ABSTRACT

Queer Sites in Global Contexts showcases a variety of cross-cultural perspectives that foreground the physical and online experiences of LGBTQ+ people living in the Caribbean, South and North America, the Middle East, Europe, and Asia.

The individual chapters—a collection of research-based texts by scholars around the world—provide twelve compelling case studies: queer sites that include buildings, digital networks, natural landscapes, urban spaces, and non-normative bodies. By prioritizing divergent histories and practices of queer life in geographies that are often othered by dominant queer studies in the West—female sex workers, people of color, indigenous populations, Latinx communities, trans identities, migrants—the book constructs thoroughly situated, nuanced discussions on queerness through a variety of research methods.

The book presents tangible examples of empirical research and practice-based work in the fields of queer and gender studies; geography, architectural, and urban theory; and media and digital culture. Responding to the critical absence surrounding experiences of non-White queer folk in Western academia, Queer Sites in Global Contexts acts as a timely resource for scholars, activists, and thinkers interested in queer placemaking practices—both spatial and digital—of diverse cultures.

chapter |13 pages

Introduction

chapter Chapter 1|19 pages

San Juan queer

Mobile apps, urban spaces, and LGBTQ identities

chapter Chapter 2|15 pages

A Kindr Grindr

Moderating race(ism) in techno-spaces of desire

chapter Chapter 3|18 pages

Learning to become an extremophile

Trans symbiosis and survival in Berlin

chapter Chapter 4|16 pages

Fluid territories

Intersectional subjectivities through hereditary and digital spaces

chapter Chapter 5|20 pages

Queer infrastructures

LGBTQ+ networks and urban governance in global London

chapter Chapter 6|15 pages

Digital dogma

Relating the manifestations of religion online to the practices and experiences of Arab MSMs

chapter Chapter 7|16 pages

The carceral feminism of SESTA-FOSTA

Reproducing spaces of exclusion from IRL to URL

chapter Chapter 8|15 pages

Queering the Map

On designing digital queer space

chapter Chapter 9|14 pages

Transformismo

A spatial, cultural, and racial intervention in Chicago’s queer and Latinx communities

chapter Chapter 11|19 pages

The Kenwood Ladies’ Bathing Pond

Instrumentalizing spatial imaginaries in the ‘Trans Debate’ in Britain

chapter Chapter 12|17 pages

Hear, Here

Preserving and sharing the history of queer stories in La Crosse, Wisconsin