A Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queers

Jen Jack Gieseking

Open Access Published by New York University Press 2020

A Queer New York

Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queers

Jen Jack Gieseking

https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479803002.001.0001

Overview
Contents

About this book

Winner, 2021 Glenda Laws Award given by the American Association of Geographers

The first lesbian and queer historical geography of New York City

Over the past few decades, rapid gentrification in New York City has led to the disappearance of many lesbian and queer spaces, displacing some of the most marginalized members of the LGBTQ+ community. In A Queer New York, Jen Jack Gieseking highlights the historic significance of these spaces, mapping the political, economic, and geographic dispossession of an important, thriving community that once called certain New York neighborhoods home.

Focusing on well-known neighborhoods like Greenwich Village, Park Slope, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Crown Heights, Gieseking shows how lesbian and queer neighborhoods have folded under the capitalist influence of white, wealthy gentrifiers who have ultimately failed to make room for them. Nevertheless, they highlight the ways lesbian and queer communities have succeeded in carving out spaces—and lives—in a city that has consistently pushed its most vulnerable citizens away.

Beautifully written, A Queer New York is an eye-opening account of how lesbians and queers have survived in the face of twenty-first century gentrification and urban development.

Author / Editor information

Gieseking Jen Jack :

Jen Jack Gieseking is Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Kentucky and editor of The People, Place, and Space Reader.Jen Jack Gieseking is Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Kentucky and editor of The People, Place, and Space Reader.

Reviews

Cyd Sturgess, Universiteit Utrecht:
[W]hat Gieseking offers his readers is a layered historical mapping, one that reveals the significance of Otherness to the creation of alternative urban spatialities. With little doubt, this book will act as a beacon to all those academics, activists, and queers who wish to explore for themselves the lights of the queer city, in all their different colors.

The histories and geographies of sexually and gender diverse New York, especially the ones that travel outside of the city, are often told from the limited and limiting perspective of cis white gay men. A Queer New York offers a timely and needed historical geography of the city (1980-2010) that displaces the centrality of these experiences and highlights the role played by lesbians and queers in producing space in the city.

Plaiting personal testimony, with group interviews and with archival research, A Queer New York is an exemplary study. May its emulators come soon. Yet, although this multimethod approach might prove a paradigm, the clarity and wit of Gieseking’s prose will be more difficult to match. A Queer New York is not only a lodestar for queer geographies but radiates for urban geography more broadly as a brilliant excursus on the lived realities of neoliberal urbanization.

Martin F. Manalansan IV, author of Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora:
In A Queer New York, Jen Jack Gieseking offers a stunningly trenchant and much needed study of lesbian-queer spaces in the city. He deftly demonstrates how place and belonging can be mapped into lesbian-queer generational shifts. With light, elegant, and sometimes humorous prose combined with an incisive analytical approach, Gieseking showcases the processes of urban emplacement and displacement of lesbian-queer lives and bodies from Greenwich Village to Crown Heights to Park Slope. A fabulous geographical portrait of an-other Big Apple.

Jen Jack locates and studies hard-to-find, and still harder to maintain, lesbian and queer spaces and places that were built and also lost over several decades in New York City … Jen Jack works within groups of lesbians who made the places of queer New York: thinking together about how assimilation, gentrification, gay, queer, and trans identities, racism and sexism, and ultimately capital shaped our cities, and the lives we make in them.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
List of Figures Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
Preface Publicly Available Download PDF	xv
1. Navigating A Queer New York Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
2. Belonging in Greenwich Village and Gay Manhattan Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	47
3. You vs. Us in Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	99
4. Dyke Slope Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	149
5. Constellating a Queer Map of the Lesbian City Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	197
Epilogue: What We Cannot Not Want Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	233
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	239
Appendix I. Identity Terms Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	245
Appendix II. Biographical Sketches of Participants Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	249
Appendix III. Methodological Details Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	253
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	261
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	297
About the Author Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	307

Language: English
Publisher: New York University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Illustrations
- Other: 45 b/w illustrations
Keywords: Lesbian; Constellations; Gentrification; Neighbourhood; Queer theory; Feminist theory; Urban geography; Production of space; Transgender and gender non-conforming people; People of color; Black geographies; Whiteness; Manhattan; Brooklyn; Racism; Greenwich Village; Paradoxical space; Queers of color; Disidentifications; Queer failure; Lines and orientations (Ahmed)

eBook

Published: September 15, 2020
ISBN: 9781479803002