Queer Spatial Analysis

The Life and Afterlife of Gay Neighborhoods, 2021

Urbanists have developed an extensive set of propositions about why gay neighborhoods form, how they change, shifts in their significance, and their spatial expressions. Existing research in this emerging field of "gayborhood studies" emphasizes macro-structural explanatory variables, including the economy (e.g., land values, urban governance, growth machine politics, affordability, and gentri-fication), culture (e.g., public opinions, societal acceptance, and assimilation), and technology (e.g., geo-coded mobile apps, online dating services). In this chapter, I use the residential logics of queer people-why they in their own words say that they live in a gay district-to show how gayborhoods acquire their significance on the streets. By shifting the analytic gaze from abstract concepts to interactions and embodied perceptions on the ground-a "street empirics" as I call it-I challenge the claim that gayborhoods as an urban form are outmoded or obsolete. More generally , my findings caution against adopting an exclusively supra-individual approach in urban studies. The reasons that residents provide for why their neighborhoods appeal to them showcase the analytic power of the streets for understanding what places mean and why they matter.

University of Michigan - Deep Blue, 2022

ix and the management here thinks I'm going to rob the place. Boystown is just not as much fun as it used to be. As he takes another sip of his drink and looks out the window at people passing by, he comments that "Boystown is just not my game anymore." Unknown to me at that time, the agglomeration of gay bars, clubs, and bathhouses with their rainbow flags, lights, and panoply of parties hide multiple structures of inequality that impact the costs of this leisure, who gains access, and how they are received. As Dex's comment reflects, both personal characteristics (such as age and race) and structural ones (such as convenience) influence the degree to which someone is successful within this neighborhood and these spaces. For some, Boystown represents a queer utopia and for others, a queer community deferred. Therefore, the guiding questions that began my study were: (1) who falls into the utopia versus deferred categories and (2) if queer men aren't frequenting Boystown, then where are they going? Over the next three and a half years, I addressed these questions by observing the various queer spaces around the city, both located within Boystown and outside of it. Within these spaces, I witnessed who used them and how to find out who was successful, where, and what they had to do in order to be successful. In talking with patrons, staff members, owners, visitors, and regulars, I learned how these queer spaces were not simply used for leisure, but to structure entire ways of organizing queer life in the city. In turn, this dictated how and with whom individuals interacted. The location of queer places helped guide the mechanisms queer men used to understand Chicago's queer sexual landscape and their own personal queer sexual map. Given this organization, it is unsurprising that when I gave queer men a map of Chicago, they were all too willing and able to circle, star, cross out, and highlight places they go, places they don't, neighborhoods they consider to be good, ones that are bad, and overall, their personal xix List of Appendices Appendix A: Map of Chicago……………………………………………………..

his article addresses methodological issues emerging from research conducted with Trans in the Center, an LGBT activist group in Tel Aviv, Israel. It addresses some complex issues related to the politics and ethics of applying queer and feminist methodology to qualitative research in a trans, queer and feminist community space. The focus is on two issues: the researcher’s positionality vis-à-vis the participants and selecting the appropriate methodology in relation to the characteristics of the group under study. Such issues demonstrate how queer and feminist principles are articulated and interwoven in geographical-spatial research in two different dimensions: in the research practice and methodology and in the practices and the spaces created by the activity of the researched group itself. I conclude with insights arising from the attempt to apply feminist and queer paradigms in both theory and research, and call for their integration into geographical research.

For decades, lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, and queer (LGBTQ) people have played key roles in these urban gentrification processes, as peripheral »gay ghettos« became gay neighborhoods and eventually »gayborhood« tourist hubs. I lay bare the interdependencies of the margin-center by showing the history of urban queer sexualities. In applying queer theories to read the placement of queer urban bodies, I suggest that the margin and the center are examples of binary mores that, rather than only be seen as at odds, require and reproduce each other.

2011

culture has developed in big cities and metropolises everywhere (not only in the West, but also in Asia, Latin America and indeed Africa). This essay examines how cities provide the spatial conditions necessary for the formation of such emancipatory movements based on identity politics and strategies which transcend binary gender dualism. The starting point of this investigation is my thesis that only urban life enables LGBTQ individuals to live their lives fully, realize their (sexual) identities, and furthermore organize themselves collectively, become publicly visible, and appropriate urban, societal and political spaces. This essay argues that the evolution of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, queer and transgender culture over the last 50 years in many big cities has a direct correlation with urban life, the reason being that only life in the city renders possible the creation of movements focusing on identity politics and their urban spatialization. 1

2013

Attitudes toward and acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI) people have changed significantly in the Western world over the last few decades, especially for white people and people of means, and this shift extends to geography as well. At the same time, a formal body of literature on geographies of sexualities and LGBTQI geographies has continued to grow with more positive support from the field as a whole; in 2013, this Annals book review is the first to examine works on geographies of sexualities. A flurry of recent edited volumes, edited journal issues, and conferences on the subjects of space and sexuality has shifted the attention and respect given this body of work. This review takes up two of these recent geography-focused volumes published by Ashgate, Queer Methods and Methodologies: Intersecting Queer Theories and Social Science Research (2010) and Queer Spiritual Spaces: Sexuality and Scared Places (2010), which have taken the work of geographies of sexualities in new, important, and timely directions.

Progress in Human Geography, 2008

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.

The Life and Afterlife of Gay Neighborhoods, 2021

Many gay villages (or "gayborhoods") arose in the wake of the gay liberation movement attracted a good deal of academic research within the last 40 years. Unfortunately, this hyper focus on certain spaces often populated by white gay men has frequently eclipsed research on other types of LGBTQ areas as well as other geographies beyond the global north. This chapter aims to address this gap, taking an ordinary cities perspective (Robinson, 2006) and asking how we can develop models that are conceptually useful for understanding the life of a more diverse array of LGBTQ spaces across the globe. To answer this question we avoid linear models of change by developing a new model based on a conceptual framework derived from physics: centripetal and centrifugal forces. The advantage of this model is its explicit recognition of the ways that social, economic, and political forces and their manifestations influence queer spaces. We use two cases from relatively under-studied regions; Atlanta and Istanbul to illustrate the utility of this framework. The "in-betweenness" of these cities, linking south and north as well as west and east, makes them a haven for queers and others fleeing the conservative surroundings in the search for more attractive and welcoming places for marginalized LGBTQ individuals. This chapter draws on the authors' lived experiences, prior research, and additional interviews to conduct a relational reading of queer spaces with emphasis on the ways that LGBTQ people circulate and congregate in a wider range of urban areas. This comparative strategy and relational reading of queer spaces expands the narrow focus from normalized narratives of gayborhoods to a broader "analysis of the heterogeneity and multiplicity of metropolitan modernities" (Roy 2009, p. 821) of queer spaces.

2015

The queer metropolis has developed across three periods of time. During the closet era (1870—World War II), “scattered gay places” like cabarets and public parks were based in bohemian parts of the city. Distinct gay neighborhoods , such as the iconic Castro district in San Francisco, first formed during the coming out era (World War II—1997), and they flourished in the “great gay migration” that ensued following the Stonewall riots. Queer moral refugees of this generation romanticized gay neighborhoods as beacons of tolerance in a sea of heterosexual hostility. Today’s post-gay era (1998—present), however, is characterized by an unprecedented societal acceptance of homosexuality. Many existing districts are “de-gaying” (gays and lesbians are moving out) and “straightening” (heterosexuals are moving in) in this actively unfolding cultural context. This chapter reviews research on the dynamic relationship between sexuality and the city across these three sexual eras.

Geography Research Forum (Vol 39, number 1), 2019

international topic issues dealing with all fields of human geography and multi-disciplinary topics of close relevance. All editorial, production and management staff (including guest editors) serve on a voluntary basis towards a joint contribution to the benefit of the international scientific community. We welcome submissions of original, innovative and theoretically informed proposals for future special issue themes. See inside back cover for manuscript submission guidelines.