What we do is Secret: Queer Infrastructures of Abandonment in Industrial Los Angeles

Keywords: Los Angeles, Queer, Latinx, Youth, Nightlife, Environmental Justice
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 74

Abstract

This paper thinks through parties, punk shows and other celebrations that take place in abandoned warehouses in Southeast Los Angeles. These abandoned warehouses which hold histories of labor and ecological disaster become the site of escape for youth overnight. In identifying the function of heteropatriarchy within the frameworks of capitalist industrial violence, I argue that landscapes of former toxic industrialization serve as the possible building blocks for spaces that transcend the boundaries of violence experienced within the quotidian lifestyles of queer subjects. This relationality of abandonment functions through two primary examples. I juxtapose an entry from the public cartographic tool, “Queering the Map” explaining sexual acts in “one of those factories” with a scene from Aurora Guerrero’s film Mosquita Y Mari. These feelings of relationality make space for a form of queer resurrection (Chambers-Letson, 2018) where spaces and affective registers are activated. Taking up the work of scholars like Karen Tongson (2011) who highlights queer life, love and possibility within “nowhere” spaces in broader Los Angeles I move through various scales of (un)belonging in industrial regions of the city. Such interrogations contribute to sexual futures (Rodriguez, 2014) within what Deborah Vargas (2014) terms Lo Sucio. Additionally, this paper is grounded in a responsibility to remember queer geographies made within the hidden spaces that reveal who we are and what we can create.