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Queering

CFP Mapping Desire – 25 years on: legacies, lessons, and lacunae (May & Sep 2020)

This is a call for papers (CFP) for CFP Mapping Desire – 25 years on: legacies, lessons, and lacunae (May & Sep 2020), part of the Conference of Irish Geographers (pre-conference symposium and conference 20-23rd May 2020, Dublin Ireland) and Royal Geographical Society/Institute of British Geographers (1st September-4th September 2020 London, England).

The year 2020 marks the 25th anniversary of the publication of Mapping Desire edited by David Bell and Gill Valentine. This edited book was the first collection of geographical work on sexuality, and has long played and continues to play a key role in cohering and legitimizing the geographies of sexualities/queer geographies as a distinct subfield within the academic study of Geography (at least within the Anglophone countries of the Minority World).

We believe it is important to acknowledge this anniversary in order to celebrate this ground-breaking work, tracing its influence on subsequent work …

New Publication: Where Are We? The Method of Mapping with GIS in Digital Humanities

I am terrifically honored to have my article, “Where Are We? The Method of Mapping with GIS in Digital Humanities,” in the the new issue of American Quarterly (70.3), “Toward a Critically Engaged Digital Practice: American Studies and the Digital Humanities.” is out! I hope this paper makes inroads between critical GIS as a product of geography and the equally innovative work on GIS in DH.

Research in digital humanities (DH) is at its strongest when interdisciplinary and American Studies makes a space for that sort of work. Edited by Lauren Tilton, Amy Earhart, Matt Delmont, Susan Garfinkel, Jesse P. Karlsberg, and Angel David Nieves and including work from colleagues and/or role models (many of whom I am lucky enough to call friends), I believe that this issue speaks to exciting interventions and contributions. Given that the article is fully open access (bravx to the editors and AQ again!), …

Joining the University of Kentucky Department of Geography

As of today, I’ve joined the Department of Geography of the University of Kentucky. I am thrilled to be on this new adventure in my work. While I was hired with a focus on digital geographies, I will be still be devoted to my feminist and queer research and teaching. My spring courses will be an introductory undergrad course, Digital Mapping (re-versioned from the pedagogy of Wilson and Zook; how fun), and a grad seminar, Social Geography: Geographies of Queer Theory. The latter will give me a chance to have conversations with geography grad students about how they read the geographies of queer theory. Scholars like C. Riley Snorton (Nebraska, the church), E. Patrick Johnson (the South), Eve Sedgwick (the closet), Ann Cvetkovich (the archive), Michael Warner (publics), Lauren Berlant (the nation), and so on have always put geography forward but with little consideration of geographic thought and theory …

New Publication: “Messing with the Attractiveness Algorithm: a Response to Queering Code/Space”

I am utterly pumped to share the pre-print for my article, “Messing with the Attractiveness Algorithm: a Response to Queering Code/Space.” This piece will be part of a 2018 special issue “Queering Code/Space,” edited by  Daniel Cockayne and Lizzie Richardson for Gender, Place and Culture. I’ve only loading this piece to Socarxiv for open access. I was honored to be asked to be a part of this special issue, a follow-up to Dan and Lizzie’s “Queering Code/Space” session at the 2016 AAG in San Francisco. The pieces in the rest of the issue by the editors, Olu Jenzen, Sam Miles, and Carl Bonner-Thompson are great contributions to thinking about the imbrication of queer lives and spaces and the production of code/space. Along with my response to those pieces, I incorporated a failure I have seen in code for over a decade now. Lacking actual access to the vast archives …

Announcing My Book Contract with NYU Press for _A Queer New York_!

I am thrilled to announce that I have signed a contract with NYU Press for my in-progress book, A Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queers, 1983-2008. While a project of urban feminist historical geography, the book will be the first lesbian- and/or queer-specific history of New York City. I am 3/4 through writing the book and hope to have it on the shelves and online open access by the spring of 2019. Hurrah and gayme on!

I provide a brief excerpt from the introduction of book below.

Blue star tattoos. I saw them on the arms of lesbians and queers for as long as I could remember. They marked Brazilians at queer Kreuzberg, Berlin dance parties in 2010, trans Southerners on the Lower East Side, New York City gay bars in 2003, a bisexual woman from Seattle at my New England women’s college in 1998, and …

New Pre-Publication: Operating Anew: Queering GIS with Good Enough Software

I am excited to share the pre-print for my article, “Operating Anew: Queering GIS with Good Enough Software.” This piece will be part of the 2018 special issue “Speculative and Constructively Critical GIS,” edited by  Jim Thatcher, Luke R. Bergmann, David O’Sullivan for The Canadian Geographer / Le Géopgraphe Canadien. Disappointed by SSRN’s purchase by Elsevier, I’m only loading this piece to Socarxiv to see if the downloads are comparable and not support a press that has made so much money from and given so little back to the academic community in comparison.

Download “Operating Anew: Queering GIS with Good Enough Software” here.

ABSTRACT

In the last decade, conversations around queering of GIScience emerged. Drawing on literature from feminist and queer critical GIS with special attention to the under-examined political economy of GIS, I suggest that the critical project of queering all of GIS, both GIScience and GISystems, requires …

Announcing the Second Queer Internet Studies Symposium

I’m excited to announce that the second Queer Internet Studies (QIS2) Symposium, which I am again blissfully organizing with the fabulous Jessa Lingel, will be a one-day event on February 17th at UPenn’s Institute for Contemporary Art. Read more about QIS2 here and get to the registration via this link: https://jgieseking.org/qis2/. Please share widely!

The goal of the day’s conversation is to broaden our thinking about the internet: to think about intersections of technology and media, sexuality and queering, gender and feminism. The final schedule is still being determined, but we’re hoping to have a mix of sharing research, making art and developing an interdisciplinary conversation of what Queer Internet Studies might mean for research, policy and activist agendas. Presenters and panelists include T.L. Cowan, Oliver Haimson, Adrienne Shaw, Carmen Rios, Mia Fischer, Mitali Thakor, Shaka McGlotten, and Katherine Sender. All in attendance will be invited …

In Sociological Review: We Never Left Laramie: White LGBTQ Consciousness Post-Election 2016

Immediately after the election, my colleague/friend Emma Jackson at Goldsmiths asked to be part of The Sociological Review‘s rapid response collection to the US election. I said yes even though I was mostly in a fog about what to write beyond making it for, by, and about queers. No surprise there.

Shortly thereafter, Rhon Manigault-Bryant’s brilliant post “An Open Letter to White Liberal Feminists” on the African-American Intellectual History Society site launched. I was inspired by Manigault-Bryant’s words when she wrote that she was “delighted” that white women were forced to finally reckon with violence and injustice that women of color faced daily. In writing a contemporary historical geography of New York City, I often struggle with the inane notion that lgbtq lives have gotten “better” when there has never been evidence of decreasing rates of LGBTQ youth suicides, harassment of LGBTQ people of color, or violence against …

U.S. National Park Service Essays on LGBTQ History Released

WOOHOO! The LGBTQ America: A Theme Study of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer History theme study has been released by the U.S. National Park Service of the Department of the Interior for National Coming Out Day! Happy coming out, National Parks!!!

Who made this happen? (Queen) Megan Springate is a kind, brilliant scholar who works on queer archaeology (that’s a thing! and it’s such a cool thing!) and she truly led the effort to bring this to life. There are dozens of authors involved. And what was my role? Besides serving as a peer reviewer for many, many essays, my own essay, “LGBTQ Spaces and Places,” is meant to be a really wide-ranging piece that allows those unfamiliar with LGBTQ geographies and pushing thinking beyond the notion that all “gay” people live and/or hang out in gay neighborhoods in cities, and just adoreeee bars. Amen. I account for the …

Publication: Area article finally in print!

48 (3): 262–70.

A year and two weeks ago, I posted the text of “Crossing Over into Territories of the Body: Urban Territories, Borders, and Lesbian-Queer Bodies in New York City” — which is now published in print! Here’s the citation and abstract and you can check out their site to know more about the services that they offer apart from printing.

Gieseking, Jen Jack. 2016. “Crossing Over into Neighbourhoods of the Body: Urban Territories, Borders and Lesbian-Queer Bodies in New York City.” Area 48 (3): 262–270. doi:10.1111/area.12147.

The geopolitical focus on territory as a fixed and cohesive nation-state simultaneously conceals the ways territories form and are operationalized at other scales. At the same time, the fleeting ability of minority bodies to make and retain cohesive, property-owned territories overlooks the limited agency that marginalized groups possess while they continually reproduce social territories as they navigate their everyday lives. Lesbians, gay, …

Publication: Review of “Safe Space” for Gender, Place and Culture

My review of Christina Hanhardt‘s utterly delicious Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence is available online and below (OA) in Gender, Place and Culture. When I say “delicious,” this is a spot on description for an important, beautiful work of lgbtq geographical history. I include the first two paragraphs below–you can read the entire publication here. (I was going to put it up on SSRN, only to find out, depressingly and shockingly, that it has been sold to the evil and most profitable-upon-academic-unpaid labor company Elsevier.)

Christina B. Hanhardt writes in Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence that one cannot “fully understand changing spatial development patterns apart from LGBT politics” (9). Geographers everywhere should take heed and would do well to read this book. Drawing upon Hanhardt’s insightful text will prove an exciting way to incorporate geographies of sexuality …

Teaching Queer America

This spring I taught two incredibly exciting courses. The senior seminar, Queer America, was comprised of a small group of students, primarily from our American Studies program. This is my second senior seminar at Trinity College and my first full-semester lgbtq studies course. Of course, the latter is the more shocking of these components: all of this queering I’ve been up to and I’m only just achieving this beautiful moment. I taught Queer(ing) New York with the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies with their Seminar in the Series course in 2013.

The course was framed around the following questions: What is queer about America? What can be and has been queered about America? What, if anything, is not queer about America?

I was really energized and excited to see what resonated with Trinity students. We began by diving into JSTimeline to map out key events in lgbtq history …

Appearing on the BBC World Services

I am honored to share that insights from my research were heard around the world for two minutes on August 23rd, 2016, in the BBC World Services “Beyond Binary” documentary. If you care to listen me especially, I am a minute 10. You can hear me speak about my new research on trans use of Tumblr. For about two years, I’ve been collecting data on the use of the #ftm hashtag and, for a shorter time, #mtf hashtag on Tumblr. I came upon the world of trans Tumblr, as I call it, in 2010 when I was choosing my own new name. I found a tightly-knit network of trans people who are otherwise unanchored through their geographic diaspora. You can click here to read more about that research project.

Here’s more on the “Beyond Binary” documentary from the BBC World Services website: In communities around the globe, non-binary …

New Research Project: Trans Tumblr

For about two years, I’ve been collecting data on the use of the #ftm hashtag and, for a shorter time, #mtf hashtag on Tumblr. These oft used trans hashtags, standing for female-to-male and male-to-female respectively, drew my attention as I was coming into my own trans identity. I came upon the world of trans Tumblr, as I call it, in 2010 when I was choosing my own new name. I found a tightly-knit network of trans people who are otherwise unanchored through their geographic diaspora. They were mostly very young, publicly sharing and connecting about the everyday violence and life milestones, accomplishments and losses that fuel life in general and trans life specifically. I was particularly struck by the small number of voices that dominated the conversation, as well as the suicide notes that would float to the surface and the resounding and instant response of those around them …

Speaking at Eulogy for the Dyke Bar in NYC

I’m in NYC again, walking around among the places where it seems everyone I knew over the last 16 years in this city used to be able to afford to live. What a perfect frame of loss and longing, transition and possibility in which to speak as part of the weekend long events on the Eulogy for the Dyke Bar (EFTDB) at PULSE today. EFTDB is an installation by artist and queer Macon Reed: a fully-immersive structure that revisits the legacies and physical spaces of dyke bars, an increasingly rare component of the contemporary queer cultural landscape. Made of simple materials and seductively saturated colors, Reed’s hand-made installation includes a full bar, pool table, jukebox, and wall-to-wall wood paneling.

I am honored to be part of that exhibit! I will be on a panel discussing the present moment of dyke bar closings at 1pm on 125 W 18th …

Didn’t I Just Get Here? Or: Reflections on My First Tenure-Track Semester

Whoa. It was August 1st and a chemist friend (god bless you, Ryan) and I are in a U-Haul on I-495 wrapping around Boston ever so slowly creeping to I-90 and then I-84 until we see Hartford on the horizon and I say, “That’s my new city, buddy!” Yes, Hartford has an actual skyline and I was ready to be romanced by this urban tract. As much as I learn and love about the city, I admit it’s tough at times as Hartford is dependent upon and revolves around car commuter culture attached to suburbs (which make up a large part of the State of Connecticut). Over the course of the semester, I’ll make some great connections and breakthroughs, and also connect to activists who want to change that dynamic. Looking for permanent housing–also: whoa and FINALLY–allows you to really get to know a place like you have not before…not …

Speaking about Gender Fluidity in Fortune Magazine (Oct 2015)

I was interviewed earlier this year by Fortune Magazine regarding trans* issues in the workplace, and was quoted in their article yesterday, “What it’s like to be young, gender neutral and in the job market.” I had an incredible conversation with journalist Vivian Giang this spring and I am delighted, relieved, and inspired to see that she is writing about these issues for the business community. As always, I am deeply honored to be able to talk about trans* issues publicly.

To read more about transgender people’s experience of navigating bathrooms, see the following:

Browne, Kath. 2004. “Genderism and the Bathroom Problem: (Re)Materialising Sexed Sites, (Re)Creating Sexed Bodies.” Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 11 (3): 331–46. doi:10.1080/0966369042000258668.
Trans*H4CK. 2015. “Trans*H4CK.” Trans*H4CK. http://www.transhack.org/.
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