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n this groundbreaking book, Jack Gieseking charts the historical and structural shifts that have led to rapid changes in the urban landscape of lesbian and queer life in New York City (NYC), during the past few decades. Instead of simply asking why lesbian and queer spaces have been shrinking and/or disappearing, Gieseking takes us on a journey across the city, illustrating the shifting and multifaceted ways that lesbian and queer spaces have and continue to exist—albeit, otherwise. Using ethnographic observations and interviews with multiple generations of lesbian, trans, gender non-conforming, and queer persons, Gieseking centers his interlocuters who become our guides throughout this beautifully written ethnography, highlighting the temporal, structural, and the affective in our understanding of the changing geographies of queer lives and spaces in NYC.
A Queer New York makes several invaluable theoretical and empirical innovations. To account for the shrinking lesbian and queer spaces, Gieseking asks us to reformulate how we conceive of queer spaces, not through land and territory ownership, but rather through ephemeral geographies of queer community-building. Gieseking does a brilliant job in illustrating the changing nature of queer NYC through his participants’ own mappings and embodied experiences of the city. The shifting urban landscape of queer NYC as Gieseking posits, cannot be simply understood by referring to essentialist understandings of lesbian and queer life and community, rather they must be situated within historical and ongoing structural changes and inequalities that differentially effect multiple communities.
Gieseking provides us with a novel approach that centers lesbians, trans, and gender non-conforming people who ascribe to “dyke politics” which he defines as “antiracist and anticapitalist politics that fuel queer feminist ideas of community” (2020: 25). His book counters dominant lenses that use the “myth of neighborhood liberation” (4) or the notion that LGBTQ communities can only be liberated through territorial ownership and having access to spatially and geographically bound spaces. Instead, Gieseking presents us with the fascinating concept of constellations to capture other ways of equitable queer world-making that respond to rapid gentrification and the widening of inequalities. Thus, Gieseking emphasizes the importance of fleeting queer and lesbian geographies and communities, which are neither spatially bound nor visible, but which he describes, rather, as constellations that are ephemeral, shifting, and constantly changing.
Stars and constellations are the optics through which we come to understand how Gieseking’s participants move throughout the city and how they create and recreate a queer NYC. Gieseking theorizes constellations as “a production of space that queers fixed, property-owned, territorial models of traditional lgbtq space as the only or best path toward radical liberation” (3). Such a formulation allows Gieseking to focus on socio-economic and material conditions of life and the growing inequalities in NYC, experienced by his interlocuters, illustrating how constellations are innovative responses by lesbians, trans, and gender non-conforming people to “produce space otherwise” (3). Stars, as Gieseking beautifully argues, “are our guides: experiences, ideas, and memories. Stars are how we find our way when the physical landscape fails us” (201). In a city where it might be hard to actually spot stars, Gieseking makes visible the invisible, by analyzing queer and lesbian experiences and space-making strategies.
Constellations allow us to appreciate the fleeting and shifting queer and lesbian geographies and communities that do not depend on demarcated spaces. Building on queer of color critique scholars such as Muñoz (1999), Manalansan (2018), and Ahmed (2006), Gieseking shows how queer spaces are always changing and messy and do not have to be visible nor traceable. Doing so, Gieseking pushes back against neoliberal notions of sexuality and sexual liberation which rely on linear narratives of progress; one which gauges queer life by the presence of mainstream LGBT visibility and gayborhoods. Most importantly, Gieseking skillfully shows us that queer liberation does not have to and perhaps ought not to be, based on demarcated gayhoods or territories that end up reproducing the same exclusions that queers fight against. Dyke politics, however, as Gieseking argues, make it possible for these everchanging constellations to exist in response to ongoing structural inequalities in the city.
When a city fails lesbian and queer residents, what do they do in response? They create something akin to what I call “queer strategies” (Moussawi, 2020: 6) of navigating everyday life. Queer strategies are ways of moving in the world that are messy and might seem counterintuitive and contradictory to normative ways of being (Moussawi 2020). In A Queer New York, constellations become queer strategies, informed by dyke politics, allowing women, trans, and gender non-conforming people to move towards more equitable presents and futures. If traditional LGBTQ visibility in cities becomes a sign of “cultural” progress, what happens when the visible becomes invisible through gentrification and continued economic and social dispossession of people of color, trans, gender non-conforming, and working class and poor queers? These constellations show us how queer world-making does not have to be tethered to territory, ownership, and further gentrification.
Gieseking provides a fresh and exciting methodology which relies on the embodied knowledge of his participants. Throughout the book we see and engage with useful mental maps that the participants themselves drew as they explained and charted their movements across the city. This grounds-up approach allows us to experience Gieseking’s interlocutors as knowledge producers, countering traditional GIS mappings of the city—which might be used as technologies of surveillance. In addition, Gieseking’s reflexivity in presenting his concept to his interlocutors and their responses was fascinating and a much-needed intervention in collaborative research.
This indispensable book will without a doubt make us rethink what it means to build, inhabit and experience queer worlds and spaces in other cities and landscapes. The book raises so many pertinent questions for us to sit with, especially with regards to equitable queer world-making. While reading the book, I couldn’t help but think of the possible links that A Queer New York could have made to other sites. I say that, since constellations show us that queer life making does and can exist without territory and ownership, a strategy that racially minoritized persons and women, trans, non-binary, and queer people in some global south settings also do employ. I learned so much from Gieseking’s book and if given the chance to revisit my own work, I would be taking more methodological risks and I would be more vulnerable in my reflexivity. In addition to all the invaluable theoretical and empirical contributions, and Gieseking’s witty humor, this book is a prime example of how to write with such clarity, vulnerability, and care. I thank Jack for putting this book out in the world and sharing it with us.
References
Ahmed S (2006) Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press.
Manalansan MF IV (2018) Messy mismeasures: Exploring the wilderness of queer migrant lives. South Atlantic Quarterly 117(3): 491–506.
Moussawi G (2020) Disruptive Situations: Fractal Orientalism and Queer Strategies in Beirut. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Muñoz JE (1999) Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Ghassan Moussawi (he/him) is associate professor of sociology and gender and women’s studies at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign. His research examines the intersections of queer of color critique, queer geographies, violence, and empire.
