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LGBTQ Spaces and Places
Abstract and Figures
2016 Gieseking, J. LGBTQ Spaces and Places. LGBTQ Heritage Initiative Theme Study. National Parks Service, U.S. Department of the Interior.
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... In fact, "LGB neighborhoods, " where people can meet, develop relationships and build communities, social and political spaces to share face-to-face contact (Gieseking, 2016) are created by a homophobic, bi-phobic, and transphobic heterosexual community. Therefore, the areas of homosexual aggregation are experienced as ghettos, in which LGB individuals are confined, and sexuality can be acted out. ...
... In fact, "LGB neighborhoods, " where people can meet, develop relationships and build communities, social and political spaces to share face-to-face contact (Gieseking, 2016) are created by a homophobic, bi-phobic, and transphobic heterosexual community. Therefore, the areas of homosexual aggregation are experienced as ghettos, in which LGB individuals are confined, and sexuality can be acted out. ...
The study investigates how the territorial community can influence the individual and social well-being of lesbian, gay, bisexual (LGB) youth and especially the recognition of their feelings and the construction of their own identity as well as their needs to be socially recognized. This research focuses on the experiences of 30 LGB individuals (23 males and 7 females), with a mean age of 25.07 years (SD = 4,578), living in urban and rural areas of Southern Italy. Focalized open interviews were conducted, and the Grounded Theory Methodology, supported by the Atlas.ti 8.0 software, was used for data analysis. The textual material was first coded, and then codes were grouped into five macro-categories: Freedom of identity expression in the urban and rural context, identity construction and acceptance process, need of aggregation and identification with the LGB community, role of the interpersonal relationship in the process of identity acceptance, socio-cultural context, and LGB psychological well-being. The results showed a condition common to the two contexts that we can define as "ghettoization." The young LGB is alone in the rural area due to a lack of places and people to identify with and greater social isolation. On the contrary, although there are more opportunities in the urban area, young people feel stigmatized and ghettoized because "their places" are frequented exclusively by the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transexual, queer (LGBTQ) community. The work will extensively discuss the limitations of the research, future proposals, and the practical implications of the results.
... Issues around visibility and recognition are particularly intensifying in debates about how to commemorate, and establish space for, sexual and gender minorities (Castiglia and Reed, 2011;Gieseking, 2016;Gorman-Murray and Nash, 2016). These debates render queer politics of inclusion as an activist commitment to creating (more) public visibility of such minorities as key pathway to heighten their recognition including formal rightsthough such processes do not follow uniform patterns (Dunn, 2017;Mekler, 2018;Zebracki, 2020). ...
Despite growing debate about the role of monuments in diverse societies, there has been insufficient attention to contestations that have emerged involving ‘gay’ or ‘queer’ monuments. This article examines the politics of inclusion and exclusion that can stem from the social practices that evolve around these monuments, particularly as the imperatives and priorities of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) activism evolve while monuments, created in a particular historical and geographical context, are in some sense ‘set in stone’. Drawing on an intensive, mixed-methods case study of the Homomonument in Amsterdam, the article develops a grounded critique of processes of inclusion and exclusion specifically in relation to Black, bisexual and transgender people. With a focus on dance parties organised at the Homomonument, the article calls for more research that analyses monuments as sites of practice.
In recent decades, LGBT neighbourhoods or gay Villages have been gaining some prominence and particular characteristics within cities, representing safe spaces for the expression and negotiation of individual and collective identities as well as for the political affirmation of LGBT communities and queer identities. As other areas that have been the main drivers of urban revitalization of inner-cities, such as cultural and creative quarters or multicultural spaces, these territories distinguish for the social practices of their users and inhabitants, the specificities of their economic activity, or their contribute to creativity or social integration. More than community ghettos, these areas have been characterized by their openness and vibrancy, enhancing the coexistence of diverse lifestyles, trajectories and identities, but also by the contribution of LGBT people to the gentrification of these districts through their strong commercial, residential and symbolic presence. Drawing upon an empirical work developed in Lisbon (Príncipe Real district) and Madrid (Chueca district), based on in-depth interviews to LGBT residents and participant observation in the two neighbourhoods, this paper characterizes the main evolutionary trajectories and specificities of these two districts. An analysis is made confronting the characteristics and contingencies of these areas with other cases previously studied in literature, identifying the existence of notable differences and suggesting evidence of significant specificities, which can represent a South European approach to the reality of Gay Villages. Some generic principles for urban planning are drawn out from the analysis.
Based on a case study on Miami Beach’s acclaimed iconic art deco architectural district, this article critically dovetails intersecting hegemonic spaces of preservation, memorial practices and social and sexual identities. It argues how commemorative narratives are selectively encrypted in the local urban environment and its artefacts deemed of historical significance. It especially reveals the tensions arising between art deco (i.e. architectural) preservation and gay (i.e. social) urban preservation, as well as its under-studied largely entrepreneurial nature and attraction for a mainstream, cosmopolitan class under neoliberalism. Drawing from extensive archival, policy, observational, participatory and interview data over 2013–2015, the article revisits in historical perspective how the art deco area, incarnated in the 1920s, developed across class-, ethnicity-, religion- and age-inflected social fragmentations and how this legacy, from the late-1970s onward, segued into the local gay-led preservation movement and select commemorations of the art deco scene. To this background, the study employs the tenet of ‘queerying’ to address the under-researched coalescing frictions in preservation between perceived authentic and engineered trajectories of (gay) place (re)makings alongside reminiscences selected over others. The findings uncover and challenge (un)intentional ‘(un)rememberings’ of the local early history and the recent past, where socially fragmented fault lines and the more recent gay-led preservation track remain overly homogeneously imprinted in dominant preservation communications and performance.
The privately funded National Park Service Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Heritage Initiative was established to address the under-representation of LGBTQ sites in National Park Service (NPS) programmes, including the National Register of Historic Places and National Historic Landmarks programmes, as well as in-park interpretation. An archaeological context in the resulting theme study aimed to facilitate the consideration of the archaeological significance of LGBTQ places. In practice, it opened a productive dialogue with LGBTQ community members and preservationists about the ability of the archaeological record to tell about LGBTQ history and heritage, and expanded how people think about the survival and persistence of their histories.
The lesbian or lesbian-queer neighbourhood is a slippery idea, and for many women throughout the world it is an elusive ideal, even in LGBTQ meccas such as San Francisco, London, Berlin, and New York City. Renowned enclaves such as the Castro district, Soho, Schöneberg, West Village, Lower East Side, and Chelsea developed as cities within cities, where LGBTQ people could safely find one another and build communities together. But practices of territory-making and place-claiming are antithetical to women’s economic and social abilities in the urban sphere, and the urban is a historically unwelcoming environment for women. I suggest, then, that lesbianqueer neighbourhoods, then, do not work in ways identical to gay and queer men’s neighbourhoods, but, as Tamar Rothenberg’s quote reveals, they are still spatialised ‘communities’. As Sarah, a participant from my research, describes in the quote above, the Park Slope neighbourhood in Brooklyn is produced as lesbian-queer in the way it affords these women safety and refuge. So what then is a lesbian-queer neighbourhood to lesbians and queer women? What does it afford them in their everyday lives? Dynamics of gender, race, and class have not been fully accounted for in studies of LGBTQ neighbourhoods; however, recent work has begun to confront assumptions that all LGBTQ people will be granted equal access and can politically and economically maintain such properties over time (Manalansan, 2005; Taylor, 2008; Moore, 2011).
This essay presents the first essay that Berube published based on the research that culminated in his award-winning book, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II. Here, Berube draws on oral histories, correspondence, and other documentary evidence to reconstruct the experience of gay men and lesbians during World War II. Written in the tradition of the New Social History of the 1960s and 1970s, the essay relates the experience of ordinary Americans rather than the rich, famous, and powerful. Berube makes the argument that World War II was “a turning point” in gay and lesbian history and that it “lay the groundwork for gay life as we know it” by helping to build the urban communities of the postwar decades.
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.
A largely unexplored area, this is an innovative and original examination of bisexual spaces as places that are defined by both geographical boundaries and cultural significance. Hemmings applies the ideas of queer theory as well as social and cultural geography in her fascinating investigation into the spaces and places of bisexual life. Specifically focusing on Northhampton, MA and San Francisco, she draws on interviews with community members and the town histories showing how and why they have developed into safe places for the gay, lesbian, and bisexual communities. By mapping out a space of bisexuality
Butch Queens Up in Pumps examines Ballroom culture, in which inner-city LGBT individuals dress, dance, and vogue to compete for prizes and trophies. Participants are affiliated with a house, an alternative family structure typically named after haute couture designers and providing support to this diverse community. Marlon M. Bailey's rich first-person performance ethnography of the Ballroom scene in Detroit examines Ballroom as a queer cultural formation that upsets dominant notions of gender, sexuality, kinship, and community.
Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement provides a new narrative history of U.S. Gay and lesbian activism, drawing on primary research in the field and the best scholarship on the history of the gay and lesbian movement.
Everyday, around the world, women who work in the Third World factories of global firms face the idea that they are disposable. Melissa W. Wright explains how this notion proliferates, both within and beyond factory walls, through the telling of a simple story: the myth of the disposable Third World woman. This myth explains how young women workers around the world eventually turn into living forms of waste. Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism follows this myth inside the global factories and surrounding cities in northern Mexico and in southern China, illustrating the crucial role the tale plays in maintaining not just the constant flow of global capital, but the present regime of transnational capitalism. The author also investigates how women challenge the story and its meaning for workers in global firms. These innovative responses illustrate how a politics for confronting global capitalism must include the many creative ways that working people resist its dehumanizing effects.