Queering the Disaster: A Presidential Session

Abstract

The 2007 SANA meetings on “Unnatural Disasters” used Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath as the focus of its scheduled sessions, and for scholarly and activist reflection on this theme. As the planning for the conference unfolded, we recognized that a very important component of the Katrina experience, related to our own work in North American anthropology, needed to be part of the conference program. New Orleans is a city with a long‐standing queer counter‐culture, many of whose participants are black and many of whom were hardest hit by the hurricane and flooding. We organized a session “Queering the Disaster,” designed to document the queer presence in the Katrina experience, and, thereby draw attention to the need to include attention to marginal sexualities in anthropological studies of unnatural disasters

Queer Domicide

“…The present discussion combines secondary data from various sources. First, the analysis draws on a literature review of existing publications on LGBT experiences in natural disasters, including non-government organization (NGO) reports and scholarly articles discussing the impacts of natural disasters on LGBT populations in New Orleans (D'Ooge 2008; Leap et al 2007 Caldwell 2006;Fisher 2006). We analyzed these media, academic, and NGO publications for information on LGBT experiences of displacement, home loss, return, and rebuilding.…”

“…Loss of personal and communal spaces-homes and community centers-exposes LGBT people to harassment (Caldwell 2006; International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission/SEROVie 2011). Moreover, disaster response agencies enact heteronormative assumptions in policies and processes, which marginalize LGBT people from aid (Balgos et al 2012;Leap et al 2007). In government and organizational policies, "family" often means an opposite-sex couple with children, while emergency relief practices deploy binary (male/female) concepts of gender (D'Ooge 2008;Pincha 2008).…”

“…LGBT people may find ways of retaining or reforging a sense of home, place, and belonging that supports individual and community wellbeing (Leap et al 2007). We now turn to the concept of home.…”

“…This space comes under renewed external pressure during disasters, where policies, often by necessity to distribute scarce resources, ignore marginal populations and their meanings of home. For LGBT people, this is often manifested in policies favoring assistance for heterosexual nuclear family households, homes, and neighborhoods (Leap et al 2007;Richards 2010). "Non-normative" households, including single-person, single-parent, and same-sex households, and non-family neighborhoods and suburbs, are often omitted from policy consideration (Cianfarani 2012;Katz 2008;Wisner 1998).…”

Sexual and gender minorities in disaster

“…Their attention to practical problems in local sites challenges the efficacy of some of concepts deployed within geographies of sexualities. Certainly sexuality and gender identity are mutable and fluid, but how might this be brought to bear in practice, in situations of disaster management (or can it even be brought to bear -see Leap, Lewin, and Wilson 2007)? Or perhaps DRR offers a means to actualise the concept of intersectionality.…”