I
n A Queer New York, Jack Jen Gieseking offers an important intervention that is interdisciplinary in both inspiration and contribution, taking up subfields in geography – historical, queer, sexualities, urban, feminist – as well as urban studies, queer studies, and history. Through Gieseking’s engagement with the production of space of/for/by lesbian, queer, and tgncp life in New York, we gain some insight into the politics of visibility and barriers to access to and full integration in the City. “Welcome but not feel exactly at home” (103), the title of this commentary, is excerpted from one of Gieseking’s participants. The statement provoked my thinking around the kinds of challenges we wrestle with as well as the opportunities for better (anti-oppressive, anti-racist) research when we center lesbian, dyke, queer, and tgncp geographies. Gieseking’s conversations with his participants demonstrate the politics of queer belonging. Even in a city like New York, a place deemed to be accepting and welcoming of all people, queer belonging is complicated by structures of exclusivity:
“Stuck in their determination to claim a place of their own some- where between the rank-and-file suburbs and towers of finance, (some white, middle-class, and cis-male) lgbtq people began to create a visible community all the while acting as agents of liberal urbanization through racial and economic segregation” (17).
Importantly, Gieseking does not shy away from discussing and analyzing this exclusivity, writing that the book’s contribution “is a queer feminist critique of propertied territoriality-as-liberation, and lesbian-queer resistance, reworking, and resilience in the face of this injustice” (10), setting his intervention apart from the otherwise rich catalog of queer geographies and geographies of sexualities.
A Queer New York is an ambitious project, one that seeks to elucidate the lesbian, dyke and queer geographies of New York City, and yet one that is tremendously overdue. Gieseking’s work is methodologically rigorous, and he discusses the challenges of traditional social science methods and approaches by thinking creatively towards new ways of scholarship, to “queer” methods: “My choice of multigenerational group interviews, mental mapping exercises, artifact-sharing exercises, and archival research” (xxi). In his methodological decisions, Gieseking’s uses something called constellations: “Constellations are a new way of recognizing and piecing together lesbian-queer productions of urban space, an alternative geographical imagination for reading the city that does not succumb to liberation-through-property ownership. Constellations developed from and speak to the embodied, situated values of feminist theory, alongside the antibinary, antinormative, fluid principles of queer theory that highlight desire and sexuality” (10). Gieseking asserts that constellations are shaped by race, class, gender, and generation. As such, we can begin (and only begin) to understand the depth to which race, class, gender and generation operate for lesbians, queers, and tgncp over time in New York City.
The conceptual use of constellations functions as an important methodological and ontological approach for research on queer geographies and geographies of sexualities. Applied to my own work, constellations work as a tool for tracing the temporality of Black lesbian and queer placemaking, both through public lgbtq events and, importantly, through the ways Black lesbian and queer women shape their own experiences and enact agency by residential and labor decisions. In the U.S. South, a region and place largely absent of “visible” queer spaces (challenging territoriality through property ownership, similar to Gieseking’s New Yorkers), most lgbtq people are embedded in the fabric of traditional (if heteronormative) neighborhoods, towns, and rural areas (see Eaves 2017, Scott 2020 Cofield 2021, and Clapp 2022, for example). Using constellations, we can trace networks of lgbtq life that are indeed antinormative. One of my own research participants, after providing her own mental map of western North Carolina, described living in the rural South as being and feeling free. It makes me wonder if we can look at constellations as routes through the ways of being and feeling free for Gieseking’s participants, too.
Returning to Gieseking’s work, I found his ability to talk with and reflect on his positionality and standpoint as well as his intimacy with the subject to be beautifully done. In his work within and among the varied communities across New York City, the consistent reflexivity present in the book is refreshing, attentive, and with care. Included in that are Gieseking’s thoughtful reflections on what was missing from the book and what kinds of conversations he was not able to have, particularly due to encountering research participants and collaborators who do not share his positionality. Gieseking’s storytelling yields an important provocation: what happens when collaborators don’t tell you everything – are not entirely open with the researcher – for whatever reasons. Geographers and social scientists attempting to take on inclusive, anti-oppressive research in queer and trans geographies have to reflect on that question.
My thoughts on reflexivity and positionality in Gieseking’s book brought me to some questions for him: Now that you have some distance, do you think these methodological choices remain appropriate? Do you still find constellations useful? Methodologically speaking, what would be different now? And are the methods in geography inclusive enough to allow us to probe in different ways for broader representations in/about placemaking? To ask a different question, given the archival richness of your project (your use of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, for example), how might we change the archives of lesbian, dyke, queer and tgncp geographies?
Ultimately, A Queer New York offers an alternative reading of the city of New York, an important approach that I believe can be applied by other scholars, in which we look to queer temporalities and expansive sites of coexistence. I am glad that in the epilogue, with some distance from his work and the research process that ended up as this book (with the research taking place ten to fifteen years ago), Gieseking comes back to say that it felt a bit anachronistic to talk about the urban – given that there are other sites of inquiry (rural, digital, global, etc). But there’s so much to be said that queer theory and urban studies and queer and trans geographies have not yet attended to yet. I hope other geographers will consider taking up the charge to tell the stories of alternative urban geographies of lgbtq lives and placemaking.
To conclude, as a Southerner with limited, largely touristic experiences with New York, I admit that I never gave much thought to the complexities and nuances of lesbian, queer, and dyke geographies of the city. I understood that lgbtq life in New York City was and is far more visible than in places I have called home throughout the South. I realized that I have taken for granted the thoughts/realities that the spaces are/would be there if I ever wanted to experience them. Now I understand the relationality and overlaps between there and here. A Queer New York gave me new language to speak about lesbian, queer, and dyke life and a new respect for the labor that has yielded such placemaking in the city.
I am glad to have this book, to share, to wrestle with, to teach with, to cite. Thank you, Jack.
References
Clapp, JF (2022) ‘Who is your neighbor… like, what flag is hanging off their porch?’: Intersectional queer homemaking in North Carolina. Southeastern Geographer 62(2): 147–162.
Cofield, RS (2021) Queer Urban Space Beyond the Gayborhood: Sexuality, Gentrification, and Displacement in Atlanta. PhD Thesis, Florida State University, USA.
Eaves, LE (2017) Black geographic possibilities: On a queer Black South. Southeastern Geographer. 57(1): 80–95.
Scott, D (2020) Intergenerationality, family narratives, and black geographic space in rural North Carolina. Gender, Place and Culture: a Journal of Feminist Geography. 27(7): 984–1006.
LaToya Eaves is a Southern Black queer femme from North Carolina. She is an associate professor of geography at the University of Tennessee and researches Black feminist and queer placemaking in the U.S. South.
