Queering social infrastructure in the suburbs: photographic narrations of everyday queer and trans micropolitics
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Keywords: LGBTQ+, suburbs, social infrastructure, micropolitics
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract
Authors:
B. Wiley Sharp, York University
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Abstract
Infrastructure, both material and social, is definitive of cities and neighbourhoods within them. From centres to peripheries, infrastructure is embedded in processes of neighborhood change, and it shapes the extent to which residents relate to metropolitan areas and each other, participate in urban life, and experience a sense of social rootedness in place. Queer and trans suburbanites make vibrant lives despite the absence of explicitly “queer infrastructure” in their immediate milieux, such as networks of commercial night venues and programming that enable heterogenous forms of sociality to coalesce in gaybourhoods (Campkin, 2021). This paper shifts away from object-centric notions of social infrastructure to argue that the individual and collective practices of negotiating sexual and gender differences, forging interpersonal connection, fostering community through organizations, and engaging in collective practices of care assemble emergent social infrastructure of queer and trans life in suburbs—in other words, “affordances to be out amongst other people” (Latham and Layton 2019, 9). This paper analyzes 192 images derived from 19 photo-elicitation interviews undertaken in the peripheral municipalities of Ajax, Markham, Mississauga, and Brampton in Canada’s largest city-region, Toronto, to document how LGBTQ2S+ suburbanites navigate and contest their peripherality by reconfiguring the social infrastructure of their everyday living and working lives. It demonstrates that the “quiet politics” emergent from seemingly mundane neighbourhood spaces is reflective of “a political will to engagement that requires commitment” (Askins 2015, 476). Such micropolitical practices hold significant potential to shift perceptions of self and Other in anticipation of (re)new(ed) suburban social relations.
Queering social infrastructure in the suburbs: photographic narrations of everyday queer and trans micropolitics
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Paper Abstract