Forthcoming in Area Special Issues on Bodies, Borders and Territories – Fall 2015 Crossing Over into Territories of the Body: Urban Territories, Borders, and Lesbian-­‐
Queer Bodies in New York City Jen Jack Gieseking Digital and Computational Studies, Bowdoin College Email: [email protected] Abstract: The geopolitical focus on territory as a fixed and cohesive nation-­‐state simultaneously conceals the ways territories form and are operationalized at other scales. At the same time, the fleeting ability of minority bodies to make and retain cohesive, property-­‐owned territories overlooks the limited agency that marginalized groups possess while they continually reproduce social territories as they navigate their everyday lives. Lesbians, gay, bisexuals, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) people began to develop urban territories—often dubbed neighborhoods or gay districts or villages—in which to find, build, and share a sense of safety and refuge. Yet all urban territories are not neighborhoods or districts because not all groups possess the power and capital to secure their boundaries through property ownership. In this paper I draw specifically upon the experiences of urban lesbians’ and queer women’s often overlapping public displays of affection (PDA) and harassment in New York City to demonstrate the shifting dimensions of territory in these women’s lives beyond the neighborhood/district model. I make use of two cases: the popular “gayborhood” of Greenwich Village in Manhattan and the border zone of Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn. Using a queer-­‐feminist theoretical approach and drawing on Elden’s geopolitical theorization of territorial “volume,” I argue that a broader meaning of territory is possible. When lesbian and queer women produce and then return to them or their former sites, they experience what feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa describes as “crossing over.” This approach highlights the role of the body for rethinking social and cultural territories and borders across scales. I suggest that territory plays a significant role at the urban scale as operationalized through the everyday movements of bodies. Key words: territory, neighborhood, border, body, lesbian, queer, women, gender, LGBTQ, urban, geopolitical Do not cite, excerpt, or reprint this version.
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Crossing Over into Territories of the Body: Urban Territories, Borders, and Lesbian-­‐
Queer Bodies in New York City Jen Jack Gieseking Territories and borders use a biopolitical regime to regulate the movement of bodies into pre-­‐determined, recognizable identities, all the while flows of bodies constantly redefine territories and borders. Stuart Elden writes how much of the work on territories and borders focuses on the former approach and dwells on the geobodies of states rather than the corporeal and social bodies of their citizens. Elden states, “Territory is traditionally understood to be a bounded space under the control of a group of people, usually a state. Recognizing the vertical dimension of territory shows that territory is a volume rather than an area…” (2009, xv, xxii). A historic myopia toward reading territories solely at the scale of the geopolitical replicates masculinist, heteronormative, and colonial perspectives on place-­‐making. Such frameworks eclipse the “vertical dimension” and “volume” of difference within territories Elden highlights. A focus on territory as a fixed and cohesive nation-­‐state simultaneously conceals the ways territories form and are operationalized at other scales. Furthermore, the fleeting ability of minority bodies to make and retain cohesive, property-­‐
owned territories overlooks the limited agency that marginalized groups possess while they nonetheless continually reproduce social territories as they navigate their everyday lives. 1
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In the 20th century, lesbians, gay, bisexuals, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) people began to develop urban territories—what are often dubbed LGBTQ neighborhoods or gay districts or villages—in which to find, build, and share a sense of safety and refuge within a like-­‐minded community. Yet all urban territories are not neighborhoods or districts because not all groups possess the power and capital to secure their boundaries through property ownership. Conceptualizations of territory therefore require refining. In this paper I draw specifically upon the experiences of urban lesbians’ and queer women’s often overlapping public displays of affection (PDA) and harassment in New York City to demonstrate the shifting dimensions of territory in these women’s lives. I make use of two cases: the popular “gayborhood” of Greenwich Village in Manhattan and the border zone of Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn. These locations balance the well-­‐known with the invisibilized, urban territory with its border. These arguments develop from my larger research project with lesbians and queer women regarding their experience of social and spatial justice in New York City from 1983 to 2008. Using a queer-­‐feminist theoretical approach in dialogue with geographical work on territories and geographies of sexualities literature, I argue that a broader meaning of territory is possible. This approach highlights the role of the body for rethinking social and cultural territories and borders across scales. I direct these ideas to urban geographic theorists who overlook the use of territory at the scale of the city. Territory plays a significant role at the urban scale as operationalized through the everyday movements of bodies. When lesbian and queer women produce and return to these former sites—
whether seeking safety, accessibility, comfort, or meaning—they experience what feminist 2
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theorist Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) describes as “crossing over.” As such, urban lesbians and queer women carve out public space for themselves in intermittent iterations across formal neighborhood boundaries that are not defined. With less political and economies power, these women produce shared material spaces as driven by sociality and fleeting, fragmented economies rather than through the more longer term social and economic territorialization associated with the gayborhoods of gay men. Territorial Qualities and Possibilities, LGBTQ and Otherwise Elden’s description of territorial verticality and voluminosity reveals that something and someone lies within territory to give it meaning. In comparison, a neighborhood is understood as being “dominated by residential uses,” “walkable” in scale, and a (physical) territory that is often conflated with (social) communities that live within those territories (see Gregory et al. 2009, 494). Gay districts are clusters of commercial, political, residential, and cultural institutions that can overlap with a gay neighborhood or exist as smaller regions of a city or town (Ruting 2008). In cities like New York City, neighborhoods and gay districts are produced materially and through the imagination not only by social cohesion, physical boundaries, and historical events, but are also sanctioned into formal boundaries by the city government and other urban economic players more broadly. Much of what defines territories beyond the residential qualities of neighborhoods and multifunctional aspects of gay districts is the use of public space and the more malleable boundaries of territories which this paper takes up. Borders, writes David Newman, “shape the ordering of society” and mark entries 3
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and exits that spatialize the exclusion, segregation, and integration of “the constant reterritorialization of human difference, at a variety of spatial scales” (2010, 773, 776). Bodies, therefore, become the focus of territories most often at their borders. Feminist and queer thinking looks to bodies foremost, which affords understandings of practices, processes, and ways of being that refuse the normative. Rather than be shut out at these borders or invoke separatism by excluding others, feminist and queer theorist Gloria Anzaldúa speaks to mixing diversity across lines invoked by identities to increase recognition across difference. She calls this process “crossing over”: At the confluence of two or more…streams…constantly “crossing over,” this mixture…rather than resulting in an inferior being, provides hybrid progeny, a mutable, more malleable species with a rich gene pool. From this racial, ideological, cultural and biological cross-­‐pollenization, an “alien” consciousness is presently in the making…a consciousness of the Borderlands. (1987, 99) In other words, we expand our minds by crossing over the borders that define our identities and, I add, the spaces associated with them. I apply Anzaldúa’s idea spatially by examining how these women cross over social and spatial boundaries at not only the national scale but also within the urban to shift the meaning of spaces that lesbians and queer women occupy. “Crossing over” then queers the geographic imagination of cities; when queered, urban territories ebb and flow and are not fixed to boundaries defined by the elite and/or propertied. Studies of territories, borders, and bodies have been a strong undercurrent to geographies of sexualities. The majority of research on LGBTQ territories begins with Manuel Castells’ (1983) framing of gay men’s cultural and economic “territorialization” in the form of physical, geographical “neighborhoods.” Many lesbian geographers continue to 4
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respond to these arguments which assume that gay neighborhoods are foremost and only socially liberatory spaces. For example, Julie Podmore’s (2006) work traces the increase in lesbian political visibility since the 1990s in Montreal. She links this shift to a parallel in lesbian deterritoralization and economic invisibility via Montreal’s historic gay neighborhood’s declining number of lesbian-­‐owned properties and businesses targeting lesbian clientele. Others such as Ruting (2008) depict less fixed borders but rather urban “gay districts”—commercial clusters of LGBTQ-­‐oriented and/or -­‐owned businesses—that come and go through processes of objectification, commodification, and gentrification. As such territorial theorizations within the geographies of sexualities of literature often frame the territorial as based upon economic buying power and property ownership. I frame lesbian-­‐queer experience beyond the propertied neighborhood to bring to light the social rhythms of everyday life that also produce these spaces. For example, studies suggest that LGBTQ territories need not be LGBTQ neighborhoods but could also function as queer-­‐friendly neighborhoods or places (see Gorman-­‐Murray and Waitt 2009). Gill Valentine (1996) has shown how the interstitial comings and goings of lesbians mark spaces as lesbian, albeit briefly, through their bodies. Shifting to focus on the everyday reveals alternative productions of territory that require as much as attention as that given to long-­‐term property ownership. As I relate the everyday stories of lesbians and queer women experiences in public spaces in New York City, territory and borders are spatial forms that we cannot assume to be self-­‐evident. A closer inspection of these spaces helps to illuminate the material production of sociospatial inequalities and resistance. 5
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Methods for a Study of Contemporary Lesbian-­‐Queer New York City My arguments draw from a larger historical geography of contemporary lesbian and queer society, culture, and economies in New York City from 1983 to 2008. My research works across the disparate moments of in/justice in this period ranging from the AIDS epidemic to the rise of internationally syndicated television drama “The L Word.” The project included multi-­‐generation group interviews with 47 self-­‐identified lesbians and queer women who came out between 1983 and 2008. Participants were asked to draw their mental maps of New York City and include spaces and places important to them as a lesbian and/or queer. I also presented the first draft of summary findings to participants via a private, online blog so that my arguments could be formulated in a participatory manner. I simultaneously examined organizational and publication records from this period at the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn, New York, the largest collection of materials by, for, and about lesbians in the world. Queer theorist Ann Pellegrini (2004) suggests that “lesbian” is used by older women more closely identified with second-­‐wave feminism, while “queer” tends to apply to younger, third-­‐wave individuals; however, this is not always the case as these identities may be complicated by personal and/or political factors. I use “lesbians and queer women” to reference my participants’ own naming of their identities, and “lesbian-­‐queer” to describe the experiences of this group of women. Interview participants came out (understood broadly and in self-­‐defined ways) between 1983 and 2008, and spent the majority of that time in New York City, which afforded cross-­‐generational dialogue. A total of 10 women identified as Black, Latina, or 6
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mixed race, and 37 participants identified as White or White-­‐Jewish. Almost all participants identified as middle class or working-­‐middle class, and had attended some college or received further education.1 In order to queer notions of community and connection, this study does not use age alone as a primary marker of generation but foregrounds rather the year in which participants “came out.” A participant’s coming out year is denoted after each participant’s name. I foremost draw on themes I developed from group interview conversations in this article. On “Crossing Over”: Lesbian-­‐Queer Bodies in Territories and Crossing Borders The bodies of my participants work within neighborhoods and against their borders to create intermittent and informal territories that allow for fuller expression of their lesbian-­‐
queer identities. These women’s experiences of public displays of affection were often coupled with experiences of harassment through my study period. These stories of public affection/harassment clearly demarcate these women’s territories and borders of lesbian-­‐
queer everyday life. Furthermore, it is these stories and the experiences of acceptance and/or safety spatialize the limits of self-­‐expression. While lesbians and queer women in my study assumed that it is a city’s specific neighborhoods that afford safety, access, and comfort, their actions show otherwise. Some background to frame lesbian-­‐queer life in NYC and large urban North American cities from 1983 to 2008 is required. In the 1990s and before, homophobic public policies reflected a widespread intolerance for overt same-­‐sex practices. White, middle-­‐
working class Linda ’96 recalled that “just being able to walk down the street and hold your 7
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girlfriend’s hand and not get yelled at was an issue!” Making out and kissing in public by lesbians and queers became acts of political defiance for many. For example the radical Lesbian Avengers hosted “kiss-­‐ins” in the early 1990s in popular tourist areas like Rockefeller Center. Pairing female objectification alongside fears of homosexual deviance, the Lesbian Avengers and other activist groups used such tactics to turn the sexualization of lesbian-­‐queer bodies by the patriarchal, heteronormative gaze on its head. By 2008, some women continued to appropriate PDA as a political act, and others still felt a strong sense of fear and experienced harassment. White, working-­‐middle class Vanessa ’94 shared, “Like you’ve got to ‘get in their face’ [makes air quotes] and be defiant and hold hands and kiss in public?! No! I don’t have to! I’m not going to put my safety in jeopardy.” Still others felt there were moments they could forget to limit their PDA by the late 2000s and found this experience to be empowering. Sexual expression in the form of PDA, however, may mark some places more accepting but do not equal change at other scales. As Phil Hubbard (2013, 224) writes of LGBTQ PDA today: “[N]ational rights to sexual orientation equality do not always translate into equal rights to sexual expression at the local scale.” Balancing self-­‐expression with both political change and mental and physical safety works differently across these women’s races, classes, and genders as these women move throughout the city. Lesbian-­‐Queer Bodies Making Territory in and through the Village One of the oldest neighborhoods in Manhattan, Greenwich Village, a.k.a. West Village or the Village (see Figure 1), is the location of the 1969 Stonewall riot, which has been attributed 8
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with inspiring the modern LGBTQ movement in the US as well as by many others around the world. The area also hosts or has hosted many LGBTQ restaurants, bars, businesses, non-­‐profit agencies, cruising grounds, and the New York City LGBT Center. Within the Village, Christopher Street remains the “queer boulevard” and hub of LGBTQ life. Participants in my study felt a great sense of attachment to the Village. Discussions of Greenwich Village amounted to over 10% of all discussions regarding neighborhoods and was noted as a shared destination all LGBTQ people, across race, class, and culture lines. However, access to material space is delimited by other forms of marginalization. James Polchin writes, Figure 1. Map of NYC. CC OSM. Admittedly, there are many “invisible” bodies on Christopher Street. The lesbian body and bodies of color only nominally appear in the storefront aesthetics and the heart of street life. Christopher Street, with its specialty stores and gay bars, reflects the economic strength of gay men. (1997, 387) In comparison, mixed-­‐race, working-­‐middle class Bailey ’95’s invisibilization plays out clearly in her first visits as an out woman at the age of 16 in 1995: I would get on the 1 [subway] train and take it all the way down to Christopher Street. I would, literally, just walk up and down Christopher Street waiting for someone—a lesbian—to invite me into one of the bars or stop and talk to me. And it never happened. 9
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As she aged, Bailey eventually found other lesbian friends and spaces of her own in the Village. She shared, “We were up and down Christopher Street, like [makes fists of pride]. So I had access. … Like I said I worked in an array of gay establishments and feel very comfortable.” Bailey then discussed returning to this neighborhood in NYC to frequent bars and for work, and her mental map only included social spaces in this neighborhood. The “invisible” bodies of Christopher Street exist and in so doing they also produce a territory. The volume of the territory is bound to the spaces in which Bailey’s body crosses over into. In so doing she refuses any sense of lesbian invisibility (even if no one stops to talk to her) by creating a territory, the space of the body, rather than laying claim to the entirety of the neighborhood. Regardless of the more generalized LGBTQ associations with the Village, the experiences and threats of violence were part of life for women even there. In a focus group of all White and middle class identified participants, Sarah ’85 shared her experience of getting punched while walking down the street in the Village holding hands and kissing: Sarah ’85: I mean, this was…‘87, I suppose. And my girlfriend and I would just walk the street holding hands and kissing there [in the Village]. Just fearless. Although we did get spat at a few times. … And people would yell at us. It was like water off a duck’s back. I mean, it was kind of scary. But actually it was more anger. And that actually happened in the Village. Kathy ’05: [Wide-­‐eyed. Leaning back from the table.] Wow. The place which is expected to be welcoming to LGBTQ people—the gayborhood—is also sometimes eclipsed by violence. Sarah manages this attack in the moment and in retrospect with a mix of letting go, fear, and anger even though “that actually happened in the Village.” Kathy, who came out 20 years after Sarah, expressed shock both at the violence and the 10
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location in which it took place. Kathy’s shock also reveals how stories like Sarah’s remain untold but still invoke a social and emotional significance for how these women negotiate these spaces in the present. These ranges of affect point to an emotional form of crossing over, where the boundaries of the imagined spaces of belonging are recognized through identifying experiences of violence. Crossing over thus enables recognition of how and which spaces work for lesbians and queer women. The Village is therefore imagined to afford safe mobility. These stories reveal how race, generation, gender, and class affect possibilities and limitations in crossing over. While the Village is the idyllic hub of LGBTQ culture and politics, it is also the site of profound injustices for lesbians and queer women, particularly for youth and women of colour,” that are finally somewhat visible in mainstream media. In 2007, four working-­‐
class, women of color from New Jersey were verbally harassed by a middle-­‐aged Black man while walking back from the Christopher Street Pier in the Village, a known hangout for LGBTQ youth of color. The women responded and then fought back physically, one of them using a knife carried for protection. Pundit Bill O’Reilly of the conservative Fox News declared that “lesbian gangs” were now spreading across the US. Sabrina ’06 described how O’Relly’s coverage made her feel even more sick and angry about the event: “He even said…: ‘Watch out for your daughters. They're beating up “poor” guys in the street.’” A few of the women, later known as the New Jersey Four, were sentenced to years of jail time. Strikingly, there were few stories of my participants fighting back to harassment. Most women handled such situations by moving elsewhere clearly demonstrating the shifting landscape of who has access to which territories. 11
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While a walkable, physical territory, the Village’s residential and social affordances that befit a “neighborhood” failed to support the needs of lesbians and queer women, particularly youth and women of color. Instead, what Elden calls the “volume” of territory is evidenced in the import of this area to these women. As such I extend Anzaldúa’s theorization of “crossing over.” The work of making change by crossing borders of where these women do and do not fully belong accumulates a volume through both positive and negative experiences and meanings. This crossing over adheres to territories beyond official and imagined neighborhood borders. The Lesbian-­‐Queer Border of Grand Army Plaza In the 1990s, Tamar Rothenberg (1995) wrote of the spatial concentration of lesbians in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn in New York City (see Figure 1). Not quite a neighborhood, her interviewees asserted the role of what they called “community” as spatially attached to—rather than fixed within—Park Slope through a combination of residential, commercial and event spaces. Most of my participants discussed how Park Slope had increasingly gentrified to the point that it is now more of an idea of a lesbian neighborhood than the welcoming residential hub of the 1980s through the early 2000s (see Gieseking 2013). Since the early stages of its gentrification, Park Slope has grown increasingly White and middle and upper class. Bailey and mixed race, working class Tre ’03’s stories of Grand Army Plaza at the northeast edge of Park Slope highlights the privilege that lesbians and queer women derive from whiteness. 12
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Grand Army Plaza (see arrow in Figure 1) is a three-­‐story archway and memorial to the Civil War dead in a small park above ground, with a subway stop below ground. The space divides Park Slope from the neighborhoods of Crown Heights and Bedford-­‐
Stuyvesant, a.k.a. Bed-­‐Stuy, working class neighborhoods composed primarily of African Americans, West Indians, and Caribbeans (see Figure 1). During the time of this study in 2008, large scale indicators of gentrification had only recently become obvious in Crown Heights and Bed-­‐Stuy. Bailey and Tre, along with all other women of color who had lived in Brooklyn, repeatedly referenced Grand Army Plaza. They described the space as a border where territorial norms around race and sexuality create divisions among social groups and as well as internal divisions within the bodies of these women. Bailey, who identified as femme, and Tre, who possessed a more masculine gender presentation and identity, described how their gender and sexuality were permissible beyond Grand Army Plaza toward Park Slope, while their race was much more accepted before this barrier in Crown Heights and Bed-­‐Stuy. Mixed race, working-­‐middle class Bailey shared, I lived in Crown Heights…one of my girlfriends I would not even let her put her hand on my leg in the car before we passed Grand Army Plaza. … It’s Jamaican, West Indian…which for me is comforting in some ways because I’m West Indian and I like…that. But in other ways it’s like, I don’t… Because I have to hide that! Bailey’s experience speaks to what feminist psychologist Michelle Fine (1994) calls hyphenated identities, the ways that people embody their multiple selves in their environments, which are difficult to find for in any one space. Such hyphenations also create individual physical borders in the landscape for my participants. Black, working-­‐
middle class Desi ’91, would not hold hands crossing Sixth Avenue since she had come out 13
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in high school even as the landscape changed drastically. Territories within and across neighborhoods form in the volume of meanings and experiences produced by the constant “crossing over.” These women then patch together a space for their own hyphenated identities on a daily basis. Figure 2. Tre’s map of NYC. CC BY-­‐NC Jen Jack Gieseking 2013 Tre included Grand Army Plaza in her mental map (see Figure 2) as the absolute border between Crown Heights and Bed-­‐Stuy neighborhoods. Poignantly, she left off less accepting spaces in her map of lesbian-­‐queer spaces but included Park Slope. Eight years younger than Bailey, mixed race, working class Tre ’03 felt the same about where she could deploy her masculine gender presentation to “play” or “fuck with it,” i.e. refuse norms and show affection with her girlfriend in public. She shared, “I don’t hold my girlfriend’s hand, like if you see that—I’m whatever—I don’t play. I do after the Grand Army Plaza stop. Then I’m fucking with it. So Park Slope. [Sarcastically:] Yay.” Tre liked to “fuck with” sexual 14
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norms in specific publics by embracing her masculine gender presentation to claim more rights to such a space. Tre later added she told her girlfriend to “wait till we get to Grand Army Plaza [to touch]. Then all the White people get on the train and [at this point]: ‘Motherfucker, I have privilege.’” She went on to explain that she uses the white privilege of Park Slope as a form of protection against Caribbean and West Indian expectations of heteronormative gender presentations and male-­‐female relationships. While Tre does not feel welcome in Park Slope because of her Blackness, she uses parts of Park Slope as the territory beyond the border for where she can be publicly gay and masculine. The borders that surround both types of areas are as much political and economic, as they are sexualized, gendered, and raced. Above in the park or below in the subway at Grand Army Plaza, there is no escaping the literal and figurative intersection of these oppressions when marked in and through these women’s bodies. It is the geographic boundaries of the Park Slope and Crown Heights neighborhoods that matter just as much as the territories beyond them that mark who are outsiders, who can only go through rather than stay. Across generations, Grand Army Plaza becomes an exemplar of the borders where lesbians and queer women of color can express themselves beyond and within the hyphen by crossing over spaces of oppression and carving out other spaces of community. Discussion & Conclusion: Lesbian-­‐Queer Possibilities of Territory The West Village and Grand Army Plaza are but two examples of lesbian-­‐queer territories and borders in the city; such territories can be found everywhere. White, working-­‐middle 15
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class Sally ’96 drafted a mental map with paths between the East Village and West Village that she carved out with friends to get to the bars and gathering places in each (see figure 3). She also included paths to and from the hub of Park Slope lesbian culture in the 2000s, Ginger’s Bar, and connected this site to spaces throughout Brooklyn. Clusters of “+1”’s mark regions of first kisses she experienced when Figure 3. Sally’s Map of NYC. CC BY-­‐NC Jen Jack Gieseking dating throughout all parts of 2013 the city. Still, Sally felt she had no official lesbian neighborhood: It’s not like, “Oh I go home to my queer neighborhood.” Like, we [women] don’t have that. …it’s like we’re constantly moving in and out of queer and straight and lesbian spaces and mostly we’re in kind of, like [sighs]…spaces that are heteronormative or whatever you want to call it. In the act of “constantly moving in and out of queer and straight and lesbians spaces,” Sally describes and maps is the work of “crossing over,” which celebrates and produces spaces for difference. Rather than functioning within the spaces of neighborhoods, lesbians and 16
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queer women are “crossing over” and recreating the territories and borders that may limit them in their everyday lives. By bringing together the lens of Anzaldúa’s process of constant “crossing over” and Elden’s consideration of the “volume” of territory, my work draws attention to how borders are made, remade and unmade through the capacities of bodies and their relationship to others and different spaces. Such fragmented and fleeting space-­‐making by lesbians and queer women through territories produced by bodies reflects and extends earlier work earlier work by Valentine (1996). LGBTQ neighborhoods and districts have experienced and/or supported other trends common to neoliberal cities that disproportionately affect women who possess lower incomes, visibility, and political power. For women of color and poor women, these experiences are even more magnified. This paper examines urban lesbians’ and queer women’s often overlapping public displays of affection (PDA) and experiences of harassment using a feminist-­‐queer approach. In the example of the West Village, my findings suggest ways these women rethink normative models of LGBTQ neighborhoods that veil the volume of varied lesbian-­‐
queer experience and meaning. The case of these women’s experiences at Grand Army Plaza reveals the difficult work of everyday “crossing over” borders to form alternative territories that shift the overlapping norms around race, class, gender, and sexuality. It is necessary to think differently about territories and borders in the way they are produced through bodies. Territories, I suggest, are produced relationally for the women in my research, and these relationships accumulate into volumes of meaning that become attached to certain places and spaces. Territory is undertheorized at other scales, particularly the urban, and this paper speaks to that absence. Lesbians and queer women 17
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create territories by positioning their gender, sexuality, race, and class within and against the neighborhoods and borders they cross over. This feminist-­‐queer approach extends the geographical imagination of urban and LGBTQ studies scholarship as my arguments also expand the uses of territory for study of oppressed groups at the scale of the city. Lesbians and queer women in New York City navigate their way through neighborhoods rather than using property ownership and lesbian-­‐oriented commercialism to mark out urban territories and borders. As such my work offers a way to theorize the spaces of these women beyond the neighborhood and gay district models. Julie Podmore states that “lesbian forms of territoriality at the urban scale have been relatively ‘invisible’ since their communities are constituted through social networks rather than commercial sites” (2006, 595). Podmore makes clear such economic salvation is an untenable plan for the social and spatial liberation of urban lesbians and queer women and also hints at the overlooked and undervalued “volume” of women’s experience in these territories that builds over time. The stories of the women in my research also speak to earlier findings from lesbian-­‐queer studies of space and place: profound experiences of gentrification, untenable and ever rising property values, and a decreasing state of public welfare (Muller Myrdahl 2011; Gieseking 2013). My research makes it clear that models of property ownership that also undergird historically gay neighborhoods are ill suited to the needs and abilities of lesbians and queer women, especially people of color, working class people, and youth. For all groups who seek social and spatial liberation, a broader meaning of territory is possible. 18
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Instead, cite forthcoming publication: Gieseking, J. 2014. Crossing Over into Territories of the Body: Urban
Territories, Borders, and Lesbian-Queer Bodies in New York City. Area.
Acknowledgements I am thankful to Sara Smith and, especially, my anonymous reviewers for their comments and collegiality; all mistakes are my own. This research was supported by the following fellowships and awards for which I remain deeply grateful: Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship in Women’s Studies; Center for Place, Culture, and Politics; Joan Heller-­‐Diane Bernard Fellowship from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies; and the CUNY Graduate Center Proshansky Dissertation Award. References Anzaldúa G 1987 Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza San Francisco CA, Aunt Lute Books Castells M 1983 Cultural Identity Sexual Liberation and Urban Structure: The Gay Community in San Francisco in The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-­‐Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements Berkeley CA, University of California Press 138–172 Elden S 2009 Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty Minneapolis MN, University Of Minnesota Press Fine M 1994 Working the Hyphens: Reinventing Self and Other in Qualitative Research in N K Denzin and Y Lincoln eds Handbook of Qualitative Research Thousand Oaks CA, Sage Publications Inc 70–82 Gieseking J J 2013 Queering the Meaning of ‘Neighbourhood’: Reinterpreting the Lesbian-­‐
Queer Experience of Park Slope Brooklyn 1983-­‐2008 in Y Taylor and M Addison eds Queer Presences and Absences London: Palgrave Macmillan 178–200 Gorman-­‐Murray A and Waitt G 2009 Queer-­‐Friendly Neighbourhoods: Interrogating Social Cohesion Across Sexual Difference in Two Australian Neighbourhoods Environment and Planning A 41 2855–2873 doi:101068/a41356 Gregory D, Johnston R, Pratt G, Watts M and Whatmore S eds 2009 The Dictionary of Human Geography Malden MA, Wiley-­‐Blackwell Hubbard P 2012 Kissing Is Not a Universal Right: Sexuality Law and the Scales of Citizenship Geoforum doi:101016/jgeoforum201208002 (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016718512001790) Accessed 10 September 2013 Muller Myrdahl T 2011 Queerying Creative Cities in P Doan ed Queerying Planning London, Ashgate 157–168 Newman D 2010 Territory Compartments and Borders: Avoiding the Trap of the Territorial Trap Geopolitics 15 773–778 a9h doi:101080/14650041003717541 Pellegrini A 2004 Mind the Gap? GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10 637–39 19
Do not cite, excerpt, or reprint this version.
Instead, cite forthcoming publication: Gieseking, J. 2015. Crossing Over into Territories of the Body: Urban
Territories, Borders, and Lesbian-Queer Bodies in New York City. Area.
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