Straights in a Gay Bar: Negotiating Boundaries Through Time-Spaces (original) (raw)
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Thinking beyond homonormativity: performative explorations of diverse gay economies
Environment and Planning A, 2009
This paper performatively decentres the role of mainstream gay consumption in contemporary thought about the economic and social lives of lesbians and gay men in the Global North. It is simultaneously critical and reparative in outlook. This paper critically engages with recent writing on homonormativity, suggesting that this work presents `homonormativity' as an all-encompassing structure that becomes politically unassailable. In parallel with an analysis of contemporary lesbian and gay life as being complicit in the reproduction of various normativities, this paper takes the innovative and reparative stance of considering how such spaces and practices also produce inter-dependent relationships across social difference. Drawing on the recent work of Gibson-Graham (2006, A Postcapitalist Politics University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN) this paper considers the prospects for outlining the diversity of lesbian and gay economic practices, with the performative ambition of making existing noncapitalist practices more visible and viable. To this end, the paper examines a number of gay spaces and practices to consider the different forms of enterprise, transactions, and labour that take place within them. On the basis of its preliminary inventory of diverse gay economic practices and spaces, this paper proposes that there are many aspects of contemporary urban gay life that already offer alternatives to the homonormative practices of neoliberalism.
Antipode, 2006
In this paper I aim to contribute to work addressing the relationship between dissident sexuality and gay political economy by providing a reconfigured Marxist exploration into the ambivalence of commercial gay space. Through the application of a central theme from Marx’s Grundrisse - the civilising influence of capital - I propose a means to move beyond an Althusserian view of commercial gay space as a contained ideological incorporation of capitalist hegemony, to that of a capitalist embodiment of constraints and radical possibilities. Focusing on the commercial gay scene of the UK’s second largest city, Birmingham, and the survival of a monthly British Asian gay club night therein, I explore the dialectical waves of capitalism. These waves drive conditions which both differentiate identity-based production/consumption to the assimilative relations of exchange value, and accommodate moments of cultural creativity that feed off this continual differentiation and escape its economic relations in the formation of radically new use-values.
Why Gayborhoods Matter: The Street Empirics of Urban Sexualities
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.
Queer Pop-Ups: A Cultural Innovation in Urban Life
City & Community, 2019
Research on sexuality and space emphasizes geographic and institutional forms that are stable, established, and fixed. By narrowing their analytic gaze on such places, which include gayborhoods and bars, scholars use observations about changing public opinions, residential integration, and the closure of nighttime venues to conclude that queer urban and institutional life is in decline. We use queer pop-up events to challenge these dominant arguments about urban sexualities and to advocate instead a "temporary turn" that analyzes the relationship between ephemeral-ity and placemaking. Drawing on interviews with party promoters and participants in Vancouver, our findings show that ephemeral events can have enduring effects. Pop-ups refresh ideas about communal expression, belonging, safety, and the ownership of space among queer-identified people who feel excluded from the gaybor-hood and its bars. As a case, pop-ups compel scholars to broaden their focus from a preoccupation with permanent places to those which are fleeting, transient, short-lived, and experienced for a moment. Only when we see the city as a collection of temporary spaces can we appreciate how queer people convert creative cultural visions into spatial practices that enable them to express an oppositional ethos and to congregate with, and celebrate, their imagined communities.
Cubbyholes, Safe-havens, and Stabilitas Loci: Quaring Small Town Gay Bars
I explore intersections of sexuality and place in the construction of public memory. Malcolm Ingram's Small Town Gay Bar documents a GLBTQ community in rural northeast Mississippi. I use quare theory, public memory, and "be longing" to explore collective authorship of a stabilitas loci navigating sexual and rural identities and communities. I extend the flexibility of quare theory to intersections of place and sexuality as interviewees constitute rural gay bar public memory. The "be longing" patrons communicate are explored through four dialectical tensions: visibility/invisibility, safety/danger, mobility/immobility, and assimilation/separation.
City, 2002
In this paper, Rob Kitchin develops a Foucaultian analysis of the sexual production of nonheterosexual space, tracing out the contingent and contested nature of socio-sexual relations in three cities: Belfast, Manchester and San Francisco. For each city, a basic historical and geographical analysis is produced, charting how discursive and material processes enacted by state and citizens and operating at different scales (region, nation) are grounded locally in particularized ways; how local nuances created through varying social, economic and political context and events create contingent and relational systems of regulation, selfregulation and resistance that manifest themselves in differing socio-spatial productions.
Sociological Review, 2004
According to i ek (1997) the logic of late capitalism offers opportunities for the incorporation of previously marginalised groups, whilst simultaneously dividing them at the same time. These possibilities for incorporation create divisions on the basis of gender, race, sexuality and class. Here, we examine how the capitalist desire for opening new markets for leisure consumption with new forms of branding, alongside the desire for the territorialisation of space by campaigning gay and lesbian groups, has led to the formation of a 'gay space' marketed as a cosmopolitan spectacle, in which the central issue becomes a matter of access and knowledge: who can use, consume and be consumed in gay space? We also ask what is the radical political impetus of sexual politics when commodified as cosmopolitan and incorporated spatially? The paper grounds the examination of the politics of cosmopolitanism within a specific locality drawing upon research undertaken on the contested use of space within Manchester's gay village. The paper is organised into four sections. The first examines competing definitions of cosmopolitanism, exploring how sexuality and class are framed as conceptual limits. The second describes how Manchester's gay village is imagined and branded as cosmopolitan. The third considers the navigation and negotiation of difference within this space. The final section evaluates the exclusions from cosmopolitan space and pursues the significance of this for arguments about incorporation in late capitalism.
After the Life of LGBTQ Spaces: Learning from Atlanta and Istanbul
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.
2021
Following numerous accounts lamenting the closure of over half of London’s LGBTQ+ nightlife venues in the last decade alone, this research paper sought to investigate the underlying factors leading to the permanent closure of many of the capital’s cherished queer spaces. I contextualise this paper in connection with a recent report commissioned by the Mayor of London that found that 58 percent of London’s LGBTQ+ venues had closed between 2006 and 2017. Building on these findings, my research constitutes of three overarching research questions that examine: how are processes of gentrification impacting London’s LGBTQ+ nightlife venues, how are LGBTQ+ dating apps and online spaces impacting London’s LGBTQ+ nightlife venues, and how are changing attitudes and habits within and towards London’s LGBTQ+ communities impacting London’s LGBTQ+ nightlife venues? In order to develop a nuanced understanding of the multitude of factors which contributed to the closures, this paper utilised over ...