In Pursuit of Visibility: Queer Space Approach to Community Architecture in Jamaica

<p>Public space is a site of contestation where people enact their identities and exercise their citizenship. Often non-conforming individuals and communities are not given this opportunity, existing solely on the fringes of these spaces. Queer, especially Trans-identified, people are members of multi-marginalised groups grappling with the realities of discrimination in Jamaica’s (public) spaces. This thesis will explore queer spaces, specifically, how architecture can be used to create safe spaces for the inclusion of the displaced Trans* youth of Jamaica. While queer space has been explored conceptually in architecture, there is now a pressing need to bring physicality to this corporeal subject. How can the experience of this community be translated into architectural expression? Playing on the theme of visibility, this research aims to develop a design of physical space through the analysis of various visual media, along with other experimental participatory design techniques. With input from members of the community, the architectural intervention will remain relevant to its target user community and grounded in its users’ Jamaican context.</p>

In Pursuit of Visibility: Queer Space Approach to Community Architecture in Jamaica

<p>Public space is a site of contestation where people enact their identities and exercise their citizenship. Often non-conforming individuals and communities are not given this opportunity, existing solely on the fringes of these spaces. Queer, especially Trans-identified, people are members of multi-marginalised groups grappling with the realities of discrimination in Jamaica’s (public) spaces. This thesis will explore queer spaces, specifically, how architecture can be used to create safe spaces for the inclusion of the displaced Trans* youth of Jamaica. While queer space has been explored conceptually in architecture, there is now a pressing need to bring physicality to this corporeal subject. How can the experience of this community be translated into architectural expression? Playing on the theme of visibility, this research aims to develop a design of physical space through the analysis of various visual media, along with other experimental participatory design techniques. With input from members of the community, the architectural intervention will remain relevant to its target user community and grounded in its users’ Jamaican context.</p>

Queer Space: Toilet Provision, Access and Inclusion in the West Midlands

Introduction This article explores issues relating to toilet provision in queer spaces. With a specific focus on the implementation of gender neutral toilets, it interrogates both practical and symbolic issues of inclusivity and accessibility. Methods The findings presented in this paper are based on 12 semi-structured interviews that were conducted and analysed in 2020. The data was analysed thematically, utilising an inductive approach to analysis. Results The results from this study highlight that spaces often considered ‘inclusionary’ operate within a number of ‘exclusionary’ frameworks. These unspoken and informal ‘rules’ and practices operate to exclude people considered ‘undesirable’ and function to uphold power structures that privilege cisgender, white gay men. Conclusions This article extends our understanding of the ways in which people engage with, and access, both gender neutral and sex-segregated toilets. Through an analysis of complex issues relating to accessibility, inclusivity and the politicisation of queer spaces, this article argues that the implementation of gender neutral toilets holds strong practical and symbolic power within a heteronormative, cis-normative society. Policy Implications The results from this study indicate that providing more gender neutral spaces improves accessibility for a range of people, but also has significant political power in challenging cis-normative, heteronormative standards.

Beyond the bow: a digital solution for the queer community

Beyond the Bow is an app for the LGBTQ+ community which will allow users to find queer events in their areas, get involved, circulate information, and help foster and build physical queer spaces in the GTA. Connection of strangers and self-organization of the queer community is what allows for the growth of queer spaces in society and sustains the physical queer geography of cities. Development of this app will cultivate and expand public discourse and support member activity in our community, which is necessary to ensure the prosperity and maintenance of our public. This digital solution is informed by research conducted through participant observation, autoethnography, and discourse analysis. The work is grounded in queer theory. Beyond the Bow will allow for communication in a new, modernized way within the LGBTQ+ community, and help reshape our culture by creating and maintaining real-life connections and queer geography through mediated communication and virtual community-building tools. The overall goal of Beyond the Bow is to offer users an accessible virtual place, that will work as a gateway into our physical queer spaces by providing resources and information surrounding on-going activities and initiatives, thus enhancing member participation and promoting the success of our community.

What's Up With All these Walls?" : Racialized Lesbian/Queer Women Immigrants and Belonging in Toronto

Despite government and scholarly interest in how Canada's immigrants settle after arrival, there is limited scholarship on how queer female immigrants find spaces for belonging in a Toronto context in both immigration scholarship, and in theories of queer migration. Drawing on critical queer, critical post-colonial feminist, and critical whiteness approaches, the paper aims to demonstrate why a universal subject, and increasingly, a universal queer subject renders a racialized lesbian/queer woman immigrant living in Toronto marginalized, impossible and unintelligible in mainstream and queer spaces. For the study, three racialized lesbian/queer women immigrants living in Toronto were interviewed. A reflexive analysis of the experiences of the three participants suggests that spaces of belonging for a racialized lesbian/queer woman immigrant in Toronto and beyond are limited, contradictory, and conditional.

What's Up With All these Walls?" : Racialized Lesbian/Queer Women Immigrants and Belonging in Toronto

Despite government and scholarly interest in how Canada's immigrants settle after arrival, there is limited scholarship on how queer female immigrants find spaces for belonging in a Toronto context in both immigration scholarship, and in theories of queer migration. Drawing on critical queer, critical post-colonial feminist, and critical whiteness approaches, the paper aims to demonstrate why a universal subject, and increasingly, a universal queer subject renders a racialized lesbian/queer woman immigrant living in Toronto marginalized, impossible and unintelligible in mainstream and queer spaces. For the study, three racialized lesbian/queer women immigrants living in Toronto were interviewed. A reflexive analysis of the experiences of the three participants suggests that spaces of belonging for a racialized lesbian/queer woman immigrant in Toronto and beyond are limited, contradictory, and conditional.

Beyond the bow: a digital solution for the queer community

Beyond the Bow is an app for the LGBTQ+ community which will allow users to find queer events in their areas, get involved, circulate information, and help foster and build physical queer spaces in the GTA. Connection of strangers and self-organization of the queer community is what allows for the growth of queer spaces in society and sustains the physical queer geography of cities. Development of this app will cultivate and expand public discourse and support member activity in our community, which is necessary to ensure the prosperity and maintenance of our public. This digital solution is informed by research conducted through participant observation, autoethnography, and discourse analysis. The work is grounded in queer theory. Beyond the Bow will allow for communication in a new, modernized way within the LGBTQ+ community, and help reshape our culture by creating and maintaining real-life connections and queer geography through mediated communication and virtual community-building tools. The overall goal of Beyond the Bow is to offer users an accessible virtual place, that will work as a gateway into our physical queer spaces by providing resources and information surrounding on-going activities and initiatives, thus enhancing member participation and promoting the success of our community.

Queer Between the Covers: Histories of Queer Publishing and Publishing Queer Voices

'Queer Between the Covers' presents a history of radical queer publishing and literature from 1880 to the modern day. Chronicling the gay struggle for acceptance and liberation, this book demonstrates how the fight for representation was often waged secretly between the covers of books at a time when public spaces for queer identities were limited. The chapters provide an array of voices and histories— from the famous, Derek Jarman and Oscar Wilde, to the lesser-known and underappreciated John Wieners and Valerie Taylor. It includes first-hand accounts of seminal moments in queer history, including the birth of Hazard Press and the Defend Gay’s the Word Bookshop campaign in the 1980s. The book demonstrates how the queer community could be brought together through shared literature. The works discussed show the imaginative and radical ways in which queer texts have fought against censorship and repression and could be used as a tool for political organisation and production. From the powerful community-wide demonstrations for Gay’s the Word during their battle with the British government, the mapping of Chicago’s queer spaces within Valerie Taylor’s pulp novels, or the anonymous but likely shared authorship of the 19th-century queer text Teleny. Queer publishing often involved a range of creative tactics to beat the censor, from self-publishing to anonymous authorship. The book also shows how collage and the repurposing of found image and text became a key queer publishing practice, from Derek Jarman’s vast creative repertoire to book artwork created by the Hazard Press. A fascinating and poignant analysis of some key historic moments for queer lib in publishing and book history, this is an essential read for those interested in how LGBTQ people throughout modernity have used literature as an important forum for self-expression and self-actualisation when spaces and sites for queer expression were taboo.

Let’s (not) Go Outside: Grindr, Hybrid Space, and Digital Queer Neighborhoods

Developments in mobile digital technologies are disrupting conventional understandings of space and place for smartphone users. One way in which location-based media are refiguring previously taken-for-granted spatial traditions is via GPS-enabled online dating and hook-up apps. For sexual minorities, these apps can reconfigure any street, park, bar, or home into a queer space through a potential meeting between mutually attracted individuals, but what does this signify for already-existing queer spaces? This chapter examines how smartphone apps including Grindr, Tinder, and Blued synthesize online queer encounter with offline physical space to create a new hybrid terrain predicated on availability, connection, and encounter. It is also a terrain that can sidestep established gay neighborhoods entirely. I explore how this hybridization impacts on older, physically rooted gay neighborhoods and the role that these neighborhoods have traditionally played in brokering social and sexual connection for sexual minorities. Few would deny that location-based apps have come to play a valuable role in multiplying opportunities for sexual minorities. However, the stratospheric rise of these technologies also provokes questions about their impact on embodied encounter, queer community, and a sense of place. A decade on from Grindr’s release, this chapter evaluates the impact of location-based media on gay spaces and reflects on what the increasing hybridization of online and offline spaces for same-sex encounter might mean for queer lives of the future.