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:

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];

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;

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

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:

white supremacy[lx], racism, and eugenics;
cultural chauvinism (including aesthetic systems) and cultural erasure;
homophobia and transphobia as part of colonial systems;
establishment of colonial languages and erasure of local languages;
settlement, displacement, gentrification, and loss of livelihood and shelter;
slavery, racialized incarceration, and institutionalization;
plantations and ecosystem conversation;
denial of access to food and agricultural production;
denial of the freedom of meeting and socializing (and have sex);
eradication of species (in favour of a small number of species of economic importance);
uneven granting of citizenship;
coerced labour and unjust contracts; and
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.

what data? quantitative? qualitative?
whose data? who controls the data? (data sovereignty)
whose narratives and stories?
whose maps?
who benefits from the data?
whose research methodologies and standards?
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

community needs by social group (‘design programming’)
design features necessary for those social groups
environmental assessment / designs: making location choices and site plans + community context and relations with neighbours
design criteria for the architecture (including security, privacy, economy)
community consultations around initial designs (which communities? how to consult?)
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

community needs by social group (‘design programming’)
design features necessary for those social groups
environmental assessment / designs: making location choices and site plans + community context and relations with neighbours
design criteria for the architecture (including security, privacy, economy)
community consultations around initial designs (which communities? how to consult?)
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