Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

Christian Anderson, University of Washington Bothell

; ,

Description:

While contemporary lesbian and queer geographies are often strongly associated with cities, deeply inequitable processes of urban development continue to present vexing challenges and dilemmas for lesbian and queer lives and spatial-social relations in urban space. In “A Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queers” (NYU Press, 2020), Jen Jack Gieseking examines these tensions in a first of its kind historical geography of New York City. Leveraging multi-generational group interviews, mental mapping, archival, and other in-depth qualitative methods alongside an array of critical spatial-social, queer, and cultural theory, Gieseking offers a rich account of how lesbians and queers have survived in the face of gentrification and inequitable urban development. From these perspectives, it offers trenchant critiques of contemporary capitalist urbanization, property regimes, and displacement but also highlights the ways that communities have succeeded in carving out spaces—and lives—even under conditions hostile to their thriving.

This Author-Meets-Readers panel brings together interdisciplinary scholars offering perspectives from urban and feminist Geography, gender and sexuality studies, and American studies, among others, to discuss Gieseking’s “A Queer New York” and to extend the historical-geographical and spatial-social insights that the book suggests.

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda