Constellations: The Limits and Inspirations of Mapping Queer Cities of Survival & Desire
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Constellations:
The Limits and Inspirations of
Mapping Queer Cities of Survival &
Desire
Jack Gieseking
@jgieseking
Department of Geography
University of Kentucky
I. What Comes Before / Approach II. Stories & Landscapes / Seeing Constellations III. Radical Geographical Imaginations / Mapping Queer Space IV. Public Engagement / Reckoning with Queer Maps V. What Comes After / Next Steps
What the map cuts up, the story cuts across.
- Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life
Yet, what if the stories of your participants
are already “cut up”?
The cut of the vertical line from history
To be cut off from signs of intimacy, sexual, racial, and/or gender, &c.
To share a part of which has been cut and divided
- Sara Ahmed, Queer Orientations
What the story cuts up, the map (and the dataviz) also cuts across.
I. What Comes Before / Approach II. Stories & Landscapes / Seeing Constellations III. Radical Geographical Imaginations / Mapping Queer Space IV. Public Engagement / Reckoning with Queer Maps V. What Comes After / Next Steps
LGBTQ Production of Space
• “LGBTQ” = bars, neighborhoods,
and cities
• Territoriality & publics of ethnic
enclave model framed as LGBTQ
liberation
• Legitimization and rights via
gentrification and territory-making
• Lesbians in “networks,”
“concentrations,” “spatialized
communities,” etc.
• Little to no consideration of
racialized gayborhoods
Martin Levine, “Gay Ghetto” 1979
Constellations:
production of space that
forefronts the multi scalar
production of lezqueer
places that come and go
like stars in the sky in
fragmented and fleeting
patterns—rather than
What if there was a map of the
territorial models—and
are linked and bound by places NYC lesbians and queers
the bodies of women and most often identified with or
trans & gender non- reminisced about?
conforming people
moving between them
(Lesbian-Queer)
New York City
The Bronx
Manhattan
Queens
Brooklyn
Staten Island
AQNY Methods
How do you tell the story of those made “invisible”?
• Interviewing 47 self- • Archival research
identified lesbians and
• 382 organizational
queers across 3 generations
records
about their everyday lives
• 25 years of publications
• Came out btw 1983-2008
• Spent most of time in NYC • Participatory action
online focus group to
• Shared mental maps &
co-construct theory
artifacts
1983-2008 NYC
Images: © Moral Majority, Levine Roberts, Keith Haring, n/a,
Queer Nation, Lesbian Avengers, GO, gonyc.gov
Lesbian-Queer
Geographical Imagination
The reason why I keep these keys is
because . . . I moved out of my mother’s
house after I came out. She didn’t kick me
out but it was sort of…respectful. I didn’t Alex ‘98’s Map
Desi ‘91’s Map
want to be there taking girls. ... ever since
then, at seventeen, I always was living with
a girlfriend. I have never not lived with a
girlfriend. . . . I just moved from my last
place—where these keys are [holds up one
set of keys]—to my new place [holds up the
other set] where these are. [laughs] And I Greenwich
still go back and forth to get my mail. . . . Village LES
My keys say it all. And, you know [holds up
a couple of keys], the keys [for the place
Bed Stuy
where I volunteer], [holds up another
couple of keys] and the keys [for the place
where I work]. Which is why I still have
these.
-Alex ’98 (Black, middle class)Constellations:
production of space that
forefronts the multi scalar
production of lezqueer
places that come and go
like stars in the sky in
fragmented and fleeting
patterns—rather than
What if there was a map of the
territorial models—and
are linked and bound by places NYC lesbians and queers
the bodies of women and most often identified with or
trans & gender non- reminisced about?
conforming people
moving between themIt is no accident that queer orientations have been described
by Foucault and others as orientations that follow a diagonal
line, which cut across "slantwise" the vertical and horizontal
lines of conventional genealogy…
- Sara Ahmed citing Bell and Binnie (2000)A Queer New York is
the
• Mapping Lesbian and Queer Lines of
Desire: Constellations ofQueer Urban
Space (Society & Space, 2020)
• Crossing Over into Territories of the
Body: Urban Territories, Borders, and
Lesbian-Queer Bodies in New York
City (Area, 2015)
• Useful Instability: the Queer Social and
Spatial Production of the Lesbian
Herstory Archives (Radical History
Review, 2015)
• Urban Margins on the Move:
Rethinking LGBTQ Inclusion by
Queering the Place of the
Gayborhood (Berliner Blätter, 2015)
Two book chapters (2016, 2013)I. What Comes Before / Approach II. Stories & Landscapes / Seeing Constellations III. Radical Geographical Imaginations / Mapping Queer Space IV. Public Engagement / Reckoning with Queer Maps V. What Comes After / Next Steps
It seems to “point” to the loneliness of the lesbian life, where
the lesbian is "on her own," cut off from the family, and where
her body is lived as an injury to others, which is “conscious of
feeling all wrong.”
- Sara Ahmed on The Well of LonelinessQueer Maps
Knopp & Brown Knopp & Brown +
• Queering the Map: The Productive
Tensions of Colliding Epistemologies
(2008, Annals)
• Participants argues over what is
“queer” enough to be on the
map
• Queer stand-in rdg on most GIS
syllabi
• Always risk for many in revealing
queer spaces/identities regardless of
when/where
How then to spatially model queer life?Queer Big Data
Queer Big Data
Queer Big Data
Queer Big Data
A Queer New York
(the website)An Everyday Queer New York
(the website, its data, and the GIS within & beyond)
Lesbian Herstory Archives
Est. 1974 (now in Brooklyn, NY)
Largest lesbian archives in the world Image c/o Text Art Archives, Bury Art Museum 2016AEQNY Labors
How do you map
the stories of those
made “invisible”?
• 10 years
• 12 collaborators to
date
• 3 small grants ($7k)
• Est. 1000+ hours of
laborAn Everyday Queer New York
(the website)An Everyday Queer New York
(the website)Present & Future Projects:
An Everyday Queer New York
Continue interactive map build
• Layers: publications, orgs,
participants’ maps/stories
• Census: race, income, rent,
property value
Conducting spatial analysis
• Gentri cation patterns with
sexuality, gender, & race in
conversation
• Cluster / migrations
fiI. What Comes Before / Approach II. Stories & Landscapes / Seeing Constellations III. Radical Geographical Imaginations / Mapping Queer Space IV. Public Engagement / Reckoning with Queer Maps V. What Comes After / Next Steps
How do you navigate that part of the LGBTQ history that has kept
hidden for a reason with telling the history as its whole self?
- Megan SpringateTrends in Queer Digital
Maps
May 11 2001 roundtable hosted virtually by ONE Archives, led by Jack SwabLGBTQ America (National Parks Service)
OUTgoing (NYC gay bars)
Queering the Map
2018 trolling then shutdown for a few months
2018+ take it back
To have a share in something is to be invested in the value of
that thing. The word itself, we might note, comes from the Old
English word scearu, which refers to cutting or division. So the
word "share," which seems to point to commonality, depends
on both cutting and on division, where things are cut up and
distributed among others.
- Sara AhmedI. What Comes Before / Approach II. Stories & Landscapes / Seeing Constellations III. Radical Geographical Imaginations / Mapping Queer Space IV. Public Engagement / Reckoning with Queer Maps V. What Comes After / Next Steps
What the map cuts up, the story cuts across.
- Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life
Yet, what if the stories of your participants
are already “cut up”?
The cut of the vertical line from history
To be cut off from signs of intimacy, sexual, racial, and/or gender, &c.
To share a part of which has been cut and divided
- Sara Ahmed, Queer Orientations
What the story cuts up, the map (and the dataviz) also cuts across.How do we protect the privacy who live in those
places now while still having the power of a dot
on a map?
That sounds so trite but that’s where we are in
queer history. These constellations of dots on a
map are so meaningful and so powerful.
And wouldn’t it be nice if it wasn’t anymore but
that’s what we have to wrestle with.
- Megan Springate, create of LGBTQ HistoryPin,
map of U.S. National Park ServiceTrends in Queer Digital
Maps
• Queers still need evidence of our existence
• Little range of what “queer” is
• OFTEN bar/urban forward
• OR single experience forward
• AND limited archival materials
• Little time/money/energy/labor/skills to develop projects
• Repeating Brown & Knopp: who defines “queer”
• Risks = trolling, violence, rejection
• Racial/classed/gendered temporalities of geographies of sexualities
• Reproducing dots on a map without change / growth
• Need data triangulation to capture qual-quan (Leszczynski)
• BUT IT REMAINS TO KEEP ASKING: WHAT IS QUEER MAPPING?Queer Activist Mapping?
(beyond archives…)What the map cuts up, the story cuts across.
- Michel de Certeau
What the story cuts up and across, the map also cuts up and across
to afford other ways of telling marginalized groups’ stories.Applications/software/platforms I use:
• Graphing: Excel, R, HighCharts w/
JSFiddle
• Text Analysis: Voyant, Wordle
• Mapping: QGIS, ArcGIS, CartoDB,
Mapbox, OSM
• Social Network Analysis: Gephi
• Coding: Python
• Websites: Wordpress, Jekyll
Thank you.
• Social Media: Twitter, Facebook,
Instagram, Tumblr, Snapchat
Jack Gieseking • Citation Management Software: Zotero
@jgieseking
jgieseking.org
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