Our Queer Lives and Spaces (#OQLS) Project is a living queer archive that affords lgbtqtstsi a space to map & share their stories in their own words and images. Read more about & join the project here: http://jgieseking.org/CLAGSqNY/oqls/.
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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 …
My co-authored paper with the fabulous Susan Opotow, “Foreground and Background: Environment as Site and Social Issue,” in the 75th anniversary issue in 2011 of the Journal of Social Issues is now available here for free download in pre-print form. Susan and I were curious about how the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) considered the role of environment in their work. We decided to use the complete published works of the Journal of Social Issues and key social psychology methods texts as a dataset for the shifting constructs and understanding of environment in critical social psychological work. Please note that only the final print version may be cited. Here’s the final citation:
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. …