Cultural Archipelagos or Planetary Systems

Doan, Petra L.

doi:10.1111/cico.12380

Cited by 28 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 18 publications

(18 reference statements)

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“…And, while Clubsterben (‘club death’ caused mainly by gentrification) has been a prominent discourse in Berlin since the early 2000s (Garcia, 2018, p. 472), the city's queer archipelago is arguably more resistant to this process than residentially based gayborhoods or clusters of nightlife. Its flexible geography, enabled by mobile equipment and a haphazard aesthetic, can respond quickly to rent increases, short leases, and noise complaints in individual locations, even if it suffers the precarity of the pop‐up economy and lacks the perceived safety in numbers associated with the enclave, which can be especially important for non‐gender‐conforming queers (Doan, 2019).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Berlin's queer archipelago: Landscape, sexuality, and nightlife

Anderson

2022

Trans Inst British Geog

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The metaphor of the archipelago has informed ideas about Berlin's post‐war and post‐wall fractured urban landscape as well as recent work on sexual minorities in the city. In the context of Berlin's landscape, the image refers to green islands of spontaneous vegetation on sites left behind by bomb damage and border infrastructure, while in scholarship on sexuality, it suggests a more dispersed distribution of minority nightlife than in the traditional focus on the gayborhood. The two meanings come together in many of Berlin's electronic dance music clubs, which are located in overgrown voids—or Brachen in German—and form a queer archipelago outside the heteronormative grid. Drawing on insights from queer and ruderal ecology, as well as some of the memory literature from the early German reunification era, this paper explores these club islands in relation to the landscape term terrain vague. By focusing on two sites in the former East Berlin borough of Friedrichshain—Wriezener Park, next to the city's most famous club Berghain, and the Brache‐turned‐dance club ://about blank—Berlin's current status as a global centre for queer club culture is understood through the lens of its unusual urban landscape and spectral ecologies.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Berlin's queer archipelago: Landscape, sexuality, and nightlife

Anderson

2022

Trans Inst British Geog

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“…In thinking about the relationship between LGBTQ people and placemaking we must look not only to gayborhoods or institutionalized spaces labeled gay (Ghaziani, 2014; Orne, 2017), but also examine sexual plurality in difference spaces (Doan, 2019; Ghaziani, 2014, 2019; Hunter, 2010). Amin Ghaziani (2019) has suggested the concept “cultural archipelago” as an analytic tool for understanding urban sexual plurality and change.…”

Section: Queer People and Placemakingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward a sociology of global comparative placemaking

Chica

2021

Sociology Compass

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I call for a globally informed sociology of comparative placemaking that integrates historical and contemporary processes and includes the ephemeral, institutional, and personal. By placemaking, I am referring to the explicit or tacit cooperation among people to create, maintain, and give meaning to places in space through bodily occupation given differential resources and constraints. I review select place, space, and community‐based literature about urban, Black, migrant, LGBTQ, and international populations to think about how we can build upon and integrate multiple theoretical, methodological, and epistemological insights to form an explicit placemaking research agenda. A US focus on neighborhoods contrasts with a comparative examination of global urban networks, social polarization, and transformation of the built environment in the interdisciplinary field of global urban studies (Ren, 2018). I argue for a placemaking research agenda that bridges insight from US Urban Sociology with Global Urban Studies to consider how various structures and actors constrain and facilitate place projects. With a globally reaching and comparatively informed sociology of placemaking, we can illuminate our multi‐structured story of place and agency in context. We can answer questions about how and why we co‐create and are simultaneously disciplined by the process of creation.

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Plateaus and Afterglows: Theorizing the Afterlives of Gayborhoods as Post-Places

Coffin

2021

The Life and Afterlife of Gay Neighborhoods

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A number of commentators have acknowledged the decline of gayborhoods and the concomitant emergence of non-heteronormative diasporas in societies where sexual and gender diversity is normalized (Ghaziani 2015; Nash and Gorman-Murray 2017; Bitterman 2020). Academic studies tend to focus on the new lives that are being led beyond the gayborhood and the diminished distinctiveness of the territories left behind (e.g. Ghaziani 2014). In contrast, this chapter explores the possibility that gayborhoods can continue to influence sociospatial dynamics, even after their physical presence has diminished or disappeared altogether. Individuals and collectives may still be inspired by the memories, representations, and imaginaries previously provided by these erstwhile places. Indeed, the metaphor of a non-heteronormative diaspora relies on an ‘origin’ from which a cultural network has dispersed. In this sense gayborhoods can continue to function as post-places, as symbolic anchors of identity that operate even if they no longer exist in a material form, even if they are used simply as markers of ‘how far the diaspora has come’. The proposition that gayborhoods are becoming post-places could be more fully theorized in a number of ways, but the approach here is to adapt Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987: 22) notion of plateaus, which denote a “region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation towards a culmination point or external end”. From this perspective gayborhoods are not spatial phenomena that reach a climax of concentration and then disappear through dissipation. Instead, they can be described as becoming more intense and concrete in the latter half of the twentieth century before gradually fading after the new millennium as they disperse gradually into a diaspora as memories, habits, and so forth. Put another way, non-climactic gayborhoods leave ‘afterglows’, affects that continue to exert geographical effects in the present and near future. This conceptualization is consequential for theory, practice, and political activism, and ends the main body of this edited volume on a more ambitious note.

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Cultural Archipelagos or Planetary Systems

Cited by 28 publications

References 18 publications

Berlin's queer archipelago: Landscape, sexuality, and nightlife

Berlin's queer archipelago: Landscape, sexuality, and nightlife

Toward a sociology of global comparative placemaking

Plateaus and Afterglows: Theorizing the Afterlives of Gayborhoods as Post-Places

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