Blogjgieseking.org | The Web Site of Jen Jack Gieseking

“Queer(ing) New York”: Education for Change, on May Day and Beyond

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

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For #QueerGeo Conference Attendees: My Chapter “Queering the Meaning of ‘Neighborhood’”

My chapter “Queering the Meaning of ‘Neighborhood’: Reinterpreting the Lesbian-Queer Experience of Park Slope, Brooklyn, 1983–2008” regarding lesbian experience of fragmented and fleeting neighborhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn, New York City, is available for download today only at Parson’s Queer Urban Geographies (#queergeo) for conference-goers only. This chapter was recently released in Queer Presences & Absences (2013).

Click here for download. The password is available at the end of the Jack’s presentation.

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Protected: Download

I had a riveting weekend helping to coordinate and preside over a session at Theorizing the Web 2013 (#TtW13). I massively enjoyed presiding over the “Bodies and Bits” panel. These papers tackled those questions close to my heart and always in my mind. How do we invoke the body in the digital? Where does the cyborg begin and end? I have another post forthcoming on my thoughts connecting this fantastic work of the presenters to my own work. In the meantime, you can watch a recording of the livestream from our room–we kicked off at the 2hr40min mark. → 3 March, 2013

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Bodies and Bits | Room B | #b3
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Presider: Jen Jack Gieseking @jgieseking
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Hashtag Moderator: Donald W. Taylor II @donaldtaylorii → 3 March, 2013

Panelists: → 3 March, 2013

Christina Dunbar-Hester ‘The Internet Is A Series Of (Fallopian) Tubes’: “Diversity” Activism in Hacker and Software Projects → 3 March, 2013

Gina Neff & co-authored by Brittany Fiore-Silfvast @ginasue What We Talk About When We → 3 March, 2013

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Every year, the students of the environmental psychology program of the CUNY Graduate Center have put together an amazing conference on the ways nature, ecology, and society are co-produced. This year’s topic is Sandy. → 27 February, 2013

Superstorm Sandy: Before, During and After

The 12th Annual Nature Ecology Society Colloquium at the CUNY Graduate Center → 27 February, 2013

Hosted by the Environmental Psychology PhD Program
Colloquium Date: March 8, 2013
Deadline for Proposals: February 20, 2013 → 27 February, 2013

Hurricane Sandy had drastic impacts on 29 October, 2012. This year’s Nature Ecology Society Colloquium is intended to open up a conversation around Hurricane Sandy. We recognize that politics play a part in this conversation, that there are complex social and environment justice issues that have and need to be understood, and that there must be a rebuilding effort that is sensitive to all of these aspects. We hope this colloquium can be a space where presenters will openly interrogate → 27 February, 2013

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The Gender, Sexuality, & Space Bibliography has a genesis through my own personal and work history. When I was an undergraduate at Mount Holyoke College in the late 1990s, I told a visiting professor that I had what was then a ‘wild’ idea to do geographic research on–gasp!–gender, sexuality, and space. Without saying a word, she led me up to her office and produced the edited volume Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities (Bell & Valentine, 1995) and slid it into my hands in absolute, reverent silence with an eye-to-eye piercing gaze. I did not understand that the magic of this book yet. I had no idea what it would have meant to not have this book exist when I posed this idea. I am still studying the generational shifts on lgbtq identities, culture, and spaces as the positive, affirming, and non-pathologizing work on gender, sexuality, and space continues to grow. → 11 February, 2013

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I was not able to attend Judith Butler’s & Omar Barghouti’s talks last night at Brooklyn College, CUNY (2/7/13) on #BDS but jumped in and made a Storify when I couldn’t stop reading the tweets. Read the play-by-play here via Storify. Butler shared her remarks with The Nation if you prefer a more traditional read. → 8 February, 2013

Either way, consider yourself educated and in the struggle once you read these notes. If you are around NYC in April, the Homonationalism and Pinkwashing Conference at the CUNY Graduate Center will be bringing together scholars and activists to share work on how we can end apartheid in Israel-Palestine. → 8 February, 2013

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An Exploration of Whiteness and Health A Roundtable Discussion → 14 December, 2012

The examination of whiteness in the scholarly literature is well established (Fine et al., 1997; Frankenberg, 1993; Hughey, 2010; Twine and Gallagher, 2008). Whiteness, like other racial categories, is socially constructed and actively maintained through the social boundaries by, for example, defining who is white and is not white (Allen, 1994; Daniels, 1997; Roediger, 2007; Wray, 2006). The seeming invisibility of whiteness is one of its’ central mechanisms because it allows those within the category white to think of themselves as simply human, individual and without race, while Others are racialized (Dyer, 1998). We know that whiteness shapes housing (Low, 2009), education (Leonardo, 2009), politics (Feagin, 2012), law (Lopez, 2006), research methods (Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva, 2008) and indeed, frames much of our misapprehension of society (Feagin, 2010; Lipsitz, 1998). Still, we understand little of how whiteness and → 14 December, 2012

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How can we bring the issues and aches of Sandy into the classroom to help work through what has taken place? Here’s my take for the Environmental Methods course in the masters program in Sustainable Interior Environments program at the Fashion Institute of Technology SUNY that I am teaching. → 3 November, 2012

In order to grapple with Sandy and confront the effects of increasing natural disasters at home and abroad, my next class in will use our next class meeting to discuss the inequalities that Sandy re-revealed in the city, the politics of a “natural” disaster, and designing for what lies ahead. As I asked my students: These are all short pieces so please read them all. Think about how each piece–all from different interests, fields, and groups–fits into the next and how the design examples in the last NYT piece fall short or support these larger issues, from fish to tech, from → 3 November, 2012

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For those arriving from Feministing and/or Salon, welcome! I encourage you to wander around the site. You might especially be interested in a Gender, Sexuality, and Space Bibliography I have building for some time. I am also the webcaptain for the Gender & Geography Bibliography, a project begun over twenty years ago and still growing. Lastly, do wander over to outhistory.org which hosts tons of exciting content, both new and archival, on lgbtq experiences over time and throughout the world. → 28 August, 2012

Do check back! Over time I will create specific lists of readings for undergraduate students and teaching undergraduates, and graduate students and teaching graduate students, as well as readings by subjectivity and identity (lesbian, trans, etc.) and environment (rural, urban, suburban) → 28 August, 2012

The Lesbian-Queer Space Mapping Project will relaunch next year. → 28 August, 2012

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Below is the full interview between Gwendolyn Beetham with Maria Rodó-de-Zárate and Jen Gieseking for the blog feministing.com. You can read the feministing.com version here. → 14 August, 2012

Chat History with
Created on 2012-07-31 14:14:25. → 14 August, 2012

Gwendolyn Beetham: 13:19:28
Anyway, so, thank you both so much for your answers to the interview questions. I just read through them both a couple of times, and feel like they really speak to each other well. What did you think of seeing them together? → 14 August, 2012

Jen Gieseking: 13:19:57
I really like them too. They really pair well. What did you think, Maria? → 14 August, 2012

Maria Rodo de Zarate: 13:20:15
I also like them! → 14 August, 2012

Jen Gieseking: 13:21:14
I think there is a lot of personal experience that fuels our work. …maybe one good conversation question is…: what we have learned from each other, either in these written statements or when we got to work together at CUNY? → 14 August, 2012

Gwendolyn Beetham: 13:24:08
That → 14 August, 2012

Gavin Brown’s 1996 research on the spaces of gay men found they described and marked their spaces in Tower Hamlets, London, as those of “pleasure” or “danger.” How far have we come to mind the gap to create spaces in between for gay men, and for all lgbtq people? → 28 October, 2011

My research builds on the pioneering work of early lesbian and gay oral historians, but by attempting to record gay men’s cognitive maps of the area – how we negotiate routes between sites of pleasure and danger and how these have influenced our decisions about where to live, shop and cruise – attempts to chart the changing ways in which we respond to and adapt the urban landscape for our own ends. (Brown 2001, 50) → 28 October, 2011

CITED → 28 October, 2011

Brown, G., 2001. Listening to Queer Maps of the City: Gay Men’s Narratives of Pleasure and Danger in London’s East End. Oral History, 29(1),

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From SFGate on October 25th, 2011: → 28 October, 2011

At 7:30 Tuesday morning, Oakland Mayor Jean Quan’s office issued a statement regarding the police raid on the two downtown Occupy Oakland camp sites. The statement, reprinted in its entirety, reads: → 28 October, 2011

Many Oaklanders support the goals of the national Occupy Wall Street movement. We maintained daily communication with the protest0rs in Oakland. → 28 October, 2011

However, over the last week it was apparent that neither the demonstrators nor the City could maintain safe or sanitary conditions, or control the ongoing vandalism. Frank Ogawa Plaza will continue to be open as a free speech area from 6 am to 10 pm. Read the full statement at Oakland North. → 28 October, 2011

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Food for thought before as plan your weekends. It makes so much sense but is mindblowing all the same, especially since the reverse is true for gay and queer men who may wish to seek out their own spaces. → 18 October, 2011

The city filed on the charge of sex discrimination, based on statutes passed in the 1960s and used successfully in the 1970s by heterosexual women seeking access to all-male clubs. As a result, at the present time in New York, it is illegal to have a lesbian-only bar. (Wolfe 1997, 320) → 18 October, 2011

To my knowledge, the law has never been repealed in the City or State of New York. → 18 October, 2011

CITED → 18 October, 2011

Wolfe, M., 1997. Invisible Women in Invisible Places: The Production of Social Space in Lesbian Bars. In G. B. Ingram, A.-M. Bouthillette, & Y. Retter, eds. Queers in Space: Communities, Public Places, Sites of Resistance. Seattle, WA: Bay Press, pp. 301-324.

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The place of lgbtq people and studies in the academy was no different than the other shores of homophobia: → 18 October, 2011

Based on 640 responses, the ASA [American Sociology Association] Task Group concluded: “Sociologists and students who are known as homosexuals or, even more so, as activists, run considerable risk, according to the perceptions of department heads and chairs, of experiencing discrimination in being hired or promoted in a sociology department. Hence, the vast majority remain closeted within the colleagues [sic]. This, in turn, inhibits them from displaying interest in, and engaging in, research, advising, or teaching courses on, the topic of homosexuality” (Huber et al. 1982: 165). - from Newton (2000, p220) → 18 October, 2011

Less than a decade before, the Gay Academic Union (GAU) was founded in 1973 by a meeting of eight academics in a Manhattan apartment (Rainbowhistory.org 2000), and had made significant headway in visibilizing at least a small presence lgtq → 18 October, 2011

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I’ve been thinking a lot about how many lgbtq blogs cover current events, and how much the past–even the recent past–continually becomes absorbed in our outrageous present. This absorption is also just plain inevitable–we cannot be conscious of all things at all times. Obviously. But, since I’m in the U.S. and mostly looking at U.S. source materials, this trend is also due to the American addiction to “progress” narratives: we love to point out to one another and the rest of the world how far we’ve come and in which ways. There is a real air of hopefulness to these (very American) ways of producing our narratives, too, and I don’t want to discount that or refuse its usefulness. I’m aiming for mindfulness here. → 18 October, 2011

That said, I do think it’s time to look back not only to remember how far we’ve come, but to come to grips with our lgbtq → 18 October, 2011

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