Queer Eyes on Cities, Places, and (Our)Stories: A Reading List for a Queerer Geography
To accompany our Places conversation, “Queer Maps, Data, Devices, and Resistance,” we’ve put together a selection of books, essays, videos, maps, and other digital media around queer activities, along with reflections related to geography and mapmaking; archiving and storytelling; data science and critical digital studies; and activism and empowerment.
These resources encompass a variety of formats, including essays and scholarly papers, standalone volumes, digital maps, and other visualizations. Each has been chosen for its contribution to the discourse surrounding queer narrations and traces, the critical usage of digital media to foster self-empowerment, the archiving of spatial traces, and the creation of maps and other visualizations. These resources document interventions, places, and relations that have emerged in the context of LGBTQ+ cultures, and reflect on the creation and use of digital media.
Of course, this (or any queer) list is forever incomplete. The reader is invited to proceed, remix, and add other resources from their perspective. Happy exploring!
I Love Bildwechsel
Founded 1979, ongoing
As we carry out projects, conduct research, and establish gathering places, other initiatives that shine their friendly light on the horizon can provide inspiration and help us to improve our own activities. One of these beacons is Bildwechsel, centered in Hamburg, Germany, with branches in other European cities. Bildwechsel (“image change”) is a feminist artists’ initiative; self-financed and self-organized, the umbrella organization has been dedicated for 45 years to “promoting women+(’s) art and culture in the audiovisual media arts.” Both a brick-and-mortar space and a website, Bildwechsel operates as an art venue, event forum, and international network, and also houses audiovisual archives, material collections, and an extensive library.
"Image Change: A Feminist Queer Film Archive"
2013
This video gathers testimonials from women+ who have contributed to the Bildwechsel project. People like durbahn, an artist and Bildwechsel co-founder, speak about the emergence of video in its early years “All of a sudden there was a medium with which I could get everything: words, pictures, sounds, music, persons, and I can show to everybody immediately.” (This short video is part of the work “videocastle,” by durbahn. Feel welcome to poke around!)
A Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queers, 1983-2008
NYU Press, 2020
This book presents an historical and cultural geography of the lesbian-queer role in the politics and economies of New York City over several decades. Through multi-generational group interviews with 47 lesbians and queers (women, trans, and gender nonconforming people), Gieseking traces the ways in which these participants and others like them have gentrified and been gentrified out of the purportedly queer city of New York. Gieseking proposes the image of “constellations” to represent lezbiqueertrans spaces, rather than relying on the “myth of neighborhood liberation” as a colonizing claim to territory. Constellations represent lezbiqueertrans places as fragmented and fleeting; they appear, shift, and disappear like stars in the sky, and it’s the paths we take between them that build our worlds.
An Everyday Queer New York
2020
An interactive web-based companion to A Queer New York, allowing the author to share more stories than could fit into the book. Gieseking’s mixed ethnographic/archival research led to a rethinking of “data” as a form of constructed knowledge. Who gets to record their queer history, and who gets to access it? How could more queer history reach more people, especially queer people?
The LBQT*S Dating & Hookup Apps study
2023-ongoing
Gieseking created this ongoing study to explore the online dating and hookup practices of people who identify as lesbian, bisexual, queer, trans*, and sapphic (LBQT*S), or a related gender-and-sexual identity. Compared to gay men or cis straight people, little is known about why and how LBQT*S people use such apps. The online survey will take 20-35 minutes, depending on how much you wish to share about your experiences. The questionnaire is a bit long, but it’s also juicy, and what you share will help LBQT*S people to better understand ourselves and our dating lives.
“Queering the Map: The Productive Tensions of Colliding Epistemologies”
Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 2008
Knopp and Brown thought they were doing a small project in 2008, when they invited LGBTIQ+ people of different ages, races, generations, classes, and gender identities to create a historic map of queer Seattle. Their research drew them to consider in more detail the complicated question of what “counts” as queer, and to whom, as well as concerns about marking a place as queer, even retrospectively. This article is widely read and taught in GIS and mapping courses, even though queer critical GIS work remains rare.
Queering The Map 2.0: A Roundtable About Interactivity, Temporality & Ambiguity in Queer Digital Maps 2021
Queer cartographer Jack Swab interviewed a panel of cartographers (including Jack Jen Gieseking) about interactive maps of queer public history, touching on topics such as inspiration for the projects; issues in design, maintenance, archiving, and representation; and data access, availability, and privacy.
In the thirteen years since the important article “Queering the Map” by Michael Brown and Larry Knopp was published, interactive maps have emerged as key to navigating and documenting queer spaces, both historical and contemporary. The spatiality of queerness has shifted dramatically; as gayborhoods decline in size and importance, apps like Grindr, Tinder, HER, Scruff, and Lex (among many others) have reimagined how queer individuals build community. This same period has seen a growing interest in queer pasts, along with efforts to document and interpret these histories. In this roundtable, interactive maps and queer geodata are discussed by the creators of both historic and contemporary queer cartographies, seeking to better understand the changes, challenges, and opportunities presented by their interactive media.
“Toward Queering the Map 2.0: A Conversation with Michael Brown, Larry Knopp, and Bo Zhao”
ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2022
In conversation with Knopp and Brown, as well as their current collaborator Bo Zhao, Swab and Gieseking present an intellectual history of the original 2008 article, while continuing to ask who creates mapping knowledge and how. Conversation participants examine longstanding tensions and emerging issues related to privacy, representation, and the political economy of geospatial technologies.
“We’re Here! We’re Queer?: Activist Archives and Archival Activism”
Lambda Nordica, 2010
The Norwegian art historian Mathias Danbolt reflects on activism and the archiving of activists’ events and movements as mutually dependent: his concept of “Activist Archives and Archival Activism” is described in connection with a concrete event: a demonstration by international queer activists in Copenhagen in the 2000s. Danbolt reflects on whether the retrieval of “archived” slogans — slogans that had been reused in this demonstration, such as “We’re Here! We’re Queer!” or “Out of the bars and into the streets!” — might entrench traditional affects and epistemologies, but might at the same time become sources of empowerment, as this re-use of earlier practices in a different context can help to create new social movements.
Feels Right: Black Queer Women and the Politics of Partying in Chicago
Duke University Press, 2023
Kemi Adeyemi spent over a decade going to Black queer women’s parties in Chicago, to trace how the music and dancing in these clubs resists anti-Blackness and anti-femmeness. Adeyemi’s ethnographies give you the feeling of being on the dance floor, while critically analyzing what has made these gatherings what they are: parties that occur once a month or less frequently, and sometimes have to move — and why specific kinds of music (slo beats versus R&B, for example) encourage specific audiences and experiences. While DIY parties are often infrequent and itinerant, the fact that queer life is primarily shaped by this kind of venue means that core aspects of social life can feel uncertain. The book, which is short and captivating, is the first academic monograph on Black queer women’s spaces, expanding the small body of amazing work by scholars and activists like Audre Lorde, Nikki Lane, and Mignon Moore.
Queer Nightlife
University of Michigan Press, 2021
Adeyemi co-edited theisfield-defining collection with Kareem Khubchandani and Ramon H. Rivera-Servera. It’s an accessible and brilliant read. Contributing authors are scholars, activists, dancers, party organizers, and/or more in queer nightlife scenes, and chapters span the world’s geographies as much as they span gender, race, and class perspectives.
The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination
University of California Press, 2012
Schulman has written many amazing books, but the best for thinking about queer maps and spaces is The Gentrification of the Mind. Schulman describes how the deaths of so many gay men in Greenwich Village and other gayborhoods in the 1990s led to evictions of partners who weren’t permitted to put their names on leases, and to the skyrocketing rental value of these apartments. She also writes beautifully about the (then) forgotten work of Kathy Acker, which helped to bring Acker back to readers' attention as a major queer writer. What “lost imaginations” could we yet harness if we knew more about the histories of our places and people?
Information Activism A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies
Duke University Press, 2020
Writing about “women who responded to their frustrated desire for information about lesbian history and lesbian lives by generating the information themselves,” Cait Mckinney describes both predigital and digital media practices by activists who have sought to build social networks, news-exchange formats, informational data-clusters, and structured history archives. These women wanted to overcome the limitations of their own perspectives and activities. Each chapter describes a different media-access form from the 1970s to the present: newsletters sent by snail mail; landline hotlines to spread news of local events; archives of analogue and digital resources.
A Hands Routine
2012
He is driving and I am sitting next to him, sometimes I reach to his side and put my hand in his, other times he reaches to my side and puts his hand in mine. We roam, we talk, and we look. Holding hands becomes a risk, a secret act, fun for being dangerous. We hold and unhold, depending on where we are, who is next to us, and what is next to us. The holding is interrupted: by a traffic light, a higher adjacent car, a rose seller, a beggar, a delivery boy, a passerby, a heated conversation, a jealous gaze ...
As a contribution to the book Queer Geographies: Beirut, Tijuana, Copenhagen, edited by Lasse Lau, Mirene Arsanios, and Felipe Zúñiga-González (Museet for Samtidskunst, 2014) and the Queer Geography Workshop (organized by Lau) from which the book emerged, the Lebanese artist Omar Mismar created a time-map, tracking memories of travel by car with his partner through Beirut. Each situation, each encounter provokes a reaction noted on the map, notating a fascinating rhythm of desire and risk.
"Reasonable Urbanism"
Not-Forgetting: Contemporary Art and the Interrogation of Mastery
University of Chicago Press, 1999
This book chapter reflects thoughtfully on the role of the subject in the city. Deutsche considers the queer novel Ready To Catch Him Should He Fall by Neil Bartlett (Serpent’s Tail, 2017), in which Boy and Older Man meet at The Bar:
Outside The Bar there is a homophobic city full of fear, inside a city of homoerotic refuge. But Barlett dismisses this contrast as quickly as he sets it up. Just as The Bar is a city that has taken up residence in London, so London takes up residence in The Bar. The bar is large and “had practically all the streets of the city in it, the men there were from all different neighbourhoods.” And by allowing itself a form of eroticism that is forbidden in the city, The Bar also brings the eroticism of urban space into its interior — the wandering, the chance encounters, the encounters with strangers, dark corners, public initiations, bodies that come together and move apart again. The bar repeats and transforms the characteristics of the city …
In 1968, Henry Lefebvre articulated the “Right to the City,” which recognizes a person’s right to be different from, but to have the same democratic rights as, any other subject. Deutsche ends her essay with an argument against urbanisms based on so-called “quality of life.” She proposes instead a democratic city indebted to Lefebvre, but with an important modification, based on Michel de Certeau in his book The Practice of Everyday Life (translated by Steven Rendell and published by the University of California Press, 1984): the understanding of a city not as a conglomeration of separate neighborhoods, but as an unlimited and iterating terrain, a city that multiplies through our “wandering around.”
Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
New York University Press, 2019
This wonderful book comprises two contrasting yet complementary parts: a very personal description of sexual encounters between strangers in New York City’s rough, pre-Disneyfied Time Square/42nd Street red light district, from the 1960s to the ’80s, and a sociopolitical essay about the significance of contacts (as in contingent meetings with strangers), in contrast to networking (as a method of purposeful self-positioning in social relations). The former can be not only cross-racial but cross-class, which is rare in our typically siloed spaces of living and working.
Delany’s memoir belongs to this reading list not only for its strong challenge to the sterility of urban redevelopment, often accompanied as it is by an intention to “normalize” everyday life, but also as a praise song to one of the most important aspects of urban existence: being a stranger among others, with all the possibilities of making “contact” and creating relationships, however uncertain, fluid, and fleeting they may be.
Gender, Sexuality, & Space Reading List
From 2006 to 2016, a period in which academic and popular literature that critically addresses dynamics of queerness and space was still relatively difficult to find, Gieseking maintained the Gender, Sexuality, & Space Reading List on their website. Readings ranged from memoir to architecture, geography to developmental psychology, art history to comics. Now, that the citations have become too numerous, Gieseking updates the list less frequently, but it remains a major resource for anyone interested in early works of queer geography.
A Thousand Channels
Thomas Böker, Dafne Jaramillo and Ulf Treger built the noncommercial mapping platform A Thousand Channels in 2022, as part of a multiyear project researching queer narratives and creating collective mappings of related histories and spatial practices. The platform is intended as a practical tool for spatial visualization with a focus on LGBTIQ+ topics.