From queer ecologies to queerer infrastructure: Research methods for new designs

Structure of the half-lecture

1. Below are a rough set of notes for  the half-lecture. The PDF version at the bottom of the notes has endnotes for further research.

2. In the first 15 minutes of the half-lecture, a few key concepts will be discussed: queer ecology, queer infrastructure, and socially oriented research methods.

3. Then in second 15 minutes, the class can participate in a seminar, almost like a fast game, in listing some of the information and research methods necessary in order have a basis for planning and design for these examples

Design for the Pluriverse: Space, Ecology, Difference

DISCUSSION / EXERCISE ON RESEARCH METHODS FOR NEW QUEER DESIGN

method: circular brainstorming (going around the zoom)

EXAMPLE 1: THE INFORMATION NECESSARY FOR PLANNING AND DESIGNING A COMBINED LGBTQ CENTRE & ELDER RESIDENCE IN THE VICINITY OF A HISTORIC AFRICAN CANADIAN / AMERICAN GRAVEYARD

1. community needs by social group (‘design programming’)

2. design features necessary for those social groups

3. environmental assessment / designs: making location choices and site plans + community context and relations with neighbours

4. design criteria for the architecture (including security, privacy, economy)

5. community consultations around initial designs (which communities? how to consult?)

6. construction / post-occupancy evaluation / redesign cycle

***

EXAMPLE 2: THE INFORMATION NECESSARY FOR A CAMPUS COMBINING

A REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH CENTRE, QUEER-FRIENDLY BATHHOUSE, AND A PARK WITH PLAYGROUND, ATHLETICS & (some) ADULT INTIMACY

1. community needs by social group (‘design programming’)

2. design features necessary for those social groups

3. environmental assessment / designs: making location choices and site plans + community context and relations with neighbours

4. design criteria for the architecture (including security, privacy, economy)

5. community consultations around initial designs (which communities? how to consult?)

6. construction / post-occupancy evaluation / redesign cycle

 rough discussion paper PDF version with endnotes:Brochu-Ingram 2022 From q ecologies to queerer infrastructure- Research methods for new designs

+ text below without endnotes

November 1, 2022

Guest half-lecture / discussion for Williams College * Fall 2022 * ARTS 314 Design for the Pluriverse: Space, Ecology, Difference[i]

From queer ecologies to queerer infrastructure:

Research methods for new designs

introduction

At a time when much of the textures of housing, public space, cultural venues, businesses, and services crucial for LGBTQ populations are being transformed and too often are closing, design and planning have heightened roles in community development and survival. Over the last decade, gentrification has often accelerated resulting in huge displacements often separating populations away from needed services. Digital networks and COVID have transformed workplaces and accelerated migrations to the exurbs and further afield in turn undermining business models for many of the services and spaces on which queer communities have depended for well over a half century. New wars, inflation, and the end of the dominance of fossil fuels will prove to huge impacts of queer spaces, the functions of and protections in those spaces, and their broader social relevance especially in areas with diminished violence and functional human rights protections (not Texas). Viewed through the lenses of linked paradigms and social projects of (shifting) queer ecologies and (rebuilding) queer infrastructure, what knowledge can we gather, trust, and analyze to guide our envisioning and designs?

 

Queer infrastructure is always nested in larger contexts of community planning. So how can we as planners identify unmet needs and imagine new events, programmes, and spaces — especially in convulsing economies with renewed challenges to racial inequities and state violence?  The notions of utopia explored by José Esteban Munoz are relevant as is the thread in its fifth chapter back to Samuel R. Delany’s 1988 memoir, The Motion of Light in the Water, linking science fiction writing and reimagining queer life. How can we explore new goals for community health while coping with and anticipating environmental change and new risks? A wide range of information is needed in planning exercises as well as new visions. Much of this data will involve new field research.

This discussion of information needed for new kinds of planning and design starts from the question of what is needed to create functional queer infrastructure, in the coming decades, that will often be quite different than that enjoyed (and endured) by minority gender and sexual experiences in urban areas since the start of the Industrial Revolution. The first half of this discussion is describing some of the mid-twentieth century ecological forces that lead to the coalescence of early communities of resistance, defense and enjoyment that were then built with more purposeful forms of infrastructure (now much of which is redundant). The second half of this discussion, the focus of the November 1, 2022, is an initial or  ‘brainstorm’ of the kinds of knowledge, data, media, narratives, analytical frameworks and the modes of data gathering necessary to advocate and plan for and then to design new kinds of queer infrastructure that we can barely imagine today (only part grounded in digital technologies).

part 1. 

From queer ecologies to queer infrastructure

 Chaotic times for LGBTQ spaces & new needs for community planning

How do we defend, anticipate, and plan for the “messiness”[ii] of the lives of LGBTQ2S[iii] populations in a time when century-old patterns of queer community formation, space, and services are convulsing and being transformed? This essay explores how planners can work to defend, expand, and diversify the communal supports on which LGBTQ2S populations depend.

 

Unless referring solely to the physical space occupied by LGBTQ2S bodies, this essay replaces the term “queer space”[iv] with “queer infrastructure.”[v] I have two reasons for preferring “infrastructure” over “space.” First queer infrastructure can function as the label a non-judgemental, conceptual ‘big tent’ that includes a wide range of needs and desires experienced by particular LGBTQ2S individuals, populations, and networks. Secondly, “queer infrastructure” is inherently spatial at multiple scales. As many of us know, getting the site details correctly is a huge task within community planning.

Three arguments are central to this discussion. First, a number of political economic factors have converged to make more comprehensive planning queer infrastructure both an important social goal and an imperative. Secondly, the imperative for planners to intervene more aggressively and transparently for queer infrastructure is based on rapid changes taking place that are undermining a century of modernist formations of social relations, space, and political economies – particularly in North America. The following are the most destructive processes: intensifying gentrification, broadening housing insecurity, and homelessness; the social isolation necessary to cope with the COVID pandemic which could be a harbinger of other highly communicable diseases;

the resulting economic contraction of the service sector;  and the over-dependence on digital surrogates for actual social spaces. My third argument is that to conceive, plan, design, and operationalize new queer infrastructure, a wider range of data sets, than are typically used in community planning, will be necessary extending to imaginaries in contemporary culture. Today’s planners, engaged in supporting queer infrastructure, could have more impact on the shape of LGBTQ2S communities and supports for the coming decades than at any time in history.

 

The central question in this discussion is how can we query contemporary culture to more fully identify needs, pressures, and opportunities for new queer infrastructure especially for the more vulnerable LGBTQ2S populations? In trying to imagine a fully decolonized queer infrastructure for my region in north-western North America, I am inspired by the experimental writings of two indigenous scholars influential in Canada: Billy-Ray Belcourt’s 2020 A History of My Brief Body[vi]  whose “NDN”[vii] and “indigiqueer”[viii] experiences often centre on being a young and sexually active, queer scholar and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s 2020 Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies.[ix] In addition, The Freezer Door by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore explores queer community and alienation in Seattle. This work on LGBTQ2S infrastructure is inspired by the notions of queer futurity explored a decade ago by the late José Esteban Muñoz in his 2009, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, the fifth chapter of which explored “the massed bodies” of sexual dissidence[x] was inspired Samuel R. Delany’s 1988 memoirs, The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village 1960-1965.[xi] Delany’s memoirs, reflecting on the balm of imagination for a black and queer adolescent were written under the shadow of the first, most horrific, wave of AIDS[xii] in New York. More recently, Joshua Chambers-Letson’s 2018. After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life[xiii] outlines how contemporary culture can lead in politics (and lay the basis for imagining possibilities and sketching new infrastructure).

In this discussion, I move from reimagining care as infrastructure to activism, planning and design nesting in the protecting, expanding and diversifying queer infrastructure to exploring infrastructure for LGBTQ2S populations as part of ecosystems and queer ecologies as dynamic processes for both desire and survival. But what do we need to know to begin to envision, plan and design for these new transactions, services, and spaces?

Reimagining care as infrastructure as planning goals

   “Esiban important practice number four: Take very, very good care of each  other, always, no matter what happens.”

                                             Leanne Betasamosake Simpson 2020[xiv]

  “[L]ife is at its most rewarding, productive, and pleasant when large numbers of  people understand, appreciate, and seek out interclass contact and communication  conducted in a mode of good will.” Samuel R. Delany 1999 Times Square Red Times Square Blue[xv]

So how can we as planners identify unmet needs, gather enough wisdom and inspiration, and imagine with rightfully distrustful communities new events, programmes, and spaces — especially in convulsing economies with renewed challenges to racial inequities and state violence?

In his 2009 blueprint for queer futurity, Cruising Utopia, Muñoz, provides three principles for queer imaginings. First, there is “the essential need for an understanding of queerness as collectivity”[xvi] and not as a assemblages of atomized consumers. Secondly, Muñoz worked with a modernization of Adorno’s notion of “utopia” as “the determined negation of that which merely is”[xvii] giving us more space for negativity as part of a fuller imaginings of queer infrastructure. In other words, a bit of negativity can go a long way. A third principle is that a reading and analysis of a work of contemporary culture can be used “as a resource for the political imagination.”[xviii] In discerning these utopian vistas, new “theory”[xix] for queer infrastructure often requires emotional processes highlighting the precarity of many populations that is exacerbated by today’s ecological emergencies.

But there are a lot of needs, expectations, and functions embodied in queer strategic sites and spaces, social interactions, and service programmes and queer infrastructure exists to facilitate the care necessary to maintain the following interactions and related self-sufficiency:

“community”[xx];

demographics (especially health);

networks;

conviviality;

needs;

mutual aid;

support systems;

events such as demonstrations, festivals, dance parties;

entertainment and cultural spaces;

erotic expression;

cultural expression;

repair;

businesses; and

political economies.

 

Today, queer life support is largely controlled through the market with a few programmes for the most vulnerable of LGBTQ2S population shunted off to poorly funded non-governmental organizations and charities. Imaginings and “imaginaries”[xxi] of a more comprehensive, queer infrastructure re-centres LGBT2S participation in the communities, landscape and ecosystems through work towards mutual “care”[xxii] nested in sustainable life support during an intensifying ecological emergency. And there are different kinds of “care” as with the example below.

I care for you (because we just spent a great night together).

I care for my aged parent.

We care for the compost in this community garden.

We care about climate change.

Let’s care for the earth.[xxiii]

Through articulating queer “ethics of care”[xxiv] as a basis for envisioning queer infrastructure, we can conceive of new initiatives to keep communities alive and entertained. Let’s return to Muñoz and cruising to utopia. Much is said in right-wing politics about the so-called “Nanny State” where underpaid female service workers provide most of the care.  In contrast, I want to imagine a feminist ‘Daddy State’[xxv] with males doing a fair share of the care.  In these imaginings, there is a dialectic of responding to vulnerabilities, as in provision of social services, versus creating more spaces for expressing desires and entertainment (for having fun and more). How this survival-and-pleasure tension is going to be played out, in coming decades under the worst challenges of particular ecological emergencies, remains unclear.

 

So if we accept the general consensus that we are living in ecosystems (often under duress) that support queer ecologies, so what? More specifically, it is time to explore what new investigations and analyses of ecosystems, life support, and infrastructure can mean for the work of theoreticians[xxvi], designers and activists? I argue that the central goal of this work is to create better queer infrastructure centred on systems of mutual and collective “care.”[xxvii] But there are different forms of care some of which have been racist, misogynist, and homophobic too often imposed on vulnerable communities. So queer infrastructure is a break from political economies that drive forms of the malevolent “state”[xxviii] extending beyond the colonial, “neocolonial,”[xxix] and modernist periods.

 

Protecting, expanding & diversifying queer infrastructure

 “What my body needs in order to be a body that’s not just a

body of   needs.”                  Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore 2020[xxx]

“I’ve evoked this formulation in the past to understand the metaphysical thrust of queerness; in a late-capitalist world in which individuality is a fetish, a mass object of desire, a political anthem, what remains queer about queerness is that it entices us to gamble with the ‘I’ in the name of love, sex, friendship, art, and so forth.” Billy-Ray Belcourt[xxxi]

One of the most difficult aspects of beginning to conceive of planning for queer infrastructure is encompassing the diversity of functions, combinations of functions, durations, dependencies, and scales present today and those that are necessary for the future. In other words, we have needs for and from other human beings that manifest through various forms of infrastructure some of which is more focused on blends of LGBTQ2S networks. We need some of this infrastructure or we will die (or possibly be killed).

So what are more comprehensive definitions of queer infrastructure? The core are organic mechanisms for sufficiently equitable distribution of options for social contact, space, economic transactions, services, and knowledge across local LGBT2S populations as to remove basic forms of precarity in terms of survival, desire, and expression. Built environments, meeting, entertainment, and service delivery sites, and a myriad of economic relationships are being conceived, constructed and dismantled with increasing rapidity. And what was needed or economically or politically viable one decade could be redundant the next. As one example, the shift from gay and lesbian bars to on-line hook-ups is one of many rapid changes that have taken place over the last century.

Each form of infrastructure involves a political economy (with relationships to decolonial processes), local and global ecological relationships, and specific kinds of informal and formal design. To illustrate the range of infrastructures, the following are but a few examples:

demonstrations and marches

homes;

residential gardens;

public parks;

retail sites;

bars and clubs;

museums and archives;

art galleries, sculpture parks, and performance spaces;

sports facilities;

bath houses and sex clubs;

theatres and entertainment venues;

educational sites including parts of universities;

programmes for language supports and learning;

health delivery centres such as clinics and hospital;

protected areas and public sex areas;

social media; and

public art and indoor art works.

All of these strategic sites and transactions enable LGBT individuals to engage more fully in collective experiences and to enjoy and provide mutual care.  These days, all of these strategic sites and transactions involve environmental costs and benefits including carbon footprints, output of plastics and other toxic substances, and impacts on local and global biological diversity.

LGBT populations, interactions, transactions, and spaces constitute distinct parts of human ecology with wider relationships across the biosphere. These queer ecologies increasingly involve social policy, planning, and design along with community development initiatives. In exploring some imperatives (and opportunities) for imagining and constructing new queer infrastructure in the face of multiple emergencies, I also argue for the use of a wider range of design practices. Spanning formal and professional design processes and the fabulously amateurish, practices can be rooted in vernacular and DIY approaches  along with those grounded in new forms of community participation and ecological assessment.

Any human being who participates in queer transactions and sites, through expressions that are not normative in terms of gender or heterosexuality, enjoys local ecologies and in turn makes trophic and spatial decisions that are effectively forms of designs — albeit often intuitive, unprofessional, and short-term. Recognition of queer ecologies re-centres design processes on architectures of life support and human social service delivery. These queer designs are often nested within broader community plans and the market place as part of community development initiatives. It would be simplistic to envision these kinds of design as a new functionalism because LGBT2S expressing includes enjoyment of culture, pursuit of desires, and a wide range of consensual erotic expression uncoupled from reproduction.

In our first discussion in the University of California Berkeley College of Environmental Design  2021 (zoom) queer ecological imaginings seminars, there was a question of what happened to the early descriptions of queer architectures from the 1990s, notably the 1994 Queer Space exhibition in New York at Storefront Art and Architecture[xxxii], the subsequent monograph by Aaron Betsky[xxxiii] and the STUD[xxxiv] and and Queers in Space[xxxv] anthologies. Much of the template for this research and theorizing was set in 1992 with publication of Beatriz Colomina’s Sexuality and Space.[xxxvi] And the early theorizing on transgender “architectonics” by Lucas Crawford[xxxvii], though a generation later, was part of this movement of confirming a diversity of queer relationships to built space.

That initial moment of acknowledging queer architectures was quickly was appropriated by human geography and sociology, with scores of monographs and hundreds of peer reviewed papers, along with the late capitalist fusing of marketing and geomatics (what is often referred to as “GPS”) that a few years later contributed to the social dominance of social media from Facebook to Grindr to Twitter and TikTok as part of “surveillance capitalism.”[xxxviii] In other words, the blueprints for expanding constellations of queer ecologies, over the last two decades, have only sometimes been those of social activists, community planners and collaborative designers. Rather, today’s queer ecologies are as much the result of market algorithms often mediated through social media. The problem is about the shifting lines between public and private space. Any new theory of design as having a beneficial impact on queer ecologies requires understanding of these public/private lines for a range of environments and for a wide spectrum of stakeholders – far beyond just infrastructures defined by entrepreneurial actors out to monetize transactions within LGBT2S populations.

  

Infrastructure for LGBTQ2S populations as part of ecological life support (in a climate emergency)

“I can’t breathe.” Eric Garner, George Floyd &

               Black Lives Matter (2014 and on and on)

“‘Emergency’ is a noun that yanks us from the normality of daily life, but its invocation also promises to grab us by the hand and lead us to safety. The addition of ‘state of’ here is also important insofar as it butts up against ’emergency’; it stretches the word out, which denotes its protracted nature, its velocity and scale. The emergency isn’t one emergency but a pileup of emergencies. On the other hand, the state of emergency can be understood as a singular emergency; it is the emergency of Canadian history.”

   `                                                           Billy-Ray Belcourt 2020[xxxix]

After COVID and intensified gentrification and homelessness, the ‘name of the game’ for the majority of LGBTQ2S populations will be survival, housing, economic and professional development, and migration away from environmental emergencies. But there will be fewer and fewer places to go. In exploring new ways of conceiving and parsing out expanding and diversifying LGBT2S infrastructures, inherently communal, ecological and global processes can be viewed in the context of chronic “precarity” [xl] with ecosystems and communities experiencing various kind of “emergencies.”[xli]Given the communities from which I originated, in which I grew up, and currently with which I engage and depend, some of the following examples are from indigenous communities and territories.

Care is a lot of activities and is at the core of communities and culture. Care is often in response to emergencies, such as fire fighting, and today the Anthropocene as manifest in multiple climate crises is a series of indefinite emergencies. Queer infrastructure constitutes a series of strategies to make communities more functional in order to optimize and diversify opportunities for expression of all gender experiences and consensual eroticism, on one hand, and to prepare for, cope with, and in some cases preclude, a steady stream of emergencies that will make the twenty-first century.

Care is intertwined with social and ecological processes that insure both survival and pleasure. For example “care” for rural communities in the northern half of North America, where the majority of young people are often indigenous, requires a nest of spaces and interactions to avert the largest threat to queer youth that is too often suicide[xlii]. And suicide, in the context of knowledge-keeping for communal survival, becomes a particularly horrific social and ecological contagion[xliii].

In a series of global emergencies, no one, the designer, the recipients (and victims) of designs, the scientist, the critic, the theoretician is immune from both ecological breakdown and, in the face of the enormity of problems, the breakdown of their spheres of responsibility. Perhaps the most fundamental difference between global culture since modernism and contemporary indigenous perspective is the relationship to deep time. Deep time is a set of experiences and a concept that often sustains communities. Deep time decentres architecture in design resituating buildings within communities, landscapes and ecosystems over a broader time-frame well beyond mythic and modern times.

To conceive of queer infrastructure, more comprehensive notions of place, community and region is necessary. Queer ecologies represent an early twenty-first century confluence of the progressive bankruptcy of homophobia and heteronormativity, a modernization of the sciences of biology and ecology, and the proliferation of ecological design practices often in response to both threats to life support and a range of violence from the overtly racist and homophobic to state neglect. In these dynamic new ecosystems, there is an ambiguity inherent in ‘queer’, as a relatively stable noun related to LGBT2S populations on one hand, and as a verb implying potentially indefinite transformation of notions of gender, erotic expression, and social bonds. So we have queer ecologies, which reliably support populations with same-sex intimacies, on one hand, and, on the other hand, the queering of ecosystems recombining acts, cultures, populations, and institutions under crises such as climate chaos and loss of biodiversity. In this context, there are intersections of some other related theoretical movements:

  1. New Materialism[xliv], as a way to recognize a range of human and non-human intelligences and objects, has further destabilized the lines between humans and ecosystems and the primacy of hominid intelligence over other sentient beings[xlv];

  1. fuller understandings of climate change and the social implications of the Anthropocene[xlvi] especially for the survival of queer communities in the face of the exacerbation of social and regional disparities through unequal distribution of environmental risks and economic costs;

  1. documentation of the fuller extent of indigenous legacies in ecosystems and landscapes as well as First Nations more fully asserting sovereignty over aspects of life support[xlvii]; and

  1. with the discrediting of  totalizing Western narratives of “Nature” new theorizing on weird, “Novel ecosystems,” [xlviii] and designed ecosystems.

 

Queer life support as decolonial & reparative processes

“Akiwenzii finds the book hilarious and offensive and they read it aloud and substitute the ‘Indians’ for trees: The Hidden Life of Indians: What They Feel, How They Communicate — Discoveries from a Secret World. They both laugh, although it hits a little too close to home.”

                                           Leanne Betasamosake Simpson 2020[xlix]

Decolonial and reparative initiatives (and liberation movements) have been working, and often successful, for over a century. But repair has often been slow for both the most under-served and vulnerable of LGBTQ2S populations and for minority erotic communities more generally. How can planning for queer infrastructure be part of more squarely challenging chronic violence and inequities?

Over the last eight years, Black Lives Matter has profoundly transformed notions of social equity, decolonization, and social repair.  For example, the June 14, 2020 All Black Lives Matter march in Los Angeles[l] was a historic event, perhaps a rupture with past notions of public space for LGBT communities, that wedded the social movements for racial justice and queer activism in profoundly new ways.

Today, the role of decolonial and reparative processes are explored in re-inscribing both queer life support, that should also create space for particular aesthetics[li] and pleasures, as queered infrastructure. Design of queer infrastructure could decolonize by reflecting on the impact of how a more accurate recognition of ecosystems, perspectives lacking in homophobia and heteronormativity, could provide new opportunities for conceiving of social goals and environmental solutions and in turn inspire new goals for meeting places and services with subsequent public policy, community planning and design practices. So in arguing for queer infrastructure, carefully conceived, designed, and nested within repaired (and queer) political economies and ecosystems, a number of crises and resulting ruptures have emerged with the following opportunities for theorizing.

First, the recent revisions of biota and ecosystems initially described as biological exuberance, recognizing erotic expression as part of ecosystems not linked directly to reproduction, have created the basis for the still in-progress, queer ecologies paradigm.

Secondly, late recognition of the ecological roles of biological exuberance, essentially censored from more than a century of modern science, calls into question more general biases modern scientific investigations rooted in the colonial era while highlight other systems of investigation such as some of those associated with indigenous knowledge keeping. So if nineteenth and twentieth century biology was in part a way to gain further sovereignty over ecosystems, biological exuberance effectively demolish that colonial project as extending to scientific paradigms.

Third, the turn towards queer affect draws us back to new blends of feeling and empiricism inspiring reconsideration and reconstruction of the lines between Homo sapiens and other species including making room for a wider range of cultural, including indigenous, perspectives[lii] on human and other organisms.

Finally and perhaps most importantly, recently constructed notions of consent are as important in understanding queer ecologies as re-inscribing LGBT2S identities (and acts) within ecosystems. Modern notions of sexual expression, including queer aspirations and challenges to homophobia, are largely based on relatively new, and transformative, forms of consent. And fuller consent undermines any remaining social currency of heteronormativity, homonationalism[liii], racial and cultural superiority, and the supremacy of Western Civilization.  As much as challenging heteronormative biases, queer ecologies re-inscribe a wider range of sexualities and gender identities within ecosystems and human communities.

Fifth in this progression of logic from biological exuberance to queer ecologies to queer infrastructure, all manner of erotic expression, and pleasure more generally, is going to be necessary for individuals and communities to cope with and to get through indefinite ecological emergencies. Belcourt’s concept of “ecological harms”[liv] inscribes toxicity and inadequate life support within the spectrum of social inequities from environmental racism to higher risks and mortality due to climate change and subsequent emergencies of the “Anthropocene, the Capitalocene, the Plantationocene, and / or the Chthulucene.”[lv] So without sufficient inspiration, erotic expression, and pleasure activism,[lvi]  and more general sexual health, it could well be even more difficult to face daunting and potentially lethal challenges.

Deriving from the Anthropocene, and its many other names, are the problems from the divergent cultural experiences of (“The”) “Apocalypse.”[lvii]  In the face of apocalyptic threats, queer infrastructure could function to support erotic communities and cultures of survival. Again, the decolonization required to understand queer ecologies recognizes uneven and divergent experiences of and vulnerabilities to ecological crises and collapses. For example, there are huge cultural divides between certain Christian conceptions of the Rapture and Apocalypse and the oral studies of indigenous communities surviving five hundred years of genocide. Even as participants in relatively successful indigenous resurgence movements[lviii], our lives as survivors are under the shadow of a kind of “melancholia”[lix] derived from realizations of the full extent of losses — even without the pain and perishing of the Anthropocene. As we move into the difficult times, not entirely different from the recent past of homophobic state violence, these divergent experiences of stress, threat and survival will have new importance in the formation of erotic cultures and queer ecologies.

The methodologies that can provide the basis for applying deeper understandings of queer ecologies for imagining and designing badly needed infrastructure are specifically decolonial and are rooted in anticolonial struggles. Queer ecologies provide bases for reconsidering sites, populations, and communities as assemblages of living things bent on survival — with infrastructure part of efforts toward minimal levels of life support – including for gender diversity and sexual health. In other words, the homophobic blind-spot that lead to avoidance of recognition of biological exuberance was part of a broader colonial notions of science for domination, the irrelevance of indigenous land management, and the marginality of ecosystem conservation. And this colonial nexus was at the formation of modern states and markets. The recent implosion of that old paradigm, that ignored more than just biological exuberance, warrants a broader interrogation of the residues of colonialism, global markets, states and apparatuses, and cultural chauvinism.

These twenty-first century queer ecologies critiques, of both older LGB+(T?) enclaves and forms of environmental conservation, are pointing towards a more diverse set of scientific investigations, renewed forms of site and landscape empiricism, that are in turn needed as part of design exercises. These kind of postcolonial queer ecological studies destabilize the lines between taxa and ecosystems and ‘unnatural’ and ‘natural’ (often conflated with indigenous cultural sites and stewarded landscapes) as well as those boundaries between individuals and communities and between professionals such as designers, ecologists, theoreticians, artists, and farmers.

The landscapes in which we live, that we hope to reconstruct with better queer ecologies, have been contested for a long time. So colonization and decolonization have always had spatial dimensions. Colonization has always faced resistance, if only because of the absurdity of particular projects with only a few generating profit. And eventually colonial projects fail or morph while facing local resurgence. The development of expanded, more effective and defensible queer infrastructure is one dimension of that resurgence.

Most of us have acute experiences of social injustice especially if we are female, people of colour, LGBT2S, and / or disabled with contemporary inequities often still maintained through some violence. And these differences in access to resources and life support are colonial projects initiated by over-privileged thugs for their own benefit. So social policy and design for queer infrastructure centres through redistributing resources through countering contemporary inequities rooted in centuries-long, colonial projects:

  1. white supremacy[lx], racism, and eugenics;

  2. cultural chauvinism (including aesthetic systems) and cultural erasure;

  3. homophobia and transphobia as part of colonial systems;

  4. establishment of colonial languages and erasure of local languages;

  5. settlement, displacement, gentrification, and loss of livelihood and shelter;

  6. slavery, racialized incarceration, and institutionalization;

  7. plantations and ecosystem conversation;

  8. denial of access to food and agricultural production;

  9. denial of the freedom of meeting and socializing (and have sex);

  10. eradication of species (in favour of a small number of species of economic importance);

  11. uneven granting of citizenship;

  12. coerced labour and unjust contracts; and

  13. denial of public benefits spanning medical services, education, and culture.

If we ground local queer infrastructure through insuring the life support denied above, in a time of ecological crisis, then we may be able to hang on, and expand access to, the good things already enjoyed by more privileged members of LGBT2S populations.

 

Re-imagining for planners:

Contemporary culture, including queer science fiction, as markers

    “Suddenly my radio stopped its music and the newscaster came.     on to announce, with great excitement, the successful Russian launch of Sputnik, the first satellite to circle the earth. He finished with an account of Little Rock, Arkansas, that day, where local students and their parents had demonstrated angrily against the Supreme Court’s ruling that the schools should no longer be racially segregated ‘…standing outside the school shouting insults and even hurling stones and beer cans at the Negro students.”

                                                                        Samuel R. Delany 1988[lxi]

 

            “This city [Seattle] that is and isn’t a city, but I guess that’s what every city is becoming now, a destination to imagine what imagination might be like, except for the lack.”    Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore 2020[lxii]

 

Delany’s The Motion of Light in Water chronicles his tender transitions from growing up in Harlem as a bastion of the African American church and middle-class[lxiii] to his adult “queer”[lxiv] identity exploring a wide range of erotic expression and space, often in the Lower East Side, with science-fiction writing[lxv] as much a balm as a source of income. Delany’s optimism was in the face of risks of violence as a black adolescent and racialized barriers to actually remaking technology. Along with an alliance with a white woman, he made a living writing about imaginary worlds of scientific and sexual possibilities (and working in a bookstore). Of a distant time only a half a century later, Sycamore’s reflections on queer Seattle, an American city especially transformed by the promises of technology, often hover around acknowledgement of social voids and the need to imagine a host of so far unimagined communal possibilities.

So how can fiction, including science-fiction, inspire planning and planners? Delany reflected that,

            “[A]t that time, the words ‘black’ and ‘gay’ – for openers – didn’t  exist with their current meanings, usage, history [in the late 1980s’]. 1961 had still been, really, part of the fifties…There were only Negroes and homosexuals, both of whom —  along with artists – were hugely devalued in the social hierarchy.”[lxvi]

In the kinds of pressurized contexts where expanded queer infrastructure is desperately needed, fantasy and other forms of cultural express can function to make conceptual and experiential ‘space’ to find, defend, transform physical space, fiscal resources, and organizational frameworks.

part 2. 

What knowledge is needed to make new queer designs?

 

Data sets for identifying emerging needs & desires for new queer infrastructure

How can planners and designers for queer(er) infrastructure better listen to vulnerable demographics and a fuller set of stakeholders while more creatively combining a wider range of data and cultural expressions? Modern community and environmental planning is largely driven by politics and selective uses of information. So big questions emerge.

  1. what data? quantitative? qualitative?

  2. whose data? who controls the data? (data sovereignty)

  3. whose narratives and stories?

  4. whose maps?

  5. who benefits from the data?

  6. whose research methodologies and standards?

  7. whose analytical frameworks and why those?

And a central task is sifting through and combining a range of modes of representation and data sets organized through metaphors and narratives.

Ascertaining, analyzing, combining, and safeguarding new data on LGBTQ2S populations is a huge and expanding field.[lxvii] Queer community mapping, and community resource and counter-mapping[lxviii] more generally, are proliferating. But in sharing such rich information, there are huge potentials for misuse of data. In response to threats to privacy, there is an entire movement of creating data opacity for queer community projects.[lxix] There is a broader movement for data justice.[lxx]

Today, we are seeing a proliferation of cartographic data and uses such as,

a neighbourhood map on harassment of women in public spaces in Cairo[lxxi], a black trans archive cultivating empathy and support depending on the viewer’s self-identification, and a kind of cross-solidarity site for young queer women with African and Asian heritages. Without careful protocols and engineering, intimate information about LGBTQ2S populations can be misused – and misrepresented indefinitely.  On a relatively minor note, the Queering the Map web-site was hacked, in 2018, to generate pro-Trump propaganda.[lxxii]

Design for the Pluriverse: Space, Ecology, Difference

DISCUSSION / EXERCISE ON RESEARCH METHODS FOR NEW QUEER DESIGN

method: circular brainstorming (going around the zoom)

EXAMPLE 1: THE INFORMATION NECESSARY FOR

PLANNING AND DESIGNING A COMBINED LGBTQ CENTRE & ELDER RESIDENCE IN THE VICINITY OF A HISTORIC AFRICAN CANADIAN / AMERICAN GRAVEYARD

  1. community needs by social group (‘design programming’)

  2. design features necessary for those social groups

  3. environmental assessment / designs: making location choices and site plans + community context and relations with neighbours

  4. design criteria for the architecture (including security, privacy, economy)

  5. community consultations around initial designs (which communities? how to consult?)

  6. construction / post-occupancy evaluation / redesign cycle

EXAMPLE 2: THE INFORMATION NECESSARY FOR A CAMPUS COMBINING

A REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH CENTRE, QUEER-FRIENDLY BATHHOUSE, AND A PARK WITH PLAYGROUND, ATHLETICS & (some) ADULT INTIMACY

  1. community needs by social group (‘design programming’)

  2. design features necessary for those social groups

  3. environmental assessment / designs: making location choices and site plans + community context and relations with neighbours

  4. design criteria for the architecture (including security, privacy, economy)

  5. community consultations around initial designs (which communities? how to consult?)

  6. construction / post-occupancy evaluation / redesign cycle

 

Imagining queer infrastructure as

“Regenerative Interactive Zones of Nurturing”

 

“Gidigaa Bizhiw drew maps on the sides of buildings with stencil and green spray paint. It wasn’t a perfect system, but it was a coordinated system of secret care, hidden under the guise of homeless, pest, defeated and indifferent.”                               Leanne Betasamosake Simpson 2020[lxxiii]

 

Data does not heal (though culture can be a balm). Communal imagining of possibilities can inspire. And queer infrastructure can provide the basis for stable, remotely happy life support. In this way, queer infrastructure is integral to the spaces, transactions, services, and erotic and cultural expression of entire societies – in order to be complete and fully functional. If we accept that heteronormativity functions as a broader policing force over erotic expression, queer infrastructure opens eroticized space for all. And it is for this more societal or socializing reason that queer infrastructure is so difficult to envision and is too often ignored or trivialized.

Why do we need expanded, better built, and more equitable queer infrastructure? Certainly we need queer infrastructure so that young adults get correct information and not kill themselves because of their desires. Certainly we need queer infrastructure to build, maintain, and fully enjoy our social networks (including a lot of partying after we’ve all been vaccinated for COVID19). Certainly we need queer infrastructure to lower the risk of violence and certainly we need queer infrastructure for information and treatments for our sexual health. But the ‘our’ here is broader than LGBT2S populations.

 

Central to more fully understanding local queer ecologies and pressures and opportunities for new infrastructure is a kind of expanded stakeholder analysis and client identification across demographics and at a range spatial and temporal scales. And decolonial infrastructure requires some engagement with regional history extending to local experiences of deep time. So in the imagining and reconceiving of expanding and diversifying queer infrastructure especially as a prelude to planning and design exercises, contemporary ecologies warrant far more study that simply site analysis. Similarly, more supple demographic studies, leading to needs assessments for the most vulnerable, can better recognize trends. And the most important means for such imaginings is to nurture expansive forms of cultural expression especially within the most vulnerable LGBT2S demographics.[lxxiv]

 

Conclusions:

Planning consultation as communal reimagining

 

            “I’m stuck between losing the hope for connection in the places and

            spaces I used to believe in, and wondering how to find that connection in

            spaces I will never believe in.” Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore 2020[lxxv]

What if we don’t bother envisioning and building new and better forms of queer infrastructure? Queer infrastructure will be envisioned and built by less representative actors – as it often is today.  What we have today to sustain LGBTQ2S communities is the product of the priorities of a few privileged gay and fewer lesbian entrepreneurs, a tiny group of designers, the social media behemoths, economic and community planners, and increasingly AI.  To transparently plan and design LGBT2S infrastructure is to insure that vulnerable populations and individuals defined and provide their own services.  This can be the central principle in exercises of collective imagining.

Planning consultations for LGBTQ2S population to conceive and create queer infrastructure involves a kind of intersectionality on steroids. The theorizing gets turgid. Communal imagining exercises, as planning workshops, are increasingly necessary and involve more creative and community-based events and ongoing relationships. These exchanges will be well-documented, on-line, but post-COVID, there are increasing pressures for more physical contact. Communal consultation frameworks can appear (and sometimes function) as games. This seems to be kernel of the design for H.O.R.I.Z.O.N. (Habitat One: Regenerative Interactive Zone of Nurture) by the Institute of Queer Ecology.[lxxvi]

[i] Thanks for the invitation from Dr. Giuseppina Forte, Assistant Professor of Architecture and Environmental Studies, for the opportunity to discuss these currents of the fields of queer, intersectional, environmental and urban planning scholarship.

[ii] “This is why people are hooking up in the bathroom, this is why people are being honest, at least some of the people, but I like it even if it’s the messiness that makes people more open — I don’t need it but maybe they do.” Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore. 2020. The Freezer Door. pages 20 – 21.

[iii] I use the suffix ‘2S’ as an abbreviation for “two-spirit” as referring to traditional and

often culturally specific and land-based, indigenous identities of gender and sexuality that do not confirm to either colonial heteronormativity (views still persisting in many areas) and cisgender homoeroticism. Also see Michelle Filice. 2015 (updated 2020). Two-spirit. in The Canadian Encyclopedia. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/two-spirit

[iv] “Queer space” is a term that has been used for three decades and has come to mean very different things. More recently, there have been explorations of how this social and political space is not always so inclusive of LGBTQ2S experiences with one example, the following statement.

“Without feminism there would be no queer, but without queer there would be no feminism, at least not for queers like me. And yet why  do I now feel disembodied in oppositional queer spaces? It’s something about the bodies that aren’t welcome, including mine.” Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore. 2020. The Freezer Door. page 51.

[v] Brochu-Ingram, Gordon Brent. 2015. Building Queer Infrastructure: Trajectories of Activism and Organizational Development in Decolonizing Vancouver. in Queer Mobilizations: Pan-Canadian Perspectives on Activism and Public Policy. Manon Tremblay editor. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. 227 – 249.

[vi] “…NDN boys who love at the speed of utopia.” (Belcourt 2020. A History of My Brief Body. page 4)

[vii] “I am counting the ways in which the flesh of NDN is emptied of ethical substance – towards another mode of enumeration.” (Billy-Ray Belcourt 2019 from CANADIAN HORROR STORY in NDN Coping Mechanisms. page 34.)

[viii] In his 2017 chapbook, Full-Metal Indigiqueer, Joshua Whitehead coined the word, “indigiqueer” and perhaps best described the self-identification with the follow passage,

“twenty-first century

inauthentic ndn

first nation prototype

digitize the drum

techno(electro)pow(wow)

summoning community

‘…our home & native land…’

(Joshua Whitehead. 2017. THEGARBAGEEATER. in Full-Metal Indigiqueer. Vancouver: Talonbooks. pp. 33 – 36. See page 34.) Whitehead later elaborated. “I go by both two-spirit and Indigiqueer. One to pay homage to where I come from, from Winnipeg, being kind of the birthplace of two-spirit in 1990. But I also think of Indigiqueer as the forward moving momentum for two-spiritness,” he said.

(CBC. 2017. Unreserved:  Poet Joshua Whitehead redefines two-spirit identity in Full-Metal Indigiqueer. CBC Radio online Dec 15, 2017. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/unreserved/from-dystopian-futures-to-secret-pasts-check-out-these-indigenous-storytellers-over-the-holidays-1.4443312/poet-joshua-whitehead-redefines-two-spirit-identity-in-full-metal-indigiqueer-1.4447321# )

And even more recently, Whitehead stated that, “I craft a theory of indigiqueerness by rejecting queer and LGBT as signposts of my identity, instead relying on the sovereignty of traditional language, such as Two-Spirit, and terminology we craft for ourselves, Indigiqueer.” (Introduction. 2020. Love After The End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fictions. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press. 9 – 15. See pages 9 and 10.)

More recently, Billy-Ray Belcourt stated that, “I argued that indigeneity is an erotic concept. Against the sexual pulse of coloniality, its perverse sensuality and that it elaborates in NDN social worlds, we have the safe haven of us, this flesh, however caught up in the sign systems of race we are.” (Belcourt. 2020. A History of My Brief Body. page 60). And Belcourt went on to re-appropriate the derogatory label, “NDN homo” (Belcourt. 2020. A History of My Brief Body. page 104 – 106).

[ix] Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. 2020. Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies. Toronto: Anansi.

[x] José Esteban Muñoz. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity.

New York: NYU Press. page 52.

[xi] With several editions of Samuel R. Delany’s 1988 memoirs, The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village 1960-1965, I am working with a revised 1990 edition published by Paladin Press of London. Delany made numerous corrections to that edition of The Motion of Light in Water and then gave the corrected copy of the book to me as a gift in 1993 in Manhattan while I was over for a visit.

[xii] Samuel R. Delany. 1988. The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village 1960-1965. London: Paladin. pages 571 – 578.

[xiii] Joshua Chambers-Letson. 2018. After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life. New York: NYU Press.

[xiv] Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. 2020. Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies. Toronto: Anansi. page 348.

[xv] Samuel R. Delany. 1999. Times Square Red Times Square Blue. New York: NYU Press. page 111.

[xvi] José Esteban Muñoz. 2009. Cruising Utopia. page 11.

[xvii] José Esteban Muñoz. 2009. Cruising Utopia. page 64.

[xviii] José Esteban Muñoz 2009 Cruising Utopia. page 189.

[xix] “I’m an emotional person, so I read theory day in and day out.’ (Belcourt. 2020. A History of My Brief Body. page 104).

[xx] “Sometimes I wonder if gated community is a redundant term. Creating boundaries around everyone who belongs so that everyone who doesn’t belong, never will.” Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore. 2020. The Freezer Door. page 236.

[xxi] briohny walker. 2019. precarious time: queer anthropocene futures. See pages 149 to 151.

[xxii]  “To care in a more feminist sense is to think outside of a singular life, and to this is to participate in a process of self-making that exceeds the individual. With care, one grows a collective a collective skin…Care detonates that which precedes it; it pulls us outside our bodies and into that which one can’t know in advance” (Belcourt. 2020. A History of My Brief Body. page 117). I also ground a notion of queer “care” in relationship to local political economies and states dominated by capitalism, on one hand, and activist initiatives, almost in spite of economic conditions, on the other hand. Indigenous scholars often describe a two-sided notion of the “care:” traditional family systems and governments versus dubious services by by historically racist and homophobic states as in Belcourt’s query. “How do a people who have been subject to some of the country’s most programmatic and legal forms of oppression continue to gather on the side of life? Under what furtive conditions do they enact care against the embargo on care that is Canada?” (Belcourt. 2020. A History of My Brief Body. page 9). A related conception of “care” is outlined by iLiana Fokianaki. She traces modern notions of care back to Rome and then to Greece and the goddess Cura. “This typical fable from antiquity carves out the dual character of care. Cura forms and “owns” humans but also carries their burden. In Latin, cura had a double meaning. On the one hand it signified worries and anxiety due to the stress of having to care for things and people and being burdened by responsibilities. On the other hand it signified what is commonly known as care today: the satisfaction of caring for others, the word having a positive connotation of devotion to caring for someone or something.” iLiana Fokianaki.  2020. The Bureau of Care: Introductory Notes on the Care-less and Care-full. e-flux Journal #113 – November 2020.

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/113/359463/the-bureau-of-care-introductory-notes-on-the-care-less-and-care-full/)

[xxiii] Not conflating care with altruism, Belcourt notes, “[A]lways, with care, we perform high-stakes processes of world-making — in the hope that, in our dying days, we might feel freer.” (Belcourt. 2020. A History of My Brief Body. p. 124)

[xxiv] “I’m reminded that freedom is itself a poetics, in that it seeks to reschematize time, space, and feeling in the direction of a future driven by an ethics of care, a relational practice of joy-making that is all of ours to enact.” (Belcourt. 2020. A History of My Brief Body. page 161)

[xxv] I use the term ‘Daddy’ here, sardonically as something of a playful parody of the complex roles of Daddies in the work of Tom of Finland.

[xxvi] “[N]o one runs to theory unless there is a dirt road in him…To be unoriginal might have humiliated NDN writer a few years ago, but it doesn’t matter because today he’s in a boat with a bunch of Foucaults minutes away from an island where the only universal is that there are no bodies to bury and thus no longer a need to make shovels out of our heavy hands.” (Belcourt. 2020. A History of My Brief Body. pages 54 – 55.)

[xxvii]  “To care in a more feminist sense is to think outside of a singular life, and to this is to participate in a process of self-making that exceeds the individual. With care, one grows a collective a collective skin…Care detonates that which precedes it; it pulls us outside our bodies and into that which one can’t know in advance” (Belcourt. 2020. A History of My Brief Body. page 117). I also ground a notion of queer “care” in relationship to local political economies and states dominated by capitalism, on one hand, and activist initiatives, almost in spite of economic conditions, on the other hand. Indigenous scholars often describe a two-sided notion of the “care:” traditional family systems and governments versus dubious services by by historically racist and homophobic states as in Belcourt’s query. “How do a people who have been subject to some of the country’s most programmatic and legal forms of oppression continue to gather on the side of life? Under what furtive conditions do they enact care against the embargo on care that is Canada?” (Belcourt. 2020. A History of My Brief Body. page 9).

[xxviii] “I write today on the side of joy, to expand its geographical confines against the tentacular ways the state and its gruesome history extinguish possibility in the lives of NDNs.” (Belcourt 2020. A History of My Brief Body. page 134)

[xxix] “Neocolonial” remains a problematic term particularly since many states and demographics currently maintain disparities rooted in the overtly colonial periods. For Canada, the neocolonial period might be conveniently bracketed by Confederation, in 1867, and the beginnings of implementation of the country’s first constitution in 1982. For the United States, the 1965 Voting Rights Act was an important milestone in moving out of its neocolonial period.

[xxx] Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore. 2020. The Freezer Door. page 21.

[xxxi] Belcourt. 2020. A History of My Brief Body. page 127

[xxxii] Shirin Neshat with Beatriz Colomina, Dennis Dollens, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Cindi Patton, Henry Urbach and Mark Wigley (curators).June – July 1994. Queer Space exhibition. The Storefront Center for Art and Architecture, New York. (see Manifestos: Queer Space. 254 pages and Queer Space, Queer Space broadside, 4 large newsprint pages, on file Storefront Art and Architecture New York (http://storefrontnews.org/programming/queer-space/) as well as Herbert Muschamp, Architecture View, Designing a framework for diversity, The New York Times, Sunday, June 19, 1994, Sunday Arts Section page 32.

[xxxiii] Aaron Betsky. 1997. Queer Space: Architecture and Same-sex Desire. New York: William Morrow & Co.

[xxxiv] Joel Sanders (editor). 1996. STUD: Architectures of Masculinity. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

[xxxv] Gordon Brent Ingram, Anne-Marie Bouthillette and Yolanda Retter (editors). 1997. Queers in Space: Communities | Public Places | Sites of Resistance. Seattle: Bay Press.

[xxxvi] Beatriz Colomina. 1992. Sexuality and Space. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

[xxxvii] Lucas Crawford. 2015. Transgender Architectonics: The Shape of Change in Modernist Space. New York: Routledge.

[xxxviii] Shoshana Zuboff. 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: PublicAffairs.

[xxxix] Billy-Ray Belcourt. 2020. A History of My Brief Body. page 135.

[xl] Belcourt describes at least two types of “precarity.” “Sometimes I’m told I’m beautiful or sexy, and for a long time this compels me to kiss the bloody lips of precarity day in and day out. This is the precarity of treating the body as though it were a catch-22. What is chronic loneliness if not the desire to exist less and less, to deplete little by little?” (Belcourt. 2020. A History of My Brief Body. pages 75 – 76). In contrast, “What I know is that it’s unfair that NDNs are called on to make do in a world we neither wanted nor built ourselves. I have called this bind precarity. It’s also the ground zero for suicidal ideation.”

(Belcourt. 2020. A History of My Brief Body. page 134).

[xli] “‘Emergency’ is a noun that yanks us from the normality of daily life, but its invocation also promises to grab us by the hand and lead us to safety. The addition of ‘state of’ here is also important insofar as it butts up against ’emergency’; it stretches the word out, which denotes its protracted nature, its velocity and scale. The emergency isn’t one emergency but a pileup of emergencies. On the other hand, the state of emergency can be understood as a singular emergency; it is the emergency of Canadian history.” (Billy-Ray Belcourt. 2020. A History of My Brief Body. Toronto: Hamish Hamilton Penguin. page 135).

[xlii] Belcourt. 2020. A History of My Brief Body. page 138 – 140.

[xliii] Belcourt. 2020. A History of My Brief Body. page 134.

[xliv] The following are four of the most influential titles for New Materialism: Giorgio Agamben. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. (Daniel Heller-Roazen translator). Stanford, California: Stanford University Press; Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman editors. 2008. Material Feminisms. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press; Diana Coole and Samantha Frost editors. 2010. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics.  Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2010; and Jane Bennett. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press.

[xlv] Some of these new ecological perspectives inform Mel Chen’s 2012 Animacies (Mel Y. Chen. 2012.  Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press).

[xlvi] briohny walker. 2019. precarious time: queer anthropocene futures. parrhesia 30: 137-155.  http://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia30/parrhesia30_walker.pdf . See pages 140 to 143.

[xlvii] This work on climate change and the Anthropocene is too vast to be reviewed in this discussed aside cultural references by Belcourt and Simpson.

[xlviii] “Novel ecosystems originate in ecosystems that are transformed beyond which the practical efforts of conventional restoration are feasible.” Eric Higgs. 2016. Novel and designed ecosystems. Restoration Ecology 25(1) http://www.erichiggs.ca/uploads/4/5/2/9/45292581/higgs2016.pdf. So in these situations, which now include the majority of the areas on the planet, simple repair, or reparation, will not be enough.

[xlix] Simpson. 2020. Noopiming. page 93.

[l] Branson-Potts, Hailey and Matt Stiles. 2020. All Black Lives Matter march calls for LGBTQ rights and racial justice. Los Angeles Times (June 15, 2020). https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-06-15/lgbtq-pride-black-lives-controversy/

[li] Current work on queer aesthetics has been anemic as of late with the most interesting the recent essay by Lucas Crawford on “transgender aesthetics” (Lucas Crawford. 2020. The Crumple and the Scrape: Two Archi-Textures in the Mode of Queer Gender. Places (MARCH 2020). https://placesjournal.org/article/the-crumple-and-the-scrape/)

[lii] As has been previously discussed in the queer ecological imaginings workshop seminars, there have been various pernicious overgeneralizations about indigenous cultures and relationships to cohabiting biota and respective ecosystems. Largely derived from western chauvinism in the twentieth century, these acknowledgements have at least flagged different cultural boundaries between humans and other life-forms.

[liii] Jasbir K. Puar. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. page 78.

[liv] Describing a Cree village in northern Ontario, Belcourt describes, “The manufactured sorrows include inadequate and improperly constructed housing, overcrowding, state mismanagement of funds, ecological harms, intergenerational trauma, and so on.” (Belcourt. 2020. A History of My Brief Body. pages 133 – 34).

[lv] Donna Haraway. 2015. Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin. Environmental Humanities 6(1):159-165

[lvi] adrienne maree brown (Editor). 2019. Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good. Chico, California: AK Press.

[lvii] “`…what’s that word again?’

‘Apocalypse’

‘Yes, apocalypse. We’ve had that over and over. But we always survived.'”

(Waubgeshig Rice. 2018. Moon of the Crusted Snow. Toronto: ECW Press pages 149 – 150).

[lviii] One example of the resurgence necessary for community-based ecological reparation, see Elizabeth Hoover 2017. The River Is in Us: Fighting Toxics in a Mohawk Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

[lix] Belcourt. 2020. A History of My Brief Body. page 106.

[lx] “I couldn’t fuck my way out of white supremacy. (One can accomplish the opposite, unfortunately.)” (Belcourt. 2020. A History of My Brief Body. page 103)

[lxi] Samuel R. Delany. 1988. The Motion of Light in Water.  page 63.

[lxii] Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore. 2020. The Freezer Door. page 29.

[lxiii] Of a number of aspirational experiences described in The Motion of Light in Water one perhaps decolonized Delany’s notions of exploration. As a boy, his parents took him to meet African-American veteran Matthew Henson the first human being ever recorded as reaching the North Pole and whose triumph was obscured under the Robert Perry Expedition. (The Motion of Light in Water, pages 340 – 341).

[lxiv] Samuel R. Delany. 1988. The Motion of Light in Water. page 93.

[lxv] One Delany recollection connects finding space for both his sexuality and marriage with writing, in that case for 1966 novel, Babel-17 (Samuel R. Delany. 1988. The Motion of Light in Water. pages 404 – 441).

[lxvi] Samuel R. Delany. 1988. The Motion of Light in Water. page 369.

[lxvii] Bonnie Ruberg and Spencer Ruelos. 2020. Data for queer lives: How LGBTQ gender and sexuality identities challenge norms of demographics. Big Data & Society (January – June 2020):  1 – 12.

[lxviii]New Media Lab. n.d. Counter-mapping return.  https://www.are.na/block/10953985

[lxix] Valerie Amend. 2018. The Internet Is Not a Possibility. An Interview with Zach Blas by Valerie Amend. Notes on Curating 40 (September 2018): 65 – 68

https://www.on-curating.org/issue-40-reader/the-internet-is-not-a-possibility-an-interview-with-zach-blas.html#.YFPbeUhKh0s

[lxx] Dorothy Kidd 2019 Extra-activism: counter-mapping and data justice. Information Communication and Society (June 2019) 22(7): 954-970. DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2019.1581243

[lxxi] https://harassmap.org/en/

[lxxii] Lucas LaRochelle. 2019. Queer community mapping. in Diagrams of Power: Visualizing, Mapping and Performing Resistance. Patricio Dávila ed. Eindhoven, Netherlands: Onomatopee.   pp. 254 – 261.

[lxxiii] Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. 2020. Noopiming. page 284

[lxxiv] For northern, North American indigiqueer populations, for example, we could parse out the unmet needs for social supports illustrated in the 2020 indigifuturism anthology edited by Joshua Whitehead, Love After The End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit & Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp).

[lxxv] Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore. 2020. The Freezer Door. page 77.

[lxxvi] https://www.guggenheim.org/at-large/horizon-habitat-one-regenerative-interactive-zone-of-nurture-by-the-institute-of-queer-ecology

 

 

Posted in essays, presentations, proposals, plans & designs | Comments Off on From queer ecologies to queerer infrastructure: Research methods for new designs

Reimagining Queer Infrastructure: Planning for ecologies of care (in a decolonizing world during multiple emergencies)

Brochu-Ingram. 2021. Reimagining Queer Infrastructure: Planning for ecologies of care (in a decolonizing world during multiple emergencies). Cornell University College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. CRP3852 / CRP5852 / ARCH6408 Queer Space / Queering Space.

powerpoint presentation: 2021 March 19 Brochu-Ingram * Reimagining Queer Infrastructure

 

synopsis

At a time when many businesses, services, and spaces crucial for LGBTQ populations are being transformed and are even closing, planning has a heightened role in community development. This discussion explores how the spaces, ecologies, and political economies of LGBT2S communities function together (though more often disjointedly) as crucial forms of social infrastructure. Through a range of opportunities and services from socializing, entertainment, and culture to protection, education and health care and to digital networks in corners of apps such as TikTok and GRINDR, queer networks take care of each other. Parsing this queerer infrastructure from broader social programs, cultural spaces, and neighbourhoods remains problematic. Queer infrastructure is always nested in larger contexts of community planning. So how can we as planners identify unmet needs and imagine new events, programmes, and spaces — especially in convulsing economies with renewed challenges to racial inequities and state violence? The notions of utopia explored by José Esteban Munoz are relevant as is the thread in its fifth chapter back to Samuel R. Delany’s 1988 memoir, The Motion of Light in the Water, linking science fiction writing and reimagining queer life. How can we explore new goals for community health while coping with and anticipating environmental change and new risks? A wide range of information is needed in planning exercises as well as new visions. Much of this data will involve new field research. As for new kinds of queer imagining, the cusp of contemporary queer culture and theorizing provides some starting points such as through three, 2020 works: A History of My Brief Body by Billy-Ray an indigenous tenant of GRINDR; Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies by ecologist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson whose queer ecologies include animals and ancestors; and The Freezer Door by community activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore.

0
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Jeff Chusid and Chris Hinman, of Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning, for kindly inviting and supporting this discussion! Also thanks to Montréal-based, queer community mapper Lucas LaRochelle for this month‘s inspiring, three-part zoom workshop on queer mapping, mutual aid, data opacity, and interactive websites.

1
Introduction:
Chaotic times for LGBTQ spaces & new needs for community planning

“Asin is watching for bird ethics. They are watching for how birds interact and communicate with each other. They are watching for how bird communities understand consent, care, self-determination, sovereignty. They are watching for queerness.” Leanne Betasamosake Simpson 2020

“Explain gentrification to me, says the ice cube.
Crushed ice, says the ice cube tray.
What about global warming, asks the ice cube. Even I’m
going to melt, says the ice cube tray. Let’s watch Olympic figure
skating.
Stop, you’re giving me nightmares, says the ice cube.”
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore 2020

How do we defend, anticipate, and plan for the “messiness” of the lives of LGBTQ2S populations in a time when century-old patterns of queer community formation, space, and services are convulsing and being transformed? This essay explores how planners can work to defend, expand, and diversify the communal supports on which LGBTQ2S populations depend.

Unless referring solely to the physical space occupied by LGBTQ2S bodies, this essay replaces the term “queer space” with “queer infrastructure.” I have two reasons for preferring “infrastructure” over “space.” First queer infrastructure can function as the label a non-judgemental, conceptual ‘big tent’ that includes a wide range of needs and desires experienced by particular LGBTQ2S individuals, populations, and networks. Secondly, “queer infrastructure” is inherently spatial at multiple scales. As many of us know, getting the site details correctly is a huge task within community planning.

Three arguments are central to this discussion. First, a number of political economic factors have converged to make more comprehensive planning queer infrastructure both an important social goal and an imperative. Secondly, the imperative for planners to intervene more aggressively and transparently for queer infrastructure is based on rapid changes taking place that are undermining a century of modernist formations of social relations, space, and political economies – particularly in North America. The following are the most destructive processes: intensifying gentrification, broadening housing insecurity, and homelessness; the social isolation necessary to cope with the COVID pandemic which could be a harbinger of other highly communicable diseases;
the resulting economic contraction of the service sector; and the over-dependence on digital surrogates for actual social spaces. My third argument is that to conceive, plan, design, and operationalize new queer infrastructure, a wider range of data sets, than are typically used in community planning, will be necessary extending to imaginaries in contemporary culture. Today’s planners, engaged in supporting queer infrastructure, could have more impact on the shape of LGBTQ2S communities and supports for the coming decades than at any time in history.

The central question in this discussion is how can we query contemporary culture to more fully identify needs, pressures, and opportunities for new queer infrastructure especially for the more vulnerable LGBTQ2S populations? In trying to imagine a fully decolonized queer infrastructure for my region in north-western North America, I am inspired by the experimental writings of two indigenous scholars influential in Canada: Billy-Ray Belcourt’s 2020 A History of My Brief Body whose “NDN” and “indigiqueer” experiences often centre on being a young and sexually active, queer scholar and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s 2020 Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies. In addition, The Freezer Door by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore explores queer community and alienation in Seattle. This work on LGBTQ2S infrastructure is inspired by the notions of queer futurity explored a decade ago by the late José Esteban Muñoz in his 2009, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, the fifth chapter of which explored “the massed bodies” of sexual dissidence was inspired Samuel R. Delany’s 1988 memoirs, The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village 1960-1965. Delany’s memoirs, reflecting on the balm of imagination for a black and queer adolescent were written under the shadow of the first, most horrific, wave of AIDS in New York. More recently, Joshua Chambers-Letson’s 2018. After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life outlines how contemporary culture can lead on politics (and development of new infrastructure).

In this discussion, I move from reimagining care as infrastructure as planning goals and
protecting, expanding and diversifying queer infrastructure to exploring infrastructure for LGBTQ2S populations as part of ecosystems and queer ecologies as dynamic processes for both desire and survival. Moving on to more questions of equity and intersectionality, I explore decolonial & reparative processes. We can then explore data sets for identifying emerging needs and desires for new queer infrastructure moving on to imagining new spaces and modes of interaction including contemporary culture and collective reimagining. Out of new imaginings, new goals and practices for community repair and planning begin to emerge. I conclude reviewing some characteristics of infrastructures of queer repair and imagination.

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Problem statement:
Reimagining care as infrastructure as planning goals

“Esiban important practice number four: Take very, very good care of each
other, always, no matter what happens.”
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson 2020

“[L]ife is at its most rewarding, productive, and pleasant when large numbers of
people understand, appreciate, and seek out interclass contact and communication
conducted in a mode of good will.”
Samuel R. Delany 1999
Times Square Red Times Square Blue
So how can we as planners identify unmet needs, gather enough wisdom and inspiration, and imagine with rightfully distrustful communities new events, programmes, and spaces — especially in convulsing economies with renewed challenges to racial inequities and state violence?

In his 2009 blueprint for queer futurity, Cruising Utopia, Muñoz, provides three principles for queer imaginings. First, there is “the essential need for an understanding of queerness as collectivity” and not as a assemblages of atomized consumers. Secondly, Muñoz worked with a modernization of Adorno’s notion of “utopia” as “the determined negation of that which merely is” giving us more space for negativity as part of a fuller imaginings of queer infrastructure. In other words, a bit of negativity can go a long way. A third principle is that a reading and analysis of a work of contemporary culture can be used “as a resource for the political imagination.” In discerning these utopian vistas, new “theory” for queer infrastructure often requires emotional processes highlighting the precarity of many populations that is exacerbated by today’s ecological emergencies.

But there are a lot of needs, expectations, and functions embodied in queer strategic sites and spaces, social interactions, and service programmes and queer infrastructure exists to facilitate the care necessary to maintain the following interactions and related self-sufficiency:

“community” ;
demographics (especially health);
networks;
conviviality;
needs;
mutual aid;
support systems;
events such as demonstrations, festivals, dance parties;
entertainment and cultural spaces;
erotic expression;
cultural expression;
repair;
businesses; and
political economies.

Today, queer life support is largely controlled through the market with a few programmes for the most vulnerable of LGBTQ2S population shunted off to poorly funded non-governmental organizations and charities. Imaginings and “imaginaries” of a more comprehensive, queer infrastructure re-centres LGBT2S participation in the communities, landscape and ecosystems through work towards mutual “care” nested in sustainable life support during an intensifying ecological emergency. And there are different kinds of “care” as with the example below.

I care for you (because we just spent a great night together).
I care for my aged parent.
We care for the compost in this community garden.
We care about climate change.
Let’s care for the earth.

Through articulating queer “ethics of care” as a basis for envisioning queer infrastructure, we can conceive of new initiatives to keep communities alive and entertained. Let’s return to Muñoz and cruising to utopia. Much is said in right-wing politics about the so-called “Nanny State” where underpaid female service workers provide most of the care. In contrast, I want to imagine a feminist ‘Daddy State’ with males doing a fair share of the care. In these imaginings, there is a dialectic of responding to vulnerabilities, as in provision of social services, versus creating more spaces for expressing desires and entertainment (for having fun and more). How this survival-and-pleasure tension is going to be played out, in coming decades under the worst challenges of particular ecological emergencies, remains unclear.

So if we accept the general consensus that we are living in ecosystems (often under duress) that support queer ecologies, so what? More specifically, it is time to explore what new investigations and analyses of ecosystems, life support, and infrastructure can mean for the work of theoreticians , designers and activists? I argue that the central goal of this work is to create better queer infrastructure centred on systems of mutual and collective “care.” But there are different forms of care some of which have been racist, misogynist, and homophobic too often imposed on vulnerable communities. So queer infrastructure is a break from political economies that drive forms of the malevolent “state” extending beyond the colonial, “neocolonial,” and modernist periods.

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Protecting, expanding & diversifying queer infrastructure

“What my body needs in order to be a body that’s not just a body of
needs.” Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore 2020

“I’ve evoked this formulation in the past to understand the metaphysical thrust of queerness; in a late-capitalist world in which individuality is a fetish, a mass object of desire, a political anthem, what remains queer about queerness is that it entices us to gamble with the ‘I’ in the name of love, sex, friendship, art, and so forth.” Billy-Ray Belcourt

One of the most difficult aspects of beginning to conceive of planning for queer infrastructure is encompassing the diversity of functions, combinations of functions, durations, dependencies, and scales present today and those that are necessary for the future. In other words, we have needs for and from other human beings that manifest through various forms of infrastructure some of which is more focused on blends of LGBTQ2S networks. We need some of this infrastructure or we will die (or possibly be killed).

So what are more comprehensive definitions of queer infrastructure? The core are organic mechanisms for sufficiently equitable distribution of options for social contact, space, economic transactions, services, and knowledge across local LGBT2S populations as to remove basic forms of precarity in terms of survival, desire, and expression. Built environments, meeting, entertainment, and service delivery sites, and a myriad of economic relationships are being conceived, constructed and dismantled with increasing rapidity. And what was needed or economically or politically viable one decade could be redundant the next. As one example, the shift from gay and lesbian bars to on-line hook-ups is one of many rapid changes that have taken place over the last century.

Each form of infrastructure involves a political economy (with relationships to decolonial processes), local and global ecological relationships, and specific kinds of informal and formal design. To illustrate the range of infrastructures, the following are but a few examples:

demonstrations and marches
homes;
residential gardens;
public parks;
retail sites;
bars and clubs;
museums and archives;
art galleries, sculpture parks, and performance spaces;
sports facilities;
bath houses and sex clubs;
theatres and entertainment venues;
educational sites including parts of universities;
programmes for language supports and learning;
health delivery centres such as clinics and hospital;
protected areas and public sex areas;
social media; and
public art and indoor art works.

All of these strategic sites and transactions enable LGBT individuals to engage more fully in collective experiences and to enjoy and provide mutual care. These days, all of these strategic sites and transactions involve environmental costs and benefits including carbon footprints, output of plastics and other toxic substances, and impacts on local and global biological diversity.

LGBT populations, interactions, transactions, and spaces constitute distinct parts of human ecology with wider relationships across the biosphere. These queer ecologies increasingly involve social policy, planning, and design along with community development initiatives. In exploring some imperatives (and opportunities) for imagining and constructing new queer infrastructure in the face of multiple emergencies, I also argue for the use of a wider range of design practices. Spanning formal and professional design processes and the fabulously amateurish, practices can be rooted in vernacular and DIY approaches along with those grounded in new forms of community participation and ecological assessment.

Any human being who participates in queer transactions and sites, through expressions that are not normative in terms of gender or heterosexuality, enjoys local ecologies and in turn makes trophic and spatial decisions that are effectively forms of designs — albeit often intuitive, unprofessional, and short-term. Recognition of queer ecologies re-centres design processes on architectures of life support and human social service delivery. These queer designs are often nested within broader community plans and the market place as part of community development initiatives. It would be simplistic to envision these kinds of design as a new functionalism because LGBT2S expressing includes enjoyment of culture, pursuit of desires, and a wide range of consensual erotic expression uncoupled from reproduction.

In our first discussion in the University of California Berkeley College of Environmental Design 2021 (zoom) queer ecological imaginings seminars, there was a question of what happened to the early descriptions of queer architectures from the 1990s, notably the 1994 Queer Space exhibition in New York at Storefront Art and Architecture , the subsequent monograph by Aaron Betsky and the STUD and and Queers in Space anthologies. Much of the template for this research and theorizing was set in 1992 with publication of Beatriz Colomina’s Sexuality and Space. And the early theorizing on transgender “architectonics” by Lucas Crawford , though a generation later, was part of this movement of confirming a diversity of queer relationships to built space.

That initial moment of acknowledging queer architectures was quickly was appropriated by human geography and sociology, with scores of monographs and hundreds of peer reviewed papers, along with the late capitalist fusing of marketing and geomatics (what is often referred to as “GPS”) that a few years later contributed to the social dominance of social media from Facebook to Grindr to Twitter and TikTok as part of “surveillance capitalism.” In other words, the blueprints for expanding constellations of queer ecologies, over the last two decades, have only sometimes been those of social activists, community planners and collaborative designers. Rather, today’s queer ecologies are as much the result of market algorithms often mediated through social media. The problem is about the shifting lines between public and private space. Any new theory of design as having a beneficial impact on queer ecologies requires understanding of these public/private lines for a range of environments and for a wide spectrum of stakeholders – far beyond just infrastructures defined by entrepreneurial actors out to monetize transactions within LGBT2S populations.
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Infrastructure for LGBTQ2S populations as part of ecological life support (in a climate emergency)

“I can’t breathe.” Eric Garner, George Floyd &
Black Lives Matter (2014 and on and on)

“‘Emergency’ is a noun that yanks us from the normality of daily life, but its invocation also promises to grab us by the hand and lead us to safety. The addition of ‘state of’ here is also important insofar as it butts up against ’emergency’; it stretches the word out, which denotes its protracted nature, its velocity and scale. The emergency isn’t one emergency but a pileup of emergencies. On the other hand, the state of emergency can be understood as a singular emergency; it is the emergency of Canadian history.”
` Billy-Ray Belcourt 2020

After COVID and intensified gentrification and homelessness, the ‘name of the game’ for the majority of LGBTQ2S populations will be survival, housing, economic and professional development, and migration away from environmental emergencies. But there will be fewer and fewer places to go. In exploring new ways of conceiving and parsing out expanding and diversifying LGBT2S infrastructures, inherently communal, ecological and global processes can be viewed in the context of chronic “precarity” with ecosystems and communities experiencing various kind of “emergencies.” Given the communities from which I originated, in which I grew up, and currently with which I engage and depend, some of the following examples are from indigenous communities and territories.

Care is a lot of activities and is at the core of communities and culture. Care is often in response to emergencies, such as fire fighting, and today the Anthropocene as manifest in multiple climate crises is a series of indefinite emergencies. Queer infrastructure constitutes a series of strategies to make communities more functional in order to optimize and diversify opportunities for expression of all gender experiences and consensual eroticism, on one hand, and to prepare for, cope with, and in some cases preclude, a steady stream of emergencies that will make the twenty-first century.

Care is intertwined with social and ecological processes that insure both survival and pleasure. For example “care” for rural communities in the northern half of North America, where the majority of young people are often indigenous, requires a nest of spaces and interactions to avert the largest threat to queer youth that is too often suicide . And suicide, in the context of knowledge-keeping for communal survival, becomes a particularly horrific social and ecological contagion .

In a series of global emergencies, no one, the designer, the recipients (and victims) of designs, the scientist, the critic, the theoretician is immune from both ecological breakdown and, in the face of the enormity of problems, the breakdown of their spheres of responsibility. Perhaps the most fundamental difference between global culture since modernism and contemporary indigenous perspective is the relationship to deep time. Deep time is a set of experiences and a concept that often sustains communities. Deep time decentres architecture in design resituating buildings within communities, landscapes and ecosystems over a broader time-frame well beyond mythic and modern times.

To conceive of queer infrastructure, more comprehensive notions of place, community and region is necessary. Queer ecologies represent an early twenty-first century confluence of the progressive bankruptcy of homophobia and heteronormativity, a modernization of the sciences of biology and ecology, and the proliferation of ecological design practices often in response to both threats to life support and a range of violence from the overtly racist and homophobic to state neglect. In these dynamic new ecosystems, there is an ambiguity inherent in ‘queer’, as a relatively stable noun related to LGBT2S populations on one hand, and as a verb implying potentially indefinite transformation of notions of gender, erotic expression, and social bonds. So we have queer ecologies, which reliably support populations with same-sex intimacies, on one hand, and, on the other hand, the queering of ecosystems recombining acts, cultures, populations, and institutions under crises such as climate chaos and loss of biodiversity. In this context, there are intersections of some other related theoretical movements:

a. New Materialism , as a way to recognize a range of human and non-human intelligences and objects, has further destabilized the lines between humans and ecosystems and the primacy of hominid intelligence over other sentient beings ;

b. fuller understandings of climate change and the social implications of the Anthropocene especially for the survival of queer communities in the face of the exacerbation of social and regional disparities through unequal distribution of environmental risks and economic costs;

c. documentation of the fuller extent of indigenous legacies in ecosystems and landscapes as well as First Nations more fully asserting sovereignty over aspects of life support ; and

d. with the discrediting of totalizing Western narratives of “Nature” new theorizing on weird, “Novel ecosystems,” and designed ecosystems.

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Queer life support as decolonial & reparative processes

“Akiwenzii finds the book hilarious and offensive and they read it aloud and substitute the word ‘Indians’ for trees: The Hidden Life of Indians: What They Feel, How They Communicate — Discoveries from a Secret World. They both laugh, although it hits a little too close to home.”
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson 2020

Decolonial and reparative initiatives (and liberation movements) have been working, and often successful, for over a century. But repair has often been slow for both the most under-served and vulnerable of LGBTQ2S populations and for minority erotic communities more generally. How can planning for queer infrastructure be part of more squarely challenging chronic violence and inequities?

Over the last eight years, Black Lives Matter has profoundly transformed notions of social equity, decolonization, and social repair. For example, the June 14, 2020 All Black Lives Matter march in Los Angeles was a historic event, perhaps a rupture with past notions of public space for LGBT communities, that wedded the social movements for racial justice and queer activism in profoundly new ways.

Today, the role of decolonial and reparative processes are explored in re-inscribing both queer life support, that should also create space for particular aesthetics and pleasures, as queered infrastructure. Design of queer infrastructure could decolonize by reflecting on the impact of how a more accurate recognition of ecosystems, perspectives lacking in homophobia and heteronormativity, could provide new opportunities for conceiving of social goals and environmental solutions and in turn inspire new goals for meeting places and services with subsequent public policy, community planning and design practices. So in arguing for queer infrastructure, carefully conceived, designed, and nested within repaired (and queer) political economies and ecosystems, a number of crises and resulting ruptures have emerged with the following opportunities for theorizing.

1. First, the recent revisions of biota and ecosystems initially described as biological exuberance, recognizing erotic expression as part of ecosystems not linked directly to reproduction, have created the basis for the still in-progress, queer ecologies paradigm.

2. Secondly, late recognition of the ecological roles of biological exuberance, essentially censored from more than a century of modern science, calls into question more general biases modern scientific investigations rooted in the colonial era while highlight other systems of investigation such as some of those associated with indigenous knowledge keeping. So if nineteenth and twentieth century biology was in part a way to gain further sovereignty over ecosystems, biological exuberance effectively demolish that colonial project as extending to scientific paradigms.

3. Third, the turn towards queer affect draws us back to new blends of feeling and empiricism inspiring reconsideration and reconstruction of the lines between Homo sapiens and other species including making room for a wider range of cultural, including indigenous, perspectives on human and other organisms.

4. Finally and perhaps most importantly, recently constructed notions of consent are as important in understanding queer ecologies as re-inscribing LGBT2S identities (and acts) within ecosystems. Modern notions of sexual expression, including queer aspirations and challenges to homophobia, are largely based on relatively new, and transformative, forms of consent. And fuller consent undermines any remaining social currency of heteronormativity, homonationalism , racial and cultural superiority, and the supremacy of Western Civilization. As much as challenging heteronormative biases, queer ecologies re-inscribe a wider range of sexualities and gender identities within ecosystems and human communities.

5. Fifth in this progression of logic from biological exuberance to queer ecologies to queer infrastructure, all manner of erotic expression, and pleasure more generally, is going to be necessary for individuals and communities to cope with and to get through indefinite ecological emergencies. Belcourt’s concept of “ecological harms” inscribes toxicity and inadequate life support within the spectrum of social inequities from environmental racism to higher risks and mortality due to climate change and subsequent emergencies of the “Anthropocene, the Capitalocene, the Plantationocene, and / or the Chthulucene.” So without sufficient inspiration, erotic expression, and pleasure activism, and more general sexual health, it could well be even more difficult to face daunting and potentially lethal challenges.

6. Deriving from the Anthropocene, and its many other names, are the problems from the divergent cultural experiences of (“The”) “Apocalypse.” In the face of apocalyptic threats, queer infrastructure could function to support erotic communities and cultures of survival. Again, the decolonization required to understand queer ecologies recognizes uneven and divergent experiences of and vulnerabilities to ecological crises and collapses. For example, there are huge cultural divides between certain Christian conceptions of the Rapture and Apocalypse and the oral studies of indigenous communities surviving five hundred years of genocide. Even as participants in relatively successful indigenous resurgence movements , our lives as survivors are under the shadow of a kind of “melancholia” derived from realizations of the full extent of losses — even without the pain and perishing of the Anthropocene. As we move into the difficult times, not entirely different from the recent past of homophobic state violence, these divergent experiences of stress, threat and survival will have new importance in the formation of erotic cultures and queer ecologies.

The methodologies that can provide the basis for applying deeper understandings of queer ecologies for imagining and designing badly needed infrastructure are specifically decolonial and are rooted in anticolonial struggles. Queer ecologies provide bases for reconsidering sites, populations, and communities as assemblages of living things bent on survival — with infrastructure part of efforts toward minimal levels of life support – including for gender diversity and sexual health. In other words, the homophobic blind-spot that lead to avoidance of recognition of biological exuberance was part of a broader colonial notions of science for domination, the irrelevance of indigenous land management, and the marginality of ecosystem conservation. And this colonial nexus was at the formation of modern states and markets. The recent implosion of that old paradigm, that ignored more than just biological exuberance, warrants a broader interrogation of the residues of colonialism, global markets, states and apparatuses, and cultural chauvinism.

These twenty-first century queer ecologies critiques, of both older LGB+(T?) enclaves and forms of environmental conservation, are pointing towards a more diverse set of scientific investigations, renewed forms of site and landscape empiricism, that are in turn needed as part of design exercises. These kind of postcolonial queer ecological studies destabilize the lines between taxa and ecosystems and ‘unnatural’ and ‘natural’ (often conflated with indigenous cultural sites and stewarded landscapes) as well as those boundaries between individuals and communities and between professionals such as designers, ecologists, theoreticians, artists, and farmers.

The landscapes in which we live, that we hope to reconstruct with better queer ecologies, have been contested for a long time. So colonization and decolonization have always had spatial dimensions. Colonization has always faced resistance, if only because of the absurdity of particular projects with only a few generating profit. And eventually colonial projects fail or morph while facing local resurgence. The development of expanded, more effective and defensible queer infrastructure is one dimension of that resurgence.

Most of us have acute experiences of social injustice especially if we are female, people of colour, LGBT2S, and / or disabled with contemporary inequities often still maintained through some violence. And these differences in access to resources and life support are colonial projects initiated by over-privileged thugs for their own benefit. So social policy and design for queer infrastructure centres through redistributing resources through countering contemporary inequities rooted in centuries-long, colonial projects:

a. white supremacy , racism, and eugenics;
b. cultural chauvinism (including aesthetic systems) and cultural erasure;
c. homophobia and transphobia as part of colonial systems;
d. establishment of colonial languages and erasure of local languages;
e. settlement, displacement, gentrification, and loss of livelihood and shelter;
f. slavery, racialized incarceration, and institutionalization;
g. plantations and ecosystem conversation;
h. denial of access to food and agricultural production;
i. denial of the freedom of meeting and socializing (and have sex);
j. eradication of species (in favour of a small number of species of economic importance);
k. uneven granting of citizenship;
l. coerced labour and unjust contracts; and
m. denial of public benefits spanning medical services, education, and culture.

If we ground local queer infrastructure through insuring the life support denied above, in a time of ecological crisis, then we may be able to hang on, and expand access to, the good things already enjoyed by more privileged members of LGBT2S populations.

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Data sets for identifying emerging needs & desires for new queer infrastructure
How can planning for queer(er) infrastructure better listen to vulnerable demographics and a fuller set of stakeholders while more creatively combining a wider range of data and cultural expressions? Modern community and environmental planning is largely driven by politics and selective uses of information. So a central question becomes which data? And a central task is sifting through and combining a range of modes of representation and data sets organized through metaphors and narratives.

Ascertaining, analyzing, combining, and safeguarding new data on LGBTQ2S populations is a huge and expanding field. Queer community mapping, and community resource and counter-mapping more generally, are proliferating. But in sharing such rich information, there are huge potentials for misuse of data. In response to threats to privacy, there is an entire movement of creating data opacity for queer community projects. There is a broader movement for data justice.

Today, we are seeing a proliferation of cartographic data and uses such as,
a neighbourhood map on harassment of women in public spaces in Cairo , a black trans archive cultivating empathy and support depending on the viewer’s self-identification, and a kind of cross-solidarity site for young queer women with African and Asian heritages. Without careful protocols and engineering, intimate information about LGBTQ2S populations can be misused – and misrepresented indefinitely. On a relatively minor note, the Queering the Map web-site was hacked, in 2018, to generate pro-Trump propaganda.

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Re-imagining for planners:
Contemporary culture, including queer science fiction, as markers

“Suddenly my radio stopped its music and the newscaster came
on to announce, with great excitement, the successful Russian launching
of Sputnik, the first satellite to circle the earth. He finished with an account
of Little Rock, Arkansas, that day, where local students and their parents had
demonstrated angrily against the Supreme Court’s ruling that the schools should
no longer be racially segregated ‘…standing outside the school shouting insults
and even hurling stones and beercans at the Negro students.”
Samuel R. Delany 1988

“This city [Seattle] that is and isn’t a city, but I guess that’s what
every city is becoming now, a destination to imagine what imagination
might be like, except for the lack.” Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore 2020

Delany’s The Motion of Light in Water chronicles his tender transitions from growing up in Harlem as a bastion of the African American church and middle-class to his adult “queer” identity exploring a wide range of erotic expression and space, often in the Lower East Side, with science-fiction writing as much a balm as a source of income. Delany’s optimism was in the face of risks of violence as a black adolescent and racialized barriers to actually remaking technology. Along with an alliance with a white woman, he made a living writing about imaginary worlds of scientific and sexual possibilities (and working in a bookstore). Of a distant time only a half a century later, Sycamore’s reflections on queer Seattle, an American city especially transformed by the promises of technology, often hover around acknowledgement of social voids and the need to imagine a host of so far unimagined communal possibilities.

So how can fiction, including science-fiction, inspire planning and planners?
Delany reflected that,

“[A]t that time, the words ‘black’ and ‘gay’ – for openers – didn’t
exist with their current meanings, usage, history [in the late 1980s’].
1961 had still been, really, part of the fifties…There were only
Negroes and homosexuals, both of whom — along with artists –
were hugely devalued in the social hierarchy.”

In the kinds of pressurized contexts where expanded queer infrastructure is desperately needed, fantasy and other forms of cultural express can function to make conceptual and experiential ‘space’ to find, defend, transform physical space, fiscal resources, and organizational frameworks.

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Imagining queer infrastructure as
“Regenerative Interactive Zones of Nurturing”

“Gidigaa Bizhiw drew maps on the sides of buildings with stencil and green spray paint. It wasn’t a perfect system, but it was a coordinated system of secret care, hidden under the guise of homeless, pest, defeated and indifferent.” Leanne Betasamosake Simpson 2020

Data does not heal (though culture can be a balm). Communal imagining of possibilities can inspire. And queer infrastructure can provide the basis for stable, remotely happy life support. In this way, queer infrastructure is integral to the spaces, transactions, services, and erotic and cultural expression of entire societies – in order to be complete and fully functional. If we accept that heteronormativity functions as a broader policing force over erotic expression, queer infrastructure opens eroticized space for all. And it is for this more societal or socializing reason that queer infrastructure is so difficult to envision and is too often ignored or trivialized.

Why do we need expanded, better built, and more equitable queer infrastructure? Certainly we need queer infrastructure so that young adults get correct information and not kill themselves because of their desires. Certainly we need queer infrastructure to build, maintain, and fully enjoy our social networks (including a lot of partying after we’ve all been vaccinated for COVID19). Certainly we need queer infrastructure to lower the risk of violence and certainly we need queer infrastructure for information and treatments for our sexual health. But the ‘our’ here is broader than LGBT2S populations.

Central to more fully understanding local queer ecologies and pressures and opportunities for new infrastructure is a kind of expanded stakeholder analysis and client identification across demographics and at a range spatial and temporal scales. And decolonial infrastructure requires some engagement with regional history extending to local experiences of deep time. So in the imagining and reconceiving of expanding and diversifying queer infrastructure especially as a prelude to planning and design exercises, contemporary ecologies warrant far more study that simply site analysis. Similarly, more supple demographic studies, leading to needs assessments for the most vulnerable, can better recognize trends. And the most important means for such imaginings is to nurture expansive forms of cultural expression especially within the most vulnerable LGBT2S demographics.

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Planning consultation as communal reimagining

“I’m stuck between losing the hope for connection in the places and
spaces I used to believe in, and wondering how to find that connection in
spaces I will never believe in.” Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore 2020

What if we don’t bother envisioning and building new and better forms of queer infrastructure? Queer infrastructure will be envisioned and built by less representative actors – as it often is today. What we have today to sustain LGBTQ2S communities is the product of the priorities of a few privileged gay and fewer lesbian entrepreneurs, a tiny group of designers, the social media behemoths, economic and community planners, and increasingly AI. To transparently plan and design LGBT2S infrastructure is to insure that vulnerable populations and individuals defined and provide their own services. This can be the central principle in exercises of collective imagining.

Planning consultations for LGBTQ2S population to conceive and create queer infrastructure involves a kind of intersectionality on steroids. The theorizing gets turgid. Communal imagining exercises, as planning workshops, are increasingly necessary and involve more creative and community-based events and ongoing relationships. These exchanges will be well-documented, on-line, but post-COVID, there are increasing pressures for more physical contact.

Communal consultation frameworks can appear (and sometimes function) as games. This seems to be kernel of the design for H.O.R.I.Z.O.N. (Habitat One: Regenerative Interactive Zone of Nurture) by the Institute of Queer Ecology.
https://www.are.na/block/10886998

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Advocating for new queer infrastructure:
Some goals & practices for community repair & planning

“To care in a more feminist sense is to think outside of a singular life, and to this is to participate in a process of self-making that exceeds the individual. With care, one grows a collective skin…Care detonates that which precedes it; it pulls us outside our bodies and into that which one can’t know in advance.” Billy-Ray Belcourt 2020

Every decision made can be considered a form of planning and design. But few of these less purposeful designs can lead to proposals and structures sufficiently powerful to overcome historical obstacles and violence. Here, assessments of queer ecologies can lead to expanded forms of imaginings only a tiny portion of which will ever be agreed upon and installed or built. It is from this critical space spanning imaginings and actual designs, grounded in material realities, human demographics, and trends, that community initiatives can originate.

We can envision new queer infrastructure as mutual aid. ” Mutual aid projects are a form of political participation in which people take responsibility for caring for one another and changing political conditions, not just through symbolic acts or putting pressure on their representatives in government, but by actually building new social relations that are more survivable.” Big Door Brigade https://bigdoorbrigade.com/what-is-mutual-aid/

So in characterizing the kinds of planning practices to explore for the queer infrastructure needed in the coming decades, the following are some shifts in approaches:

expanding planning and design agency, who gets to be considered a professional to include users, a wide range of design professionals, scientists, artists, and theoreticians;

re-centring many design exercises for LGBTQ2S populations as direct responses to the hazards and resulting precarity from violence from racialized murder by the state to homophobic violence to suppression of queer erotic expression;

expanded frameworks for research, site analysis and community participation, in both information sharing and design, for most re-designs of public space that include, more specifically, LGBT2S demographics and needs assessments;

queer ecological stakeholder analysis that includes traditional territories (and governments), future generations, and non-human beings;

stakeholder assessment and resulting collaborations and consultations at various steps in design exercises well into installation, construction, and post-occupancy evaluation;

new kinds of education and preparation for design involving both spaces of LGBTQ2S users and “queering” architecture in the context of ecological emergencies nurturing more expertise in demographics, ecology, local history, and political economy;

acknowledgement of layered and contested, site ownership and with challenges for reparations to correct contemporary disparities especially in access to public and private space and more generally public resources – extending to some recognition in design processes of movements challenging land dispossession , resource extraction, gentrification, and displacement;

queer ecological designs become of net contributions to counter ecological breakdown and for repair;

a requirement of design for queer infrastructure is a kind of site-play involving hands-on involvement in respective ecologies and human populations with designers getting their hands dirty through working with experimental spaces and precedent sites; and

‘wild’ and natural landscapes as re-inscribed as diverse cultural zones involving a wider spectrum of human and non-human stakeholders and expanded and indefinite frameworks of joint and collaborative management (between human groups) of public sites.

11
Conclusions:
Infrastructures of queer repair & imagination

“Queerness: at once what never was and what is still to come.”
Billy-Ray Belcourt 2019

“Maybe the dream of queer is just another consumer mirage.
Maybe we need to bury the dream in order to imagine something else.”
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore 2020

“Through a complete disregard for the politics and ethics of care, contemporary power clearly desires to banish the commons from collective consciousness.” iLiana Fokianaki 2020
If we are going to protect the queer communities that have nurtured us while providing more space and services to the most vulnerable and under-served LGBTQ2S communities, we will need to listen more carefully to each other, find deeper inspiration and compassion through the exchange of experiences embodied in contemporary culture, use a wider array of data sets more precisely and creatively, and find new ways to celebrate life together (and in ways that won’t make us sick).

This exploration of queer ecologies and infrastructure, with some implications for design, has taken place in a difficult but illuminating year. Challenges to the very specific forms of violence against African heritages have highlighted the persistence of violence and pain that in turn have had a huge, and poorly explored, impact on erotic expression including within LGBTQ2S communities. COVID19 has kept people apart while reminding us how central are social spaces both more generally and for erotic expression. And the horrific losses from COVID have highlighted the centrality of care-givers and the racial dimensions of the uneven distribution of risk. This is a good year to consider the range of care and infrastructure on which we depend: for social contact, entertainment, and sexual expression, on one hand, and from medical treatment to child-care to ecological life supports. As for Zoom and social media, 2020 represents the peak of screen time especially as surrogates for queer social connections and intimacies.

It has been fun to theorize on expanding and diversifying queer infrastructures while beginning to identify a wider array of design processes and best practices. These strategic sites and routes within landscapes, built spaces, service programs, aesthetic statements, and cultural venues, increasingly transformed by LGBT2S populations, have been coalescing for well over a century. It now time to find ways to imagine and design for the most vulnerable, for unmet needs, and for new possibilities. The longer-term public policy issue for this myriad of design processes is whether or not markets can provide the basis for organizing the necessary political and fiscal resources for viable designs. While, infrastructures conceived and operated less comprehensively will leave some LGBT2S populations, especially people of colour, under-served and sometimes at risk on an indefinite basis, government programmes have rarely had much success beyond providing spaces for basic needs. So queer pleasures are bound to be captives of capital for some time.

As for imagining the unmet needs of LGBT2S populations through the prism of queer ecologies, I could rewrite this discussion from the standpoint of the darker side of oikos as in economics and political economy. But such an approach would avoid some of the implications of today’s ecological emergencies. Without the prism of queer ecologies, a narrower focus on political economy could lead to blind spots that could in turn make us vulnerable to losing many people, places and other aspects of the communities in which each of us depend.

Manuscript with endnotes
Brochu-Ingram 2021 Reimagining Queer Infrastructure for Cornell Q Space

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Queer infrastructures: Design strategies that decolonize

Brochu-Ingram, Gordon Brent. 2020. Queer infrastructures: Design strategies that decolonize. November 6, 2020 zoom presentation for Queer Ecological Imaginations Working Group of the Townsend Center for the Humanities & the  University of California Berkeley  College of Environmental Design. 

Gordon Brent Brochu-Ingram from College of Environmental Design on Vimeo.

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Queering Urban Forests as Democratizing Public Space & Community (including LGBTQ2S) Infrastructure

 

satellite image above: Historic Lees Trail in Vancouver’s largest green space, Stanley Park, has seen male public sex for at least a century. Recently the informal trails and patterns of cruising and sex appear to be changing rapidly — in part due to demographic shifts, the advent of digital devices and apps such as GRINDR, and climate change transforming this forest.

Brochu-Ingram. 2019. Queering Urban Forests as Democratizing Public Space & Community (including LGBTQ2S) Infrastructure. part of SESSION 3:Queering the Urban Forest: Heterotopias and Peripheral Spaces, RISING URBANISTS 2019: REFRAMING THE URBAN FOREST, ASLA CCNY / Spitzer School of Architecture, The City University of New York.  notes & graphics: 2019 BROCHU-INGRAM queering the urban forest as infrastructure
SESSION 3:Queering the Urban Forest: Heterotopias and Peripheral Spaces

Queering Urban Forests as Democratizing Public Space & Community (including LGBTQ2S) Infrastructure

Urban forests largely exist because of exceptional episodes of activism. In beginning this discussion, I reflect on the central role of collective ‘agency’ in queering (and protecting) urban forests reflecting on the fiftieth anniversary of the short-lived and very queer DIY organization, Trees for Queens — while challenging participants to more carefully research respective legacies embodied in many of the forests that they enjoy. [The Stonewall Riots were the first communal “reterritorialization,” {and} raged for well over two nights and did not end abruptly. In the same month, a cruising area in Queens, “Kew Gardens,” was badly destroyed, with extensive tree cutting and violent vigilante attacks, to discourage the presence of gay men. Within a week after Stonewall there were public actions using conscious visibility and the formation of the first gay liberationist environmental group, Trees for Queens, to restore the park. Gordon Brent Ingram. 1997. Marginality and the landscapes of erotic alien( n)ations. in Queers in Space: Communities | Public Places | Sites of Resistance. Ingram, G. B., A.-M. Bouthillette and Y. Retter (eds.). Seattle: Bay Press. 27 – 52.]

Discussions of urban forests and LGBTQ2S populations have more often been dominated by relatively subjective reports of male public sex even when respective spaces have been unsafe for women, trans and other people with nonconforming genders, individuals with mobility constraints and other vulnerabilities, and persons of colour. In contrast to under-surveilled forest depths, other parts of urban forests have been more important to many LGBTQ2S groups: playing fields as historic feminist spaces, public conveniences, particular trees and other landmarks, particular habitat, public art, lawns and forest edges, and cafes and cultural venues. The range of social reliance on particular sites in urban forests continues to be poorly acknowledged more often with little empirical data to inform social policy and design programming — and little funding for new field research. And research methods, such as ‘participant-observer’ have limited utility in understanding ephemeral experiences that at times are highly private with other uses of the forest far more communal. This discussion proposes the urban forest as embodying and supporting a complex set of ‘queer infrastructure’, involving sex and so much more, that is part of ongoing initiatives to democratize public spaces in community development. Given the vulnerable nature of most urban forests, particularly from climate change and pressures associated with gentrification, the ‘infrastructure paradigm’ can aid activists and landscape architects in developing matrices for better tracking site histories, uses, and ongoing social (including LGBTQ2S) dependencies (as stakeholders), a wider range of queer forest uses and needs (spanning socializing, cultural expression, socializing, and [of course] sex), imperatives and options for ecosystem management and forest protection, and contradictions within design programming and broader municipal and social policy. The more fundamental problem for landscape architects, in hoping to contribute to the queering of urban forests, is that activities, demographics, and design-related needs in urban forests, are changing more rapidly than the typical cycles of programming of public sites, public consultation, design, and post-use evaluations. Examples will be provided from Vancouver, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Rome, and Dubai / Abu Dhabi.
select publications & other discussions mentioning queer sexual expression in public parks with forests

Brochu-Ingram. 2015 From constructing rights to building multicultural, queer infrastructure: Trajectories of activism, public policy & organizational development in Vancouver. in Queer Mobilizations: Social Movement Activism and Canadian Public Policy. Manon Tremblay editor. Vancouver: UBC Press. 227 – 249.

Ingram. 2012. From queer spaces to queerer ecologies: Recasting Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind to further mobilise & anticipate historically marginal stakeholders in environmental planning for community development. European Journal of Ecopsychology 3 (Queer Ecologies issue): 53 – 80.

Ingram. 2011. Cruising on the Margins: Photographing The Changing Worlds of Outdoor Sex Between Males. An essay in Chad States. 2011. Cruising: Photographs by Chad States. New York: powerHouse Books. pages 79 – 87.

Ingram. 2010. Fragments, edges & matrices: Retheorizing the formation of a so-called Gay Ghetto through queering landscape ecology. in Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics & Desire. Cate Sandilands and Bruce Erickson (eds.). Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. pages 254 – 282.

Ingram. 2003. Returning to the scene of the crime: Uses of trial narratives of consensual male homosexuality for urban research, with examples from Twentieth-Century British Columbia. GLQ (Gay and Lesbian Quarterly) 10(1): 77 – 110.

Ingram. 2001. Redesigning Wreck: Beach meets forest as location of male homoerotic culture & placemaking in Pacific Canada. in In a Queer Country: Gay and lesbian studies in the Canadian Context. Terry Goldie (ed.). Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press. 188 – 208.

 

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From queer spaces to queerer ecologies: Recasting Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind to further mobilise & anticipate historically marginal stakeholders in environmental planning for community development

Ingram, Gordon Brent. 2012. From queer spaces to queerer ecologies: Recasting Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind to further mobilise & anticipate historically marginal stakeholders in environmental planning for community development. European Journal of Ecopsychology 3 (Queer Ecologies issue): 53 – 80. PDF copy available: Ingram 2012 Queer spaces to queerer ecologies – E J of Ecopsychology

‘Warrior’s Feather Head Dress’ Cowichan man – photograph taken by Edward S. Curtis in 1913

This individual would have had considerable knowledge of the second case study in this paper, the south-west slope of Mount Maxwell on Salt Spring Island, that was a few miles away from his village.

 

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Queer Ecologies Roundtable in UnderCurrents: Journal of Critical Environmental Studies 19

Undercurrents 19 cover_Page_1

Gordon Brent Brochu-Ingram, Peter Hobbs and Catriona Sandilands. 2015. Roundtable. Part 1: From Queer/Natures to Queer Ecologies. UnderCurrents: Journal of Critical Environmental Studies 19: 15-16 and
Part 2: Examining Heteronormativity, Reprocentricity, and Ecology: 27-28;
Part 3: Politics, Resistance, Alliances, and Imbroglios: 46-47; and
Part 4: Queer Ecologies at the Limits: 60-61.

PDF of combined Roundtable transcripts: Brochu-Ingram Hobbs & Sandilands 2015 Roundtable UnderCurrents 19Undercurrents 19 cover_Page_1

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Ryan Thoreson on the Struggles, Achievements and Foibles of a Quarter Century of Transnational LGBT Activism

thoreson_transnational

 

Transnational LGBT Activism

Interviewed by Gordon Brent Brochu-Ingram in April 2015

 IGLHRC logo

Modern LGBT organizations now go back more than sixty years with international solidarity work having linked communities for three decades. Yet there have been few public reflections on the many achievements and setbacks of hundreds of activists, initiatives, partnerships and staff. Even within transnational LGBT initiatives, there are almost too many issues, chronologies, and personal recollections from which to draw lessons.

 

Ryan Thoreson’s 2014 Transnational LGBT Activism: Working for Sexual Rights Worldwide is one of the first comprehensive studies of the evolution, indeed the repeated transformations, of one LGBT organization, the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC)—a smaller, United States-based NGO compared to the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA) that is more active in Europe. Thoreson spent a tumultuous year spanning 2009 and 2010 working for IGLHRC as the organization assessed situations, contacted media, coordinated demonstrations, and provided technical support and other resources in order to challenge homophobic laws and policing around the globe. Starting at the grassroots, IGLHRC grew to support local organizations in many countries around the world and became increasingly active in international forums, including United Nations bodies.

 

Thoreson interviewed scores of current and past IGLHRC staff and executives through both an anthropological lens and international law at a time of progressive institutionalization of human rights initiatives. In the year that Thoreson was working for IGLHRC, Uganda, Malawi, and Senegal all saw clashes that were often difficult to fathom from IGLHRC’s office in New York.

 

In Transnational LGBT Activism, the twenty-five years of IGLHRC’s initiatives break down into at least three rather different phases and organizational frameworks loosely connected by name and a few shared board members and staff. At various transition points, there was high turnover of personnel. But instead of emphasizing the conflicts, Transnational LGBT Activism describes institutional learning in the face of dynamic and unpredictable economies and increasingly savvy local organizations even in the poorest of countries. Transnational LGBT Activism provides critical reflections while suggesting more effective strategies for new kinds of solidarity and partnerships between LGBT and other human rights activists.

 

Ryan

Ryan Thoreson

 

GBBI:

You describe how IGLHRC formed in San Francisco in 1989 as a “ragtag organization” rooted in “radical queer movements,” then became more professional by the time that it moved to New York City a decade later. In its second decade, IGLHRC became increasingly active in international forums and some United Nations bodies. Few grassroots organizations survive for a quarter-century and then receive an evaluation, especially at the level of careful explorations of operational priorities and activist practices. It sounds like the activists and staff whom you interviewed had a lot to say even years after working for the organization. What drove people to be so passionate about this work and then to create such an influential network? What kinds of formative experiences did current and former staff describe that explained their motivations?

 

RRT:

I was struck by how deeply activists who’d worked at IGLHRC were moved by their own experiences with injustice. I think there’s a tendency to think of activists in New York or Geneva as kind of technocratic or far removed from grassroots struggles. But when I asked activists at IGLHRC why they did transnational LGBT work, they usually responded with stories about people, not abstract principles. They recalled having their home raided, or seeking asylum, or making prison visits to people arrested for same-sex activity, or being marginalized in other social movements because they were queer. The specific experiences differed widely, but a strong common thread was that they were passionate about the work they did because they had seen or experienced injustice first-hand and were committed to working against it.

julie_dorf

IGLHR co-founder and first Director, Julie Dorf

GBBI:

You described several phases in the history of IGLHRC describing a shift “from working directly with at-risk individuals to working primarily with [other] activists and [other] NGOs.” What drove those shifts and the changes in staff numbers, goals and the focus of day-to-day work?

 

RRT:

NGOs are interesting because their work is so heavily influenced by individual agendas and political trends, but it’s never reducible to one of those things or the other. In the book, I argue that IGLHRC’s history illustrates how much individual activists can shape an organization’s focus. Its founder, Julie Dorf, built the organization from a grassroots group in the style of ACT-UP or Queer Nation into a more professional 501(c)(3) that became an authoritative source for information about LGBT rights globally. Paula Ettelbrick, a feminist legal scholar based in New York, moved IGLHRC from San Francisco to New York and intensified its work at the United Nations. And Cary Alan Johnson, who had helped launch IGLHRC’s Africa Program, maintained a strong focus on LGBT rights advocacy in the region when he became the organization’s executive director.

 

But I also argue organizational priorities and programming can only be understood in the context of the wider political environment. From 1990 to 2010, foundations, governments, and other NGOs became increasingly receptive to the idea that LGBT rights are human rights. Against that backdrop, activists expanded IGLHRC’s focus in some respects—most notably, by opening regional offices—but narrowed it in others. In its early years, IGLHRC had an overt focus on people living with HIV/AIDS, whether queer or not, and operated a dedicated program to assist with immigration and asylum claims. For a variety of reasons—as needs changed, as other organizations took up those issues, or as IGLHRC sought to refine its mission and target its resources—the HIV and asylum programs were dropped. Those kinds of shifts are driven by a mix of individual and structural conditions, and I don’t think you can understand LGBT rights struggles without understanding how those aspects of advocacy affect each other.

iglhrc.org.blocked.11-25-2000

GBBI:

Within several years of the founding of IGLHRC, a number of larger international human rights organizations, notably Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, became active in challenging institutional homophobia and later transphobia especially for people suffering from state violence and incarceration. For example, I was active in an Amnesty group working to dismantle the more homophobic and AIDSphobic laws in China. Within this broader international movement around a great many needs for rights and protections for populations vulnerable to homophobia and transphobia, what distinctive roles have been taken on by IGLHRC that has allowed the organization maintain a well-defined niche in order to continue to expand its work?

 

RRT:

Defining IGLHRC’s niche was an ongoing conversation during my fieldwork, and I think it’s a really productive one. When IGLHRC was founded, one of its first campaigns was to pressure generalist human rights organizations like Amnesty to incorporate LGBT rights into their work. A quarter-century later, IGLHRC is no longer a lone voice in the wilderness. NGOs like HRW and Amnesty regularly work on LGBT issues, many governments and UN bodies recognize the legitimacy of LGBT rights, and there are visible, vocal LGBT groups engaged in advocacy in virtually every country around the globe. It’s a huge shift, and I think that’s been cause to re-evaluate where IGLHRC, as a U.S.-based organization, might add the most value to the global movement.

 

In the past few years, I think IGLHRC has done some of its most groundbreaking work as a kind of connective tissue linking different actors involved in the movement. It does that in a number of ways, like bringing activists together to strategize around shared challenges, partnering with groups to produce reports on themes like LGBT rights in post-disaster and post-conflict settings, and providing guidance and translation to help LGBT activists raise concerns with UN officials and bodies. For a variety of reasons, I think IGLHRC does that connective work very well, even as the movement has grown considerably.

Greetings from IGLHRC

GBBI:

Early on in Transnational LGBT Activism, you talk about an underlying role of an international organization such as IGLHRC in “norm-creation” in constructing expanded notions of human rights. In what resistant governments was IGLHRC the most influential and how was this work achieved?

 

RRT:

I don’t think the efficacy of transnational LGBT groups can be measured by how often they name and shame a government into remedying a violation. Activists recognize that, as a practical matter, a lot of political leaders globally won’t lose sleep at night because a U.S.-based LGBT NGO is upset with them. Instead, I think efficacy is measured by how well you support the efforts of local activists, impress upon governments that they have to answer for violations, and bolster the norm that LGBT rights are human rights. At IGLHRC, I think effectiveness on those fronts has been facilitated by having staff members from a country or region. During my fieldwork, for example, IGLHRC did great work in Uganda, where Victor Mukasa had deep ties to the movement, and in the Inter-American system, where Marcelo Ferreyra was very invested in regional efforts. Its efficacy has also been bolstered by its work at the UN, where local and transnational groups have built relationships with governments and officials that have begun to generate meaningful precedents which activists around the globe can then use in their work.

international_lesbian_gay_marriage_human_rights_map

GBBI

Your study of IGLHRC was partially funded through a Rhodes Scholarship, which has quite a legacy of the ‘white man’s burden,’ and as a part of your doctoral studies in anthropology at Oxford. What are the most important lessons that these activist anthropology studies can teach us about individual activists, organizations, and social change? In other words, how could any individual active or on staff in an international or LGBT organization read Transnational LGBT Activism to become more proactive about delving into these organizational politics and to further build these workplaces?

 

RRT:

I think the primary lesson is the value of asking different questions in activist anthropology. My earliest anthropological work was with LGBT activists in South Africa and queer people living in poverty in the Philippines, and I felt a growing discomfort with the ways anthropologists scrutinized sexual politics in the Global South but often assumed they understood what sexual politics in the Global North and in transnational work entailed. The project that generated the book was meant to train the anthropological gaze on transnational LGBT advocacy, and to encourage a more empirical look at its underpinnings—who engages in that work and why, what ideologies actually guide their advocacy, and why their efforts produce intended and unintended outcomes. Those are scholarly questions, but they’re also political questions for activists who work on behalf of global constituencies. The book focuses on LGBT advocacy, but my hope is that it illustrates that those are valid and important questions for activists in any transnational movement, and worth investigating empirically instead of assuming we know the answers.

GLAA forum 2011

GBBI:

The field research that led to Transnational LGBT Activism was constructed around the idea of the “broker,” who works within activist organizations doing the day to day tasks as staff or consultants. You even talk about “brokerage” as a dynamic set of practices. When is an activist a “broker,” whether or not they are collecting a salary from an organization. And when is an activist or staff member doing important work in a human rights organization but not actually acting as a “broker”?

 

RRT:

For me, brokerage is a lens to focus on some of the dynamics I consider interesting in transnational activism. I think all transnational LGBT activists act as “brokers” to the extent that their work is about negotiating among various actors, who operate in different political systems, and who often bring their own distinctive agendas or objectives to the wider movement. Those actors not only include partner NGOs in both the Global North and Global South, but are also funders, journalists, experts, and governments, among others. For me, the concept of brokerage is a way to underscore that advocacy—and especially transnational advocacy—isn’t only a matter of pursuing a set of preordained goals or principles, but is really about the painstaking work of navigating relationships and building a political project.

 

GBBI

What struck me throughout Transnational LGBT Activism was the wide array of different tasks that were expected of staff as “brokers” with expectations often only based on vague strategic plans set every few years. When in your interviews did brokers feel like they were driving or at least shaping the agenda of the organization and when did they feel more constrained by the IGLHRC board and executive along with the limited terms of references of international initiatives?

 

RRT:

I think this is a real challenge for smaller human rights organizations with broad constituencies or goals. IGLHRC’s motto—“Human Rights for Everyone, Everywhere”—is ambitious, and IGLHRC has always used a lot of different tactics to advance their mission. Even as staff pursued the same overarching goals, they favored different tactics to achieve them. Some of the staff at IGLHRC really enjoyed the higher level planning and advocacy that gradually moved the ball in spaces like the UN, while others drew strength and satisfaction from more immediate work in service delivery, asylum claims, or emergency response. Some NGOs have a pretty defined mandate or model—think, for example, of the approaches that HRW and Amnesty have historically employed in their work—but for smaller, scrappier organizations whose work is guided by the felt needs of a global constituency, the activist toolkit can be much more fluid. Brokers at those organizations might favor very different strategies, and the challenge becomes how you effectively harmonize a set of approaches that could be used to reach the same ends.

 

GBBI:

Your approach of viewing the IGLHRC as sometimes a network and more often a hierarchy of brokers allowed you to delve into structural problems and contradictions, often felt more through the working conditions of the staff, common to quite a number of LGBT organizations in both poor and less repressive and wealthier countries. What were some of the obstacles described by the staff, as brokers of information and activist initiatives, to their doing the work of IGLHRC? Why did so many individuals only work IGLHRC for a year or two?

 

RRT:

IGLHRC had a policy of hiring activists, and I think that can pose unique challenges both for NGOs and for their employees. A lot of staff came to IGLHRC with previous leadership experience and well-defined ideological commitments, and some emphasized the difficulties of working for a transnational NGO where priorities, expenditures, and day-to-day work had to be vetted by colleagues or fit within a broader institutional workplan. The creation of regional offices did a lot to expand IGLHRC’s networks around the globe, but it also put a tremendous amount of responsibility on the two to four staff members tasked with being the organization’s eyes and ears in continent-sized regions. And some staff described struggling with their identification with a cadre of transnational activists, especially when colleagues from their former groups and networks approached them seeking funding or forms of support that they couldn’t provide in their role at IGLHRC.

 

And while there certainly have been periods in its history where the staff changed very rapidly (and contentiously), I don’t think IGLHRC’s turnover is uncommon for a small NGO. IGLHRC made a point of hiring activists, and some turnover is inevitable simply because activists have their own interests and commitments that aren’t strictly tied to the place where they work. They may work at any given NGO for a year or two and then move elsewhere as part of a longer career in human rights and social justice advocacy—and that was certainly the case for many of the interviewees I spoke with during my fieldwork. On one hand, that means that the composition of the staff might change noticeably from year to year. But on the other hand, that brings a steady flow of fresh ideas and perspectives into IGLHRC’s work, and historically, I think a lot of its most innovative projects and reports have been the result of that dynamism.

LGBT struggles in Africa

GBBI

One of the most important contributions of Transnational LGBT Activism is in examining IGLHRC’s shifting priorities, practices, and programs over the years. You provided six chapters along with conclusions. Could you describe the progression of concerns in Transnational LGBT Activism and the key lesson or idea in each chapter?

 

RRT:

The themes of the book are that activists simultaneously construct, promote, and institutionalize human rights, and by doing so, they meaningfully shape what we collectively recognize as human rights.

 

The initial chapters of the book explore the human side of transnational LGBT activism—first, by reconstructing IGLHRC’s history, and second, by looking at who worked at IGLHRC, what perspectives they brought to their work, and how that shaped IGLHRC’s day-to-day advocacy. The subsequent chapters explore how activists at IGLHRC shape what we now recognize as a transnational LGBT rights movement. Chapter Three looks at how brokers conceptualize the category of “LGBT human rights” and how the conjunction of sexual politics and the human rights framework enable projects that other NGOs would be unlikely to undertake. Chapter Four and Chapter Five examine how brokers at IGLHRC promote human rights, and highlight the central role that North-South partnerships and knowledge production play in brokers’ work. They highlight that both phenomena involve complicated dynamics with groups around the globe that activists have to navigate in practice. Chapter Six details how brokers at IGLHRC have institutionalized human rights, and underscores the difficulties and potential payoffs of translating activist demands into actionable protections at the UN and in other intergovernmental spaces. Anthropologists have paid attention to each of these facets of human rights advocacy, but what I think IGLHRC’s work suggests is how these phenomena inform each other—how what happens at the UN affects what we think of as an LGBT human right, which then affects what activists promote in their work and how they go about it.

coc2014HeaderR

GBBI:

In your conclusions you note that, “As a form of law, human rights require categorization for their very operation, and sexuality is a field that, to put it mildly, resists easy categorization.” It struck me that one of the ongoing difficulties of being a broker at IGLHRC was coping with various soft kinds of institutional discipline that determined on a week-to-week basis how much work to put into a certain issue or country. You described an example from Senegal where two men were arrested for public sex but where you were told by an IGLHRC executive to not research or pursue the situation because the case was nominally about the location of the contact and not specifically the homosexuality. Reflecting back five years, don’t you think the guidance to not pursue that case, that kind of institutional discipline, could be considered misplaced by more recent thinking?

 

RRT:

As a matter of principle, I think it’s difficult to defend any absolute valorization of private sex over public sex. I find feminist and queer critiques of the public/private dichotomy compelling, and I think most brokers at IGLHRC understood that sex in private is a luxury that isn’t available to a lot of queer people globally. In practical terms, though, I think those kinds of calls are incredibly contextual. A very relevant consideration—if not the most relevant consideration—would be whether Senegalese groups would find it helpful or harmful for IGLHRC to publicly declare an arrest for public sex unjust. Would a strongly worded letter or press release from a U.S.-based LGBT organization actually help secure the release of the arrested individuals, or would it make their situation worse? What beliefs about a gay agenda would that confirm for Senegalese audiences, and how would it complicate the work of local LGBT or MSM NGOs?

 

In the episode in the book, the issue was dropped and those questions weren’t asked. Without knowing the answers, I’m hesitant to declare the guidance misplaced. I think a challenge for principled activists doing transnational work is that your queer politics always have to coexist with a deep sense of humility and a meaningful commitment to doing no harm. In practice, that’s a constant tension, but the activists I worked with recognized it’s critically important to keep in mind when the people who issue press releases from New York or Cape Town are not necessarily those who will face the consequences.

 

GBBI:

The focus in Transnational LGBT Activism of sketching an organizational anthropology of activism is quite a different lens than, for example, cultural studies and queer theory in the 1990s or recent work on the reshaping of regional political economies and moving outside of more urban enclaves. Why are these kinds of organizational and anthropological studies important for further building LGBT organizations in the coming decades? I am thinking in terms of both poor and repressive regions, such as in much of Africa, with little of the kind of social infrastructure crucial to empowering people to tolerate sexual difference, and, in contrast, more developed regions with higher levels of rights protections, such as Canada, that are still behind in providing resources to a range of communities, including trans, indigenous, migrant, and impoverished demographics.

 

RRT:

I actually think inward-looking analyses are productive in the Global North and Global South for fundamentally the same reasons. They’re a way to reflect on the human aspects of movements that are too often regarded as monolithic or coasting along a predetermined trajectory. And especially in demanding contexts where activists are moving from crisis to crisis, organizational and anthropological studies are a way to pause and assess what’s working and what’s not working, both for the NGO and for the people who work within it. Some of the things I think organizational studies do especially well apply with equal force to Northern, Southern, and transnational NGOs—for example, articulating the motivations that guide activists and organizations, identifying how the personal and political goals within a single organization converge and diverge, and exploring affective dimensions of activism like frustration, burnout, solidarity, and satisfaction. You reach those questions differently with an anthropological toolkit than you would using queer theory or international relations methodologies, and I think that’s indispensable.

IGLHRC iraq_briefings_cover_web

GBBI:

Based on what you have seen succeed at IGLHRC, and other efforts that have faltered, what kinds of organizations would you invest time into for the coming decade? What are you looking for in seeking out and supporting other LGBT and other social justice initiatives that have had as much impact as has IGLHRC?

 

RRT:

I think the anti-LGBT legislation in Uganda and Nigeria and the anti-LGBT propaganda laws in Central and Eastern Europe illustrate that top-down pressure, even with powerful allies, has its limits. I think an enormous amount can still be done by funding smaller NGOs that are moving the needle of public opinion in rural and underserved areas, among people of faith, or in solidarity with other social movements, and doing that in really transformative ways. And that’s true of groups in the Global North as well as the Global South—I think groups like the Safe OUTside the System Collective, the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, and Southerners On New Ground are having an outsize impact relative to their size and budget because they not only speak to the felt needs of queer populations, but are also deeply invested in transforming communities and institutions.

 

GBBI:

What is the most important lesson in Transnational LGBT Activism that activists can apply to organizations for the next twenty-five years?

 

RRT:

Practically speaking, I think Transnational LGBT Activism illustrates that what human rights organizations do—from articulating ideals about the way people should be treated to agenda-setting and norm creation to the codification of laws and policies—is the product of committed activists working tirelessly over time. For identity-based movements, that involves working to ensure that the human rights framework is equipped to recognize and remedy the injustices that marginalized groups are experiencing acutely. The book focuses on LGBT advocacy, but as I discuss in the conclusion, the commitment and creativity involved in that work has also been evident in other identity-based movements—women’s rights, children’s rights, and indigenous rights campaigns, among others—that haven’t shied away from challenging dominant models and insisting that human rights should be flexible enough to accommodate a wider spectrum of human experience. It’s a kind of unapologetic demand for recognition and transformation that I think is very, very powerful.

 

GBBI:

You began this study of IGLHRC partially funded through a Rhodes Scholarship as part of doctoral studies in anthropology at Oxford. Then you combined this work with legal studies at Yale University and more recently you married another 29 year old man who is a Presbyterian chaplain. What kind of social justice projects interest you now?

 

RRT:

I’m still very interested in the questions addressed in Transnational LGBT Activism, but my current work focuses on limitation clauses in human rights law and how assertions of national security, public health, public order, and morality are balanced against the rights of marginalized individuals and groups. My most recent piece in that vein examined the recent rash of anti-LGBT propaganda laws, and argued that human rights bodies should consider children’s rights guarantees when scrutinizing child-protective rationales for rights restrictive laws.

 

GBBI:

What kinds of LGBT organizations and social justice initiatives forming today could have as much impact as has IGLHRC over the last decades and what obstacles do you foresee?

RRT:

I think organizations that take advantage of new technologies have a huge amount of potential to gather and share information, broaden the scope of service delivery, revolutionize fundraising, and expand social movements to rural or underserved areas. Obviously, those technologies raise difficult challenges, not least of which are disparities in access and affordability, difficulties in vetting information as it rapidly circulates, and the question of whether they necessarily generate transparent, democratic, and responsive organizational forms. Over the next twenty five years, though, I think groups that learn to harness the positive potential of new tools will produce a very different model of LGBT advocacy than we’re used to today.

 

Headshot

 

Ryan R. Thoreson. 2014. Transnational LGBT Activism: Working for Sexual Rights Worldwide. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

 

Ryan R. Thoreson is a legal anthropologist. He has worked with a number of LGBT NGOs, including ILGA, IGLHRC, and HRW. His most recent work, “From Child Protection to Children’s Rights: Rethinking Homosexual Propaganda Bans in Human Rights Law,” appears in the January/February 2015 issue of the Yale Law Journal.

 

Gordon Brent Brochu-Ingram is an environmental planner whose work extends to LGBT spaces, organizations and public policy. He authored a chapter on decolonizing Vancouver in the 2015 UBC Press anthology, Queer Mobilizations: Pan-Canadian Perspectives on Activism and Public Policy.

Cameroon map

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Building Queer Infrastructure: Trajectories of Activism and Organizational Development in Decolonizing Vancouver

Lower Mainland 1 Fragment of a photograph taken on September 6, 2014 by an astronaut on the International Space Station: metropolitan Vancouver with all of its suburbs often referred to as “The Lower Mainland”

 

West End

Fragment of a photograph taken on September 6, 2014 by an astronaut on the International Space Station: Vancouver’s West End, Downtown, and False Creek the focus of early LGBT activism and gay male neighbourhood formation in the second half of the Twentieth Century

 

Brochu-Ingram, Gordon Brent. 2015. Building Queer Infrastructure: Trajectories of Activism and Organizational Development in Decolonizing Vancouver. in Queer Mobilizations: Pan-Canadian Perspectives on Activism and Public Policy. Manon Tremblay editor. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. 227 – 249.
PDF copy available:  Brochu-Ingram 2015 Q infrastructure in Queer Mobilizations

Commercial Drive & Main Street

Fragment of a photograph taken on September 6, 2014 by an astronaut on the International Space Station: The Eastside of the City of Vancouver including Main Street and Commercial Drive and bounded in the north by Burrard Inlet and in the south by the Fraser River. Commercial Drive was the fulcrum of lesbian neighbourhood formation and activism in the 1980s and 1990s.

 

 

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Surrey British Columbia

Fragment of a photograph taken on September 6, 2014 by an astronaut on the International Space Station: the sprawling city of Surrey the second most populous municipality in The Lower Mainland that recently elected an openly lesbian councillor.

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Review in press: Christina B. Hanhardt 2013 Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence

brochu-ingram's  safe space graphics 2

Review in press Journal of American Studies (Cambridge University Press)

Christina B. Hanhardt, Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2013, $25.95). Pp. 376. isbn 978 0 8223 5470 3.

Any arc of identities, subcultures and alliances that has made such spectacular social and political gains, as have lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) populations in five short decades across half the world, must have made some exceptional comprises with the state, powerful economic interests, and the turn towards neoliberalism. Yet this field of how certain LGBT political formations have been accommodated by, and sometimes collaborated with, the elites of metropolitan political economies has remained exceptionally under-researched. Moreover, topics involving the questions of the mixed impacts of LGBT activism in contemporary political economies remain largely ‘unfundable’ in the scholarly mainstreams of contemporary political science, urban planning, sociology, and even cultural geography. Emerging from this vacuum, Christina Hanhardt’s Safe Space is a courageous and almost paradigmatic development. Hanhardt’s argument is that while much of successful early LGBT activism depended on coalitions with other marginalised urban populations, by the late 1970s a kind of ‘militant gay liberalism’ created the ideological basis for LGBT municipal politics to drop the coalition-building, especially with blacks and Latinos, in favour of a new ideal for safe neighbourhood space that played into both the hands of real estate speculators gentrifying San Francisco and Lower Manhattan and advocates for quality of life policing and today’s high rates of incarceration.

 

A line of thinking was initiated with Jasbir Puar’s 2007 Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times where the egalitarian patinas of some LGBT alliances was exposed as covering policies and apparatuses that actually functioned quite the opposite. ‘Pinkwashing’ has became a term for the cynical use of supportive positions towards some LGBT populations while actually oppressing other groups such as Palestinians or LGBT people of colour. But aside from rhetorical analyses of contradictions in broad national policy, this line of critique of ‘homonationalism’ has more often been poorly substantiated. By focusing on the urban processes in central neighbourhoods of New York and the San Francisco Bay Area, Safe Space represents something of a methodological breakthrough. Hanhart deftly illuminates a line of more principled LGBT positions and alliances, especially with people of colour, stretching back a half century – along with many more instances of quiet betrayal by white activists couched in a preoccupation with street violence.

 

Safe Space is almost paradigmatic because the work is something of a transitional and often muddled project loyal more to the only partially convincing research methods and analytical frameworks of cultural theory. Hanhart is successful in confirming a half-century dynamic of genuine coalition-building between white LGBT activists and a range of political formations organized by people of colour (some of which were LGBT) being regularly subsumed by alliances dominated by urban elites that in turn regularly marginalized and displaced more vulnerable inner city populations (some of which were LGBT and more often were people of colour). But with all of her copious notes and research, the author barely engages in the critical operational dynamics of gentrification within the context of shifting metropolitan politics. Safe Space only sketches rhetorical positions, opportunism, and moral vacuums, whether well-voiced or obscured as in the case of key local politicians nearly all still active in the Democratic Party elite, along with some of their more perennial backers, the real estate developers. In this way, Safe Space opens an invaluable window on five decades of urban cultural history and political cultures for some now very expensive urban neighbourhoods (so exclusive that large portions of the white LGBT populations have more recently been pushed out). But without a more serious engagement in the research methods and analytical work of political economy, urban planning, or cultural geography, Safe Space more often reduces itself to another American story of idealism, hype, and betrayal. Hanhart’s avowed scepticism of empirical data in general, while being rather selective in her choice primary and secondary sources, for example largely eschewing key records on municipal policy-making, begs a deeper critique of the bias and abuse in earlier social science research rather than her current attachment to the kind of queer utopianism that begun to be articulated by the late José Esteban Muñoz. But then Safe Space is so well researched, and somewhat under-theorized, that Hanhart has effectively committed herself to a much longer investigation that will invariably uncover many new sources, some more quantitative and spatial.

 

At times a bit shrill, Safe Space can best be read along with Sarah Schulman’s 2012 The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination and Amin Ghaziani’s 2014 There Goes the Gayborhood? Both of these monographs are more cogent while based on less careful and passionate research than Safe Space. Hanhard’s first book suggests the beginning of an important new turn in LGBT and urban studies warranting subsequent works engaging in a wider array of sources and many more years of the kind of creative investigations that she could only have begun under the rubric of American Studies.

GORDON BRENT INGRAM

brochu-ingram's safe space graphics 5

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Fragments, edges & matrices: Retheorizing the formation of a so-called Gay Ghetto through queering landscape ecology

2010. Fragments, edges & matrices: Retheorizing the formation of a so-called Gay Ghetto through queering landscape ecology. in Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics & Desire. Cate Sandilands and Bruce Erickson (eds.). Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. 254 – 282.

QE Chapter 9 Ingram

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