Dissertation: Here, There, and Everywhere: Culture, Space, and the Search for Queer Communities
2024 Martin P. Levine Dissertation Award, Honorable Mention
Despite recent research and popular media reports about how LGBTQIA+ people in cities have assimilated into the mainstream and have become "post-gay," my research shows how LGBTQIA+ people in the Boston region call upon many, varied places and spaces to affirm different parts of their sexual identity. Utilizing six years of ethnographic and in-depth interview data of LGBTQIA+ people and communities in the Boston and Providence region, I show that LGBTQIA+ people form communities that span neighborhoods, cities, states, and between physical and digital worlds. However, they do so unevenly. The availability of distinctive spaces and places, one's privilege in accessing different areas, and how one frames their own sexual and political identities shape their divergent paths to affirm their sense of self. As a result, place-based inequities and policies shape the different routes queer people in this region take to be themselves. Factors such as housing, education, relative wealth, transportation, and racial identity affect the ways in which LGBTQIA+ people navigate place and their own lives. Overall, my research underscores the impacts of urban- and state-level policies, access to higher education, and relative privileges on queer people's journeys through more than just their neighborhood or city.
"Cruising Boston and Providence: The Roles of Place and Desire for Reflexive Queer Research(ers)" in Ethnography (2022)
Feminist methodological interventions have advanced our understanding of reflexivities, leading us to question our own positions and intersections in relation to the field and those we study. More recent methodological contributions from queer authors add notions of fluid researcher identities and researcher erotics to reflexivities. However, such interventions frame reflexivity as a research practice applied to the research process or occurrences in the field. This article argues for a continuous, although never complete, use of reflexivity that addresses the researcher’s personal desires and orientations—there before the research started—that can influence what topics we study, the questions we ask, the methods and sites we choose, how we interact with others in the field, and our analyses. I use ethnographic data on gay and queer spaces in Boston, Massachusetts, and Providence, Rhode Island, to demonstrate the utility of this reflexivity, especially for sex research.
Link to article: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/14661381211067457
"We're Here, and We're Queer--And Over There, Sometimes: Heterogeneous Gay Placemaking"
[ Under Revise and Resubmit at City & Community ]
Recent scholarship on sexuality and place notes how places associated with sexual minorities are declining in physical number and cultural significance due to concomitant changes in urban development, public acceptance, and changing identities described as assimilative and normalizing. In contrast, I find that gay urbanites located in the Boston, MA and Providence, RI urban region call upon and make meanings of a diverse array of institutional resources to affirm distinctive facets of their sexual identities and to (episodically) satisfy their personal, social, sexual, and cultural needs. Drawing upon ethnographic and interview data from the Boston-Providence region, this paper shows how this heterogeneous placemaking is sustained by the variety in how these gay urbanites understand their own identities, along with the accessibility of a range of distinctive regional sites important to their identities and the privilege to access and utilize these sites. Ultimately, this paper offers a framework that shifts questions of queer placemaking from “where,” to “how” and “when,” showing that there is variance within individuals’ understandings of self and the sites they find meaningful that does not rely upon reductive distinctions between normative or not, nor a unidirectional flow from one typology of area to another.
"Sexualities and the City: Changing Communities and Geographies, Changing Literatures"
Book chapter co-authored with Japonica Brown-Saracino, PhD
Oxford Handbook of Urban Sociology
[ Forthcoming, Volume Under Contract ]
In this book chapter, we provide an account of scholarship on urban sociology and sexualities. Though the topic of sexualities within urban sociology is gaining attention, we note that scholars must be attuned to the field's overreliance on studying neighborhoods that tend to be homogenous in terms of gender, sexuality, race, and class. These neighborhoods--termed "gayborhoods" due to their concentration of gay and lesbian residences, organizations, and institutions--tend to dominate the study of place and sexualities despite more recent literature noting how such enclaves are often exlusionary on the basis of race, gender, class, and immigration status. Consequently, much of the literature on place and sexulity tends to center white, cisgender, middle- and upper-class gay male culture. Instead, by pulling from related academic traditions such as queer theory, geography, and history, we argue for an approach to the study of sexualities and place that looks beyond certain kinds of Institutions and neighborhoods. Such an approach can help broaden our understanding of queer communities--particularly those that remian understudied.