Third Class Follow-Up: Street Life

Good morning, infinitely wonderful participants in Queer(ing) New York! Thank you so much for yet another riveting class! If you are just getting started, you can watch the first, second, and third seminar videos here. Continue your comments on Twitter with the hashtag #CLAGSqNY or just keep chatting on the in-class thread here for the first class and here for the second, as both include a chat history from the online folks watching during the live stream.

To continue to keep this open, online registration will stay open throughout the class.

Your ideas about the readings and responses to them are heartwarming and galvanizing.

– Jack

Third Pre-Class Thread: May 15th: Street Life

“Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with improvisations.” -Jane Jacobs

“Out of the bars and into the streets!” -Harvey Milk

In a walking city, the ability to claim or be claimed on the street is a core aspect of everyday life. As noted in her quote above, Jane Jacobs suggested that it was not neighborhoods that allowed us to flourish in urban environments but the city streets. The “sidewalk ballet” afforded a form of intimacy that any larger scale erases. New York City’s streets are famous, especially in the lgbtq imagination and it was no surprise that Harvey Milk paralleled the interior of bars to the public streets as a framing for protest and change in 1970s San Francisco. From Wall Street to Christopher Street to Riverside Drive to Fifth Avenue–in both Brooklyn and Manhattan, streets have defined and served as the hubs of queer life. How? Why?

George Chauncey suggests that for gay men “privacy could only be had in public,” but the stories we ave shared so far in the course and the experiences of our everyday lives tell us that streets work differently for different people. Race, class, age, disability, and gender especially are often most clearly demarcated in the simple act of walking or rolling down the city sidewalk. What some lesbians refer to as the “the dyke nod” is a sign of eye-to-eye recognition while such a gaze between men is often referred to as cruising. For many queer youth, like in the interview with Jay Toole this week, streets are the homes of many lgbtq youth. Where you are also shapes who you are and can be, just as much as our bodies define the possibilities and limitations of spaces. The street is a key space and place in forming lgbtq identity and culture.

Our Discussion Questions

How can the streets serve as a space of change for good? How do they work work for or against the needs of lgbtq people? How can the streets be the home to our most vulnerable and the galvanizing place for action as well as the hub of public sexuality? What ways do streets work in your life?

*See the Further Recommended Readings for this week to see the citations for the works mentioned here.

 

Second Class Follow-Up: Place-Making, i.e. the Bar, the Institution, and the Space Between

Good morning, utterly fabulous participants in Queer(ing) New York! Thank you so much for yet another riveting class! If you are just getting started, you can watch the first and second seminar videos here. Continue your comments on Twitter with the hashtag #CLAGSqNY or just keep chatting on the in-class thread here for the first class and here for the second, as both include a chat history from the online folks watching during the live stream.

To continue to keep this open, online registration will stay open throughout the class.

Your ideas about the readings and responses to them continue to be inspiring. – Jack

Second In-Class Thread: May 8th: Place-Making, i.e. the Bar, the Institution, and the Space Between

What are your questions for our second class? Share them here or via Twitter with the hashtag #CLAGSqNY. For more on tonight’s class, read Second Pre-Class Thread: May 8th: Place-Making, i.e. the Bar, the Institution, and the Space Between.

Class begins at 6:30pm US EST today.

Second Pre-Class Thread: May 8th: Place-Making, i.e. the Bar, the Institution, and the Space Between

The assorted collection of bars, bathhouses, restaurants, clothing stores, community centres, sports clubs and professional offices provided gay movements and gay activists with a ready-made, concentrated constituency available for political and social organizing  [in the 1970s]… (Nash 2005, 115)

The variety of places key to lgbtq life in the popular lgbtq imagination remains similar to the list described in geographer Catherine Nash’s quote regarding 1970s’ lesbian and gay spaces and places, as well as homes. The more recent additions include many virtual and online places, and, I add, places that many lgbtq people go to find connection or solace like a book or piece of music. There are also more temporary locations that many scholars refer to as “gay times” (Markwell 2002; see also Freeman 2000; 2005; 2010). Placed events are places without a permanent physical location but which are iterated in certain or certain types of locations, like the annual Dyke March down Fifth Avenue or traveling parties that rent or use space in gay men’s bars, church basements, dungeons, or community centers.

Contrary to the way that “place” is often thought of as fixed Cartesian coordinates, in practice, place is more processual than a static node, and it defines and is defined by social, cultural, economics, and political dynamics (see Pred 1984; Massey 1994). People’s relationships to place change over time, particularly as people age and are able to have more control of the production of places in their lives. These attachments to and memories of place contribute to forming their identities and navigating experiences, both just and unjust (see Altman and Low 1992; Hayden 1997; Casey 2000).

Our Discussion Questions

Are bars, the purported quintessential lgbtq place, still the hub of queer life? Bars and many of these public or for pay places close within a lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, or queer person’s lifetime–where does the essence of these places go? As increasing acceptance towards lgbtq people grows, many ask if these places are even important anymore–do you agree? As you reflect on these questions, remember that theory is divined from experience so share as much as you wish about you wish of your ideas and experiences to reflect on this.

*See the Further Recommended Readings for this week to see the citations for the works mentioned here.

First Class Follow-Up: About Cities and the Bodies within Them

Good morning, incredibly awesome participants in Queer(ing) New York! Thank you so much for a riveting first class! I am especially thankful to Kalle Westerling and Jasmina Sinanovice of CLAGS for their ceaseless social media and tech support during the class–these are the awesome people who were chatting with you on Twitter and in the live stream chat window.

If you are just getting started, you can watch the first seminar video here. Continue your comments on Twitter with the hashtag #CLAGSqNY or just keep chatting on the in-class thread here, and the first comment includes a chat history from the online folks watching during the live stream.

To continue to keep this open, online registration will stay open throughout the class. Sorry that more in-person seats are not available but the physical room is already bursting!

Thanks again for an awesome first class! Your ideas about the readings and responses to them were inspiring. – Jack

Reblog from jgieseking.org: Why We Begin this Course on May Day

This morning I wrote a post titled “Queer(ing) New York”: Education for Change, on May Day and Beyond’ on my home site of jgieseking.org. I am reblogging here for the course community of students:

The CLAGS Seminar in the City that I am teaching, “Queer(ing) New York,” will begin this evening, May 1st. Since creating this course, a lot of activists have wondered why we would choose to begin on International Worker’s Day. I see May Day as not only the right to work but the right to learn and to know. Free, open, and accessible education–like Queer(ing) New York–must instead be made common and therefore part of our public commons.

Courses like this are the ways we can reimagine education, and also reimagine and enact equality. Lgbtq people live through and walk through absences everyday, ranging from issues of recognition to acceptance, from using bathrooms to using the subway, from the bar that used to be there but closed to the home that used to be there but doesn’t count you as family anymore. As a group that lives the marginalization of their sexuality on a daily basis–always also intertwined with their gender, race, and class–looking closely at the lives and spaces of lgbtq people allow us a way to reclaim those absences and push for the recognition of all of humanity.

I am thankful to the CUNY Graduate Center for the ability to live stream and record the course for folks to watch later so that students in over eight countries can take part–if not more! While the debates on the usefulness and/or corporatization of the university by massive, open, online courses (MOOCs) rage on and play out before our eyes, Queer(ing) New York is an opportunity to share four focused classes with folks interested in a common issue. With only four course meetings, we are focusing on honing the conversation through blog posts and our Twitter hashtag (#CLAGSqNY). Coming to both deeper and broader understandings about issues of difference through conversations with people different than you opens not only our minds but our possibilities for action, change, and/or a more exciting experience of everyday life.

My labor is education. My purpose is the recognition of social and spatial inequality in the work toward social and spatial justice. How will you labor today?

For those of you who are members of the City University of New York, tweet your posts or ideas about the role of education and access on this fine May Day to @OpenCUNY or join OpenCUNY.org today!