Performative Progressiveness: Accounting for New Forms of Inequality in the Gayborhood

Urban lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) community research in sociology has largely ignored LGBTQ communities in the most common urban form: small cities. In this article, I argue that LGBTQ communities in small cities are an underexplored source of theory making about LGBTQ communities more broadly, and I highlight the ways such research enhances LGBTQ community research. I first discuss a definitional framework of LGBTQ communities in small cities. In other words, what do we mean by small cities, and what do we mean by LGBTQ communities within them? I then discuss the handful of examples of research on LGBTQ communities in small cities, describing the kinds of theoretical questions such research raises. I examine specifically how small‐city LGBTQ communities shift our thinking about urban LGBTQ community research in the following four areas: social networks, spatial and temporal dimensions of community, identity intersections, and allyship. Next, I identify three reasons why a focus on small cities is necessary to theory making in LGBTQ and community research more broadly, including and moving beyond questions of representation. I conclude by highlighting the methodological diversity needed to effectively research LGBTQ communities in small cities and briefly address a few challenges in moving this field of research forward.

Section: What Small Cities Addmentioning

confidence: 99%

Theory Making from the Middle: Researching LGBTQ Communities in Small Cities

Forstie

2020

“…Describing this change variously as “post closet” (Dean ; Seidman ), “post‐mo” (Nash ), or “post gay” (Ghaziani ), researchers describe the ways in which LGBT people increasingly do not seek out specific LGBT places (Brekhus ; Brown‐Saracino ; Ghaziani ; Seidman ). LGBT people nevertheless express anxiety over the recent “invasions” of straight people into formerly LGBT places made possible by LGBT social acceptance (Brodyn and Ghaziani ; Doan and Higgins ; Ghaziani ; Hartless ; Mattson ; Orne ; Reynolds ; Ruting ). This has led to recent calls to examine the spatial unevenness of LGBT equality (see review in Ghaziani ; Mattson ; Podmore ).…”

Section: The Big‐city Bias Of Gay Bar Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Small–City Gay Bars, Big–City Urbanism

Mattson

2020

Despite the widely hailed importance of gay bars, what we know of them comes largely from the gayborhoods of four “great cities.” This paper explores the similarities of 55 lone small‐city gay bars to each other and the challenges they pose to the sexualities and urban literatures. Small‐city gay bars have long been integrated with straight people in their often red‐state communities; they are undifferentiated and unspecialized subcultural amenities not just for LGBT people, but for straights as well, fostering cosmopolitan lifestyles for large geographical regions whose residents nevertheless prefer small‐city living for reasons, including proximity to kin or nature, and the fact that many big‐city pleasures can be found everywhere. Contrasts between these findings and previous scholarship reveal the ways in which the latter has often implicitly defined urbanism and cosmopolitanism in terms of commercial diversity, as do studies of gentrification or gayborhoods. Small cities provide a way to integrate studies along the urban–rural interface, including places left to rural studies by both sexualities and urban scholarship. As an analytic object of comparison, small cities can help to disentangle urban effects from the cosmopolitanism of modern life generally.

“…; Mathers et al. )—even in the gayborhood (Doan ; Knee )—where straight residents, who say they support gay rights and feel a common humanity with their LGBTQ/2S neighbors, still discriminate against them (Brodyn and Ghaziani ). Rather, post‐gay is a conceptual shorthand that consolidates multiple empirical indicators pointing to shifts in the meanings and material expressions of sexuality.…”

Section: Gayborhoods and Gay Barsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Queer Pop–Ups: A Cultural Innovation in Urban Life

Stillwagon

Ghaziani

2019

Self Cite

Research on sexuality and space emphasizes geographic and institutional forms that are stable, established, and fixed. By narrowing their analytic gaze on such places, which include gayborhoods and bars, scholars use observations about changing public opinions, residential integration, and the closure of nighttime venues to conclude that queer urban and institutional life is in decline. We use queer pop‐up events to challenge these dominant arguments about urban sexualities and to advocate instead a “temporary turn” that analyzes the relationship between ephemerality and placemaking. Drawing on interviews with party promoters and participants in Vancouver, our findings show that ephemeral events can have enduring effects. Pop‐ups refresh ideas about communal expression, belonging, safety, and the ownership of space among queer‐identified people who feel excluded from the gayborhood and its bars. As a case, pop‐ups compel scholars to broaden their focus from a preoccupation with permanent places to those which are fleeting, transient, short‐lived, and experienced for a moment. Only when we see the city as a collection of temporary spaces can we appreciate how queer people convert creative cultural visions into spatial practices that enable them to express an oppositional ethos and to congregate with, and celebrate, their imagined communities.