Dissertation: Here, There, and Everywhere: Culture, Space, and the Search for Queer Communities
2024 Martin P. Levine Dissertation Award, Honorable Mention
My dissertation argues that urban conditions directly impact how queer communities form, often unevenly, ultimately delimiting or conditioning certain lifestyles and cultures. Through seven years of in-person and digital ethnography, along with 26 in-depth interviews of LGBTQIA+ people and communities in the Boston, Massachusetts and Providence, Rhode Island region, I show how LGBTQIA+ people are impelled to form communities that span across formal place boundaries, such as neighborhoods, cities, states, and even across digital and physical spaces. Various urban-level pressures, such as the cost of living, gentrification, and city regulations, compress non-normative LGBTQIA+ subjectivities and cultural offerings in one place while opening these ways of being elsewhere. Understanding how queer people must navigate many places to forge social, romantic, sexual, and political ties, this project underscores the importance of mobility to maintain a strong sense of belonging amongst urban inequalities.
"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 Queer, We're Here--But Not Over There: How Homonormativity Shapes Placemaking"
[ Under Revise and Resubmit at City & Community ]
Recent scholarship on sexuality and space notes how spaces associated with sexual minorities are declining in physical number and cultural significance due to concomitant changes in urban development, public acceptance, and changing identities. Adding to this literature, I argue that homonormativity—a politics that upholds dominant heterosexual culture and institutions while depoliticizing identity—affects how gay urbanites understand and move through spaces. This ultimately shapes how they engage with urban institutions and structure their social lives. Consequently, this leads some gay people away from specific events, spaces, organizations, and communities that have, historically, had significance for LGBTQIA+ populations. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data from Boston, Massachusetts and Providence, Rhode Island, this paper reveals how broadly available cultural values (in this case, homonormativity) influence urbanites’ social choices, institutional affiliations, and how they move about the city. Ultimately, this paper offers a framework that shifts questions of queer placemaking from “where” to “how” and “when,” showing that homonormative cultural values can delimit who, what, and where is “normal” or “other.”
"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.