political product, created through activism, and through research on sociospatial relations. Rather than seeking a fixed definition that can apply to many circumstances, I argue that research on neighborhoods ought to focus on how neighborhoods are produced socially and, in turn, physically, through cooperation and conflict. I apply this frame-work of enacting neighborhood to a brief case study of neighborhood conflicts in Athens, Geor-gia.
This paper examines processes of social cohesion across sexual difference in ‘queer-friendly neighbourhoods’—localities that have a heterosexual majority in residential and commercial terms, but where a significant presence of gay and lesbian residents, businesses, and organisations are welcomed. This investigation advances a lineage of work on the development and maintenance of gay and lesbian neighbourhoods, and their role in residents’ well-being. The findings also extend understandings of social cohesion, a key theme in neighbourhood and policy research across the West. The context of this study is Australia, where recent projects on social cohesion have focused on public order, economic benefits, and race tensions. However, given that gay men and lesbians are present in Australian social and political debates, sexuality should be integrated into studies about neighbourhood cohesion. To analyse processes of cohesion between heterosexual and same-sex-attracted people, we draw on data from case studies of two queer-friendly neighbourhoods in Australia—the inner-city suburb of Newtown, NSW, and the regional town of Daylesford, Victoria. We discuss the findings in three analytical categories to highlight common processes and characteristics of queer-friendly neighbourhoods: diversity and difference; symbolic landscapes; combating homophobia.
To explore the use of photovoice as a research methodology to identify and explore community health and disability priorities.
Published studies (n = 31) that applied photovoice as a research methodology to promote and enhance individual and community change were identified and reviewed.
Findings are explored and organized by community concerns and priorities; participant recruitment, training, and camera instruction; identification of photo assignment; photo assignment discussion; data analysis; outcomes; and evaluation of program and policy changes.
Despite the limitations of the studies and/or how they are reported, findings from this review support further application of photovoice to facilitate community change.
The West Side of the City of Buffalo, New York, is a neighborhood in racial and ethnic transition, demographically. However, at any given time it represents a snapshot of a geographic area that is diverse economically, ethnically, and racially, and in terms of its built environment. I use the notion of ‘patchwork’ first as a literal interpretation based on a quilting project I facilitated with children from an after-school program in this location. Second, ‘patchwork’ is used as a metaphor capturing results of neighborhood explorations led by the children over three years (2003 – 06). Specifically, as I explore children’s perceptions of ‘neighborhood’, the notion of ‘patchwork’ seems to accommodate their varied understandings, views, and perspectives of their neighborhoods well. Simultaneously, the notion also contributes to the fluid and active construction of the term in urban geography.
Over the past 10 years, growth of the Latino population in the United States has been most rapid in North Carolina. Project Realidad Latina (Latino Reality) was a qualitative exploratory study conducted to gain insight into the immigration experiences of 10 newly-arrived Latino adolescents living in rural North Carolina (NC). The study followed a community-based participatory research (CBPR) approach and used the photovoice method. Over a one-year period, adolescents partnered with public health practitioners and researchers in: generating photo-assignments, taking photographs based on these assignments, using the photographs for photo-discussions, and defining themes based on these photo-discussions. A photograph exhibition and community forum raised awareness among local decision-makers and community members of the issues and assets of Latino adolescents and initiated a process toward change. From the participants' words and photographs emerged contextual descriptions of issues that both challenged and facilitated their adaptation and quality of life in their school and community. Likewise, implications from the findings and the nature of the CBPR approach for future Latino adolescent health intervention research are presented.
The LGBT agenda for too long has been dominated by pragmatic issues like same-sex marriage and gays in the military. It has been stifled by this myopic focus on the present, which is short-sighted and assimilationist. Cruising Utopia seeks to break the present stagnancy by cruising ahead. Drawing on the work of Ernst Bloch, José Esteban Muñoz recalls the queer past for guidance in presaging its future. He considers the work of seminal artists and writers such as Andy Warhol, LeRoi Jones, Frank O'Hara, Ray Johnson, Fred Herko, Samuel Delany, and Elizabeth Bishop, alongside contemporary performance and visual artists like Dynasty Handbag, My Barbarian, Luke Dowd, Tony Just, and Kevin McCarty in order to decipher the anticipatory illumination of art and its uncanny ability to open windows to the future. In a startling repudiation of what the LGBT movement has held dear, Muñoz contends that queerness is instead a futurity bound phenomenon, a "not yet here" that critically engages pragmatic presentism. Part manifesto, part love-letter to the past and the future, Cruising Utopia argues that the here and now are not enough and issues an urgent call for the revivification of the queer political imagination.
In this article, I ask how the theoretical lenses through which we conceptualise LGBQ lives compel a particular categorisation of queer geographies and experiences; namely, through (implicit) hierarchies between the "gay metropolis" and the many small cities and rural places outside of purportedly "welcoming" metropolitan centres. Drawing inspiration from Robinson's (2006) ordinary cities thesis, I argue that our scholarly (and popular) points of reference structure the possibilities of understanding LGBQ lives and place-making outside of metropolitan centres recognised to be "gay friendly". Consequently, the production of knowledge about queer lives still tends to conform to a dominant model in which a metro-centric and hierarchical spatial narrative functions as an implicit referential illusion. Employing oral history narratives from LGBQ women in one small Canadian city, I argue that urban/urban-rural hierarchies are at once embedded in the frameworks used to understand queer lives and practices, and constrain our ability to conceptualise the embodied and emplaced geographies of everyday queer lives in geographically-specific terms. Theorising ordinary sexual subjectivities requires attending to the mutual constitution of subjectivities, process and place in specific geographical contexts. (181 words).
Gay villages, usually defined as spatially concentrated configurations of bars, entertainment venues, community spaces, and homes associated with a gay-identified population, have received considerable attention from urban geographers studying gentrification. Frequently, gay villages have been critiqued as commodified spaces that serve mostly upper- and middle-class patrons. Yet they are also culturally and historically significant sites of mobilization, community building, and identity formation. During the last decade, media outlets in some North American cities have begun to dismiss gay villages as 'declining' or 'dead.' In models of 'gay village evolution,' decline is often positioned as a natural end precipitated by the commercialization and normalization of gay community spaces, the emergence of alternative venues in out-of-centre neighborhoods, and recent advancements in gay rights that render 'safe' spaces unnecessary. Using the case study of Ottawa, Canada's Le/The Village, a gay village designated by the municipal government in November 2011, this paper argues that gay village decline, more a discursive trend than a foregone conclusion, is contingent upon both the historical and cultural particularities of cities and the intersecting subjectivities of those who encounter the village. The Ottawa case runs counter to discourse that dismisses gay villages as normalizing, over-commercialized, exclusionary, or simply pass. Using the narratives of 24 gay-identified men living in Ottawa, this article suggests that the absence of a village, as much as the creation and concretization of one, can perpetuate extant class and locational privilege within gay communities and that 'new' gay villages in smaller cities-perhaps more symbolic and psychic than capitalistic-may work to challenge the perpetuation of privilege.
I consider the iconic place of the urban gay neighborhood across the literature. Noting, but also qualifying, its early preponderance, I trace its relative decline as both an empirical concern and also a theoretical one. I argue that this trend reflects a queer pluralization of 'sexuality' as well as a growing sophistication of how geographers handle place and scale. There has been a resurgence of interest in the 'gayborhood', however, within and beyond geography, and so I consider this counter trend in relation to the changing structurations of sexualities and space, as well as the forces pushing to maintain such zones in the city.
This book provides an essential insight into the practices and ideas of maps and map-making. It draws on a wide range of social theorists, and theorists of maps and cartography, to show how maps and map-making have shaped the spaces in which we live.
This paper examines how certain inner city spaces in Toronto, Canada are being transformed in part due
to changing sexual and gendered identities, and practices variously described as ‘post-gay’ or ‘post-mo.’
Drawing on a June 2011 Grid article entitled ‘Dawn of a new gay’ and related commentary, I argue that in
seeking to understand various spatial transformations underway in Toronto, one element deserving of
attention is a so-called growing intergenerational divide amongst and between certain segments of Toronto’s
LGBT population. More specifically, new or alternative understandings of same-sex identity, and
practices are emerging that are markedly different from those of previous generations. As a result, a
self-styled ‘post-mo’ generation is less interested in (or does not frequent as often), Toronto’s traditional
gay Village and is utilizing alternative urban spaces in ways that rework the gendered and sexualized
meanings of those locations and suggests transformative processes are underway for LGBT social, political
and economic life in Toronto.
While idealised as a private space, the residential home is embedded in public relationships, and a critical aspect of homemaking is managing the public/private boundary. Geographers of sexualities show this is fraught for sexual minorities, with gay men having a heightened need to control the public/private boundary, fearing discrimination from neighbours. This paper re‐examines the ways in which gay men manage the public/private boundary and considers how these practices are entwined with social power and queer politics. Analysing data from research with gay men in Australia, I find diversity in their management of home as a site of both privacy and public connections. Some men do try to seal their homes from neighbours, fearing repercussions if their sexuality is publicised. But others engage with local communities and open their homes to neighbourly visits. This has important reparative effects for social change: by utilising the porosity of domestic borders, these men's homes become sites of queer politics that help reconcile the inequitable social power of the heterosexual/homosexual binary.
In this article I consider working-class lesbians' views and experiences of commercialized scene space as these venues change in light of social, economic and political developments. Working-class lesbians both participated in and felt excluded from scene spaces, often criticizing them as 'pretentious' and 'unreal' for their cosmopolitan gloss. In this upgrading a politicized perspective was believed to have been sacrificed or in jeopardy, threatened by gendered and classed consumer-based expectations and inhabitations. The reproduction of such space via regeneration and sophistication mediates the construction of lesbian styles, appearances and identities, demarcating boundaries of inclusion across time and place. Interviewees spoke of scene developments and changes with a sense of loss, even nostalgia; their descriptions frequently conjured up binaries of now/then, political/apolitical, marginal/mainstream, metropolitan/provincial — producing an uneasy situation in and out of place. Such positionings illustrate material, embodied and felt exclusions, and tenuous inclusions, as this space is negotiated, contested and rejected.
Over the past two decades, geographers’ attentions to the ‘visual’ arts have broadened considerably. From a tightly focused study of 18th- and 19th-century landscape paintings this engagement now encompasses: a temporal reorientation towards 20th-century art practices; an opening out of concerns beyond the thematic frame of landscape; the embrace of a wider variety of artistic media beyond painting practices; and a shift in modes of engagement that sees geographers taking up a range of creative practices. In this paper I do not want to further expand the field, but rather to draw attention to how and with what effect these engagements have proceeded. Discussion is framed by Rosalind Krauss’ influential exploration of art’s ‘expanded field’, itself an attempt to rethink art as an analytic object in the face of a multiplication of artistic practices, materials, operations and sites. The body of the paper explores three analytics that mark intersections of art’s expanding field of theory and practice, and geography’s own expanding field of operations: these are, artists’ changing orientations towards ‘site’, a phenomenological critique of the ‘body’, and the ‘materialities’ and ‘practices’ of making (keywords that have usually been articulated as intrinsically geographic, and applied to the art world). Synthesizing these perspectives with current geographical engagements with art and broader disciplinary debates is, I suggest, to affirm the place and value of the study and practice of art within key disciplinary concerns.
This volume fills a gap in the literature on planning and the development of queer spaces. It highlights the resistance there has been within the planning profession to incorporate gay and lesbian concerns into the planning mainstream. Bringing together leading academic planners and geographers, it reflects on the ways in which issues germane to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community have been slowly integrated into the planning mainstream, as well as those topics on which there is more work to do.
The emergence of creative industries as a productive sector marks a significant transformation in economic life in contemporary Western societies. On the one hand, the opportunities such a development affords in providing career pathways and lucrative opportunities for creative workers in areas like computer games and film might seem like cause for celebration, also enabling humanities disciplines to rebadge themselves in order to attract students within the competitive higher education market. On the other hand, the ways in which creativity is alienated to the capitalist market as an economic commodity does raise particular concerns, particularly in the context of regional communities lacking the scale, resources and critical mass to be successful in this market. This is a speculative (and indeed playful) paper that canvasses ways in which the regions might respond to the emerging economy of the creative industries. It draws on the concept of fields of resonance to suggest how the region might be configured as a creative performance space, open to the world, and ecologically attuned, thereby offering a distinctive response to this emerging cultural and economic force.
Over the past half century, many visible gay districts emerged in Western inner cities as sites of gay and lesbian residence, commerce, entertainment, culture and politics. Rather than static enclaves, these visibly gay districts are constantly changing, reflecting improved social attitudes towards homosexuality, increasing diversity of social activities and venues, and financial constraints on residential location in the inner city for many lesbians and gay men. This paper revisits Collins’ evolutionary gay district model to examine recent changes around one such inner-city district, Oxford Street in Sydney, Australia. A neoclassical economic perspective, focusing on market forces, consumer preferences and incentives, is used to hypothesise whether these changes are a process of decline, integration or colonisation of gay space. For the Oxford Street district there is growing evidence that various factors have eroded the vibrancy of gay cultural expressions. The paper concludes by discussing the different possible ongoing transformations of inner-city gay districts.
This paper discusses the socio-cultural processes that shape homosexual leisure space, specifically examining the experiences of lesbians. In doing so, it seeks to contribute to the emergent body of tourism research focusing on gendered and sexualized leisure. Its primary contribution to gender tourism research, however, is to provide further support for the conceptualization of leisure processes and spaces as both heterosexist and androcentric. The paper thus begins by briefly discussing the socio-cultural construction of gay space and the powerful dynamics that underpin its emotional geography. It then briefly discusses the study's methodological approach before presenting and discussing the findings of the research conducted with lesbians in Manchester's gay village one of the UK's first and most successful gay and lesbian quarters. The paper reveals how sexuality and gender combine to constrain women's consumption of public leisure space and suggests that, whilst homosexual spaces have emotional and psychological importance as empowering places in a heterosexual world, in the case of the Manchester gay village, this homosexual space does not empower lesbians because of the homo-patriarchic power dialectics characterizing its socio-cultural construction. The women interviewed in the study do have territorial ambitions in the village their own space is important to them, it confirms their place in the village and it supports the development of social networks for lesbians in a hostile, hetero-patriarchic world. Yet, it emerges that lesbian space is an exceptionally difficult homosexual space to claim since the more powerful and more established gay male community in that area does not particularly welcome women.
All learning is emplaced. It happens somewhere and it involves material things. It is located and situated. This paper focuses on spaces and places outside of the classroom where lessons about ‘self’ and ‘other’ are learnt. Drawing on recent research (‘Space, place and the making of masculinities in primary schools in Ireland’, O Donoghue, Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 2006, volume 3), the paper analyses the stories/narratives of a group of ten and eleven year old boys, stories that tell of how they learn to speak, act and perform masculinities in school spaces and places. These performances, ‘naturalized’ through repetition and regulation, happen in spaces that exert significant effects on boys by opening up/closing off certain behavioural possibilities. The paper makes visible processes of doing and re/presenting research into masculinities and schooling in, with and through art. It argues that a research approach drawing on theories and processes of contemporary art practice offers much for conceptualizing, doing and representing research and provides opportunities that other research methods close off.
Drawing on and speaking to literatures in geographic information systems (GIS), queer geography, and queer urban history, we chronicle ethnographically our experience as queer geographers using GIS in an action-research project. We made a map of sites of historical significance in Seattle, Washington, with the Northwest Lesbian and Gay History Museum Project. We detail how queer theory/activism and GIS technologies, in tension with one another, made the map successful, albeit imperfect, via five themes: colliding epistemologies, attempts to represent the unrepresentable, productive pragmatics, the contingencies of facts and truths, and power relations. This article thus answers recent calls in the discipline for joining GIS with social-theoretical geographies, as well as bringing a spatial epistemology to queer urban history, and a cartographic one to queer geography.
The notion of "gay space' is often taken to be synonymous with predominantly gay male residential neighbourhoods in major cities, such as San Francisco. This paper examines some of the spaces that lesbians create. It begins by considering how lesbian structures of meaning are constructed around specific materially ground sites: a residential district and a lesbian institutional base in a provincial UK town. It then moves on to examine how lesbian spaces are produced and claimed through collective imaginings focused upon social networks, specific "lesbian' celebrities and political events. Attention is given to the specific time-space frameworks within which different forms of lesbian space are produced, from relatively fixed to periodic or fleeting. -Author
Between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, a loose association of gay social spaces consolidated into what is now known as the ‘gay village’ in the Church and Wellesley street areas in downtown Toronto. Scholars argue that, while these residential and commercial districts evolved prior to the formation of organized gay political organizations, they suggest that the emergence of these districts as political and commercial districts was a direct result of deliberate local gay activism. I argue here that contrary to this literature and for much of its history, the gay movement was largely opposed to the existence of specifically gay-identified spaces, particularly those operated by both heterosexual and homosexual businesspersons. Toronto's gay activists, using different ideological frameworks, struggled to constitute a homosexual identity that stood mainly in opposition to the so-called ‘ghetto gay’ and to construct alternative spaces that were seen as more appropriate to the formation of a properly politicized homosexual identity. Nevertheless, by the early 1980s, as the gay village continued to thrive and as the players in gay movement politics changed, the gay ghetto became the gay village and was celebrated as a location of political strength and social necessity. This article explores that material and symbolic transformation.
This paper offers a pragmatic, principally economic perspective on the body of work analysing the genesis and development of urban 'gay villages'. The Soho Gay Village in central London is presented as a case study. Its evolution and principal features are considered in the light of the existing corpus of research into gay agglomerations and the documented experiences of some other urban gay villages in England. It is suggested that, even with differing historical roots and widely differing levels and forms of municipal support, a recurrent developmental pattern seems to be discernible. This is characterised by an urban area in decline progressing through several broad stages of economic enterprise denoted by: sexual and legal liminality; gay male social and recreational opportunities; a widening service-sector business base; and, ulti-mately, the assimilation of the area into the fashionable mainstream.
The limited literature on the relationship of lesbians and gay men to urban space is ambiguous about the existence of lesbian spatial concentrations. We sought to establish the existence of spatial concentrations of lesbians and then to characterize the areas within which they were found in an urban area in the US. We found that census tracts where lesbians concentrate had significantly lower levels of rents, proportions of owner-occupied housing, and traditional family households. The lesbian neighbourhood lacks the visibility of its gay male counterpart because lesbians have less acccess to capital with which to transform urban space and are more at risk on public places, rather than because of fundamental gender differences in how men and women relate to space and to urban politics. -Authors
Earlier studies of Canadian inner-city gentrification, especially in Toronto, project an image of the process as being emancipatory: a middle-class reaction to the oppressive conformity of suburbia, modernist planning and market principles. This paper, a case study of gentrification in South Parkdale, Toronto, questions this image by illustrating the role of local context in theory and policy and the consequences of gentrification for vulnerable inner-city populations. Once a desirable residential neighbourhood, South Parkdale experienced disinvestment following the construction of the Gardiner Expressway in the 1960s and also experienced further problems in the 1970s and 1980s following the deinstitutionalisation of psychiatric patients from adjacent hospitals. Discharged patients suffered from a shortage of affordable housing options, and many ended up in substandard rooming houses and bachelorettes, of which South Parkdale has a disproportionate share in Toronto. The neighbourhood's sporadic gentrification since the mid-1980s has intensified in recent years, as the City of Toronto is regularising and licensing the neighbourhood's low-income housing-a major concern for tenants who fear that landlords will use recent provincial legislation on tenancy to attract wealthier residents into their improved buildings. This paper examines this situation with qualitative evidence and argues that gentrification in South Parkdale, driven and managed by neoliberal policy, is far from an emancipatory process and argues for an interpretation of gentrification that looks beyond the experiences of the middle classes.
What are the methodological and theoretical issues of doing collective research? While raising questions that speak to the process and point to the high and low lights of a collaborative research approach, my paper addresses issues of representation and shifting power that are central to feminist inquiry, critical pedagogy, critical race theory, and research concerned with social (in)justice and inclusion. Specifically this paper grapples with the possibility of research as a vehicle for social change. journal article
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 8.1-2 (2002) 183-206
In North American and European cities, gay and lesbian residential and commercial zones have become increasingly visible to and visited by the public at large. Although this trend could readily be attributed to the success of gay civil rights movements and the recognition of gays as a niche market, it has been accompanied by other forms of urban transformation, notably the commodification of space related to a growth in tourism and a shift toward an entrepreneurial form of urban governance. As secondary U.S. cities such as Austin, Texas; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Portland, Oregon, compete to lure footloose capital in the financial, information, and high-tech industries, they seek to market themselves as centers of culture and consumption. To stake a claim to cosmopolitanism, one of the most desirable forms of contemporary cultural capital, many emphasize their ethnic diversity. In a growing number of instances, "queer space" functions as one form of this ethnic diversity, tentatively promoted by cities both as equivalent to other ethnic neighborhoods and as an independent indicator of cosmopolitanism.
The popular press reinforces the queer cachet, noting the gay quotient of clubs and neighborhoods in explorations of the "geography of cool." In an article that serves as a tour guide to the international club scene, highlighting places frequented by "both gays and straights" in European cities such as Paris, Madrid, and Amsterdam, Roger Cohen writes that in Berlin, "a cooler note" can be found at the Greenwich, where
In this instance, racial diversity and sexual diversity highlight the establishment's sophisticated allure even as nonwhite and/or queer bodies provide a chic stamp of approval recognized by the reader of the New York Times, assumed to be a cosmopolitan traveler. Although Cohen does not preclude the possibility of queers of color in his description of the nightclub, Asian and African are offered as other, presumably in opposition to whiteness, and homosexual is offered as the other of heterosexual. If bodies are assumed to be heterosexual and white unless otherwise specified, only one axis of difference is presumed, and queers of color are erased from the discourses of cosmopolitanism and globalization, as consumers and commodities.
In clubs such as the Greenwich, queers and queer space are consumed by a broader, non-queer-identified public in ways that shape the evolution of these spaces and affect the everyday lives of the gays who inhabit them (whether as residents or as tourists themselves). Whether local residents or visitors to the city, empathetic supporters or scandalized voyeurs, tourists read as straight consume the temporary space of queer festivals and parades or the more enduring spaces of queer neighborhoods. The presence of such tourists disrupts queer space's homogeneity, which is only putative because categories of class, race, and gender are frequently not acknowledged in the abstract construct that is queer space. Yet disruptions based solely on a queer/straight binary further entrench the homogeneous nature of the (white male) queer. This essay explores the history and implications of these disruptions. How has this process of commodification been enabled by changes in the global political economy and in queer space itself? Have tourism and the related commodification of queer space for consumption affected gays who live in and visit these spaces? Might these consumption practices inscribe new or reinforce current exclusionary practices along the lines of race, ethnicity, class, and gender? Finally, are there parallels between the contemporary consumption of queer space and the long history of tourists traveling in search of the other?
After reviewing earlier instances of urban tourism centered on a quest for a place-based exotic other, I outline the shift toward urban governance that has paralleled the rise of queer space's visibility. I then briefly survey the literature that describes the...
Despite its apparent irrelevance as a scale or space of sociocultural organisation, the neighbourhood is back on the political agenda. At an international level, the neighbourhood -- or, more specifically, the 'global neighbourhood' -- is being promoted as a moral space through which to manage the complex economic, political, and ecological problems of the planet. Mirroring this process at a national level, in the United Kingdom the neighbourhood has been rediscovered and now provides the parameters through which a range of antipoverty, welfare, and local democracy programmes are being delivered. In light of its contemporary political popularity, this paper presents a critical reanalysis of the concept of the neighbourhood. In particular, the analysis explores the ideological and political uses of the ideal of neighbourhood, and how these processes relate to a particular 'politics of scale'. In order to unpack the various politics of scales associated with the neighbourhood, the analysis combines theories of scale with Lefebvre's work on the production of space. Drawing on these theoretical insights and the case of neighbourhood politics in the town of Walsall in the United Kingdom, I explore the political narratives and practices through which the neighbourhood scale is produced and contested, and question the ability of neighbourhoods, as they are currently being constructed in the United Kingdom, to offer locally empowering scales of political and social organisation.
Queer and gendered housing: A tale of two neighbourhoods in Vancouver
- M Bouthillettea