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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 OA: Geographical Imagination in Forthcoming _Intl Encyc of Geography_

I recently made my article, “Size Matters to Lesbians Too: Queer Feminist Interventions into the Scale of Big Data,” public via the open access (OA) services SocArxchiv and SSRN. While I am sharing a new publication through same means but on the geographical imagination–the topic of my first blog post and, still and weirdly, my most popular–I also want to write a little more about why I am keen to place my OA work in these archives. Specifically, my dear friend / feminist geographer Sara Koopman pointed out in a recent comment that I didn’t “explain why [I] like these two cites better than academia[.edu] or research gate – both of which have their issues but are WAY prettier and easier to use than these two [sites, i.e. SSRN and SocArxchiv].” Indeed! In brief: while I will surely load my work to academia.edu and ResearchGate as well, I …

Publication OA: Size Matters to Lesbians Too in Forthcoming _Professional Geographer_

My. Best. Journal article title. Ever. Is finally ready to share. It’s also my favorite publication to date and I’ve loaded it in pre-print form to make it accessible now and posted the full cite at the end. Enjoy the likes of….

Size Matters to Lesbians Too: Queer Feminist Interventions into the Scale of Big Data

Abstract: How can we recognize those whose lives and data become attached to the far-from-groundbreaking framework of “small data”? Specifically, how can marginalized people who do not have the resources to produce, self-categorize, analyze, or store “big data” claim their place in the big data debates? I examine the place of lesbians and queer women in the big data debates through the Lesbian Herstory Archive’s not “big” enough lgbtq organizing history dataset—perhaps the largest dataset known to exist on lgbtq activist history—as one such alternative. A contribution to critical data studies, I take a …

Interviewed for “Home Games: The Strange Overlapping Borders of Sports Fandom”

Rick Paulas is a fantastic journalist who is as enthralled with environmental psychology as I am. We recently spoke about the way notions of geography and identity are co-produced by and evident in “Home Games: The Strange Overlapping Borders of Sports Fandom.” I rarely get a chance to discuss athletics so that — coming from a NESCAC school where *surely* we will *finally* beat Amherst for the football title this year, i.e. go, Trin! — it was a special pleasure to contribute to thinking on this topic.

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Presenting at #TransStudies Conf Tomorrow (9/10)

I’m already in Tucson taking in the first ever and utterly incredible Trans Studies Conference. My paper on the my #ftm and #mtf Tumblr research is tomorrow, with a focus on the subset of my way-too-big-to-analyze-on-my-computer-dataset of millions of posts over 2 years(!): “Networked Trans: #FtM Culture, Identity, and Knowledge Production on Tumblr.” I hope there will be some great tweets to share. I’ve been thinking a lot about what trans theory is and could be and hope to work those ideas in to this.…

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 Data Driven Cultures

In my recent blog post, Teaching Queer America, I reflected on my second senior seminar. In this post, I want to briefly touch on the pleasures of teaching my first intermediate-level course, Data Driven Cultures, at Trinity this spring. The course is fueled by a pair of basic yet profound question: how does the internet work, and how does it work upon us? Our daily existence is increasingly structured by code and data, from the algorithms that time our traffic lights to those that filter our search criteria and record our thoughts and ideas. In this course, we explored the possibilities, limitations, and implications of using digital methods and analytics to study issues that affect our everyday lives through a social scientific approach. We pay special attention to the ways we collect, trust, analyze, portray, and use data, most especially the tools and meanings involved in data visualization …

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 …

Advice for Grad Students: How to Respond to Peer Review

You say: Ack! You are going to submit something you wrote! To a journal! This is happening!

I say: Good for you, friend!

Wow, you did it. You wrote something and you sent it into the ether of peer review and three months to two years went by and, suddenly! (because it feels that way), your peer review is back. Quite like my most recent post on How to Do Peer Review, it is just as important to think about how to respond to peer review. Junior researchers and scholars can especially get bent out of shape–cough, cough, myself included–when overwhelmed by criticism and critique, some of which is inevitably at odds at one another.

This post includes some steps (below) on how to reply to peer review and keep a sane distance in the process, all the while producing a clear, tight, and logical series of responses that …

Advice for Grad Students: How to Do Academic Peer Review

A grad student friend of mine called in a panic a few months ago asking how to do a peer review. “Should I say yes? Is this a good thing? Is this just free labor? How the hay do I even do one of these things?!?!?!?!”

I admit the last question floored me until I recalled that I took a class with the amazing Barbara Katz-Rothman and Juan Battle when at the Graduate Center CUNY that explained this process to me. As a cultural geographer, I begged my way “Writing for Sociologists” and it made my academic life so much easier. To write this post, I reached out to colleagues about how they do peer review. I also draw on my experience as admin associate of WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly for three years and my service on multiple editorial boards to offer some best practices / shortcuts / ways to …

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 …

My Recommendation Writing Policy, and Advice on How/When/Who to Ask

Semester after semester, I find myself receiving an increasing number of requests to write recommendation letters. They are a pleasure to write. Unfortunately, my students often appear confused about who to ask or feel nervous to ask so that they send their requests at the last possible minute, thereby leaving me with little time to write the best letter for them. Another dilemma is that undergraduates often have never asked for letters and fail to supply all of the needed information, or do not know how to tell me the story of what they need and how they need it. Yet another issue is that students do not know the labor involved or the depths to which professors and others go in writing such letters.

In my new Pedagogy sub-page, “My Recommendation Writing Policy,” I share my recommendation writing policy with my Trinity students and also offer advice on how, …

‘To be associated in space,’ or: a delightful misreading

My dear friend and colleague, Maggie Galvan, put up a post some time ago with a pretty powerful quote from feminist, queer, critical race, and postcolonical theorist Gloria Anzaldúa:

According to Edward Hall, early in life we become oriented to space in a way that is tied to survival and sanity. When we become disoriented from that sense of space we fall in danger of becoming psychotic. I question this—to be disoriented in space is the ‘normal’ way of being for us mestizas living in the borderlands. It is the sane way of coping with the accelerated pace of this complex, interdependent, and multicultural planet. To be disoriented in space is to be en nepantla. To be disoriented in space is to experience bouts of dissociation of identity, identity breakdowns and buildups.
I misread the final line as: “To be associated in space is to experience bouts of
…