The Geography of Research on LGBTQ Life: Why sociologists should study the South, rural queers, and ordinary cities

Research on sexuality and space makes assumptions about spatial singularity: Across the landscape of different neighborhoods in the city, there is one, and apparently only one, called the gayborhood. This assumption, rooted in an enclave epistemology and theoretical models that are based on immigrant migration patterns, creates blind spots in our knowledge about urban sexualities. I propose an alternative conceptual framework that emphasizes spatial plurality. Drawing on the location patterns of lesbians, transgender individuals, same‐sex families with children, and people of color, I show that cities cultivate “cultural archipelagos” in response to the geo‐sexual complexities that arise from within‐group heterogeneity. Rather than inducing spatially singular or scholastic outcomes, as some scholarship predicts, subgroup variations produce diverse yet distinct types of queer spaces. The analytic frame of cultural archipelagos suggests more generally that we cannot categorize urban or social worlds using simple binaries such as “the gayborhood” versus all other undifferentiated straight spaces. Thinking in terms of plurality provides a more generative approach to advance the study of sexuality and space.

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confidence: 99%

Cultural Archipelagos: New Directions in the Study of Sexuality and Space

Ghaziani

2019

“…When they do, they are often treated as anomalously dense nodes in a sea of rurality (e.g., Lichter, Parisi, and Taquino ; Sherman ), or as contemporary updates of classic community studies, like Middletown (Lynd and Lynd ) or Yankee City (Warner ) (e.g., Bell and Jayne ; Lorentzen and van Heur ). It is as if urban scholars had taken to heart lesbian anthropologist Weston's () critique to “get thee to a big city” and ignored the places where half of Americans live, including LGBT people (Norman ; Stone ).…”

Section: Commercial Heterogeneity In the Small Citymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Big‐city Bias Of Gay Bar Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The majority of scholarship about LGBT life in the United States comes from studies of gay neighborhoods in four large metropolitan areas—San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York (Stone ). As Stone (:7) notes, “most studies disproportionately focus on gay life in small sections of these cities with an emphasis on gay enclaves, ‘gayborhoods,’ commercial, and bar areas” (see also Nash ). This focus on areas of commercial choice in four MSAs that contain only 14.7 percent of the U.S. population abandons LGBT life in some of the largest cities in the country and ignores the vibrant albeit different gay neighborhoods in such cities as Seattle, WA; Oklahoma City, OK; Milwaukee, WI; Providence, RI: or Wilton Manors, FL (see also Ghaziani ).…”

Section: The Big‐city Bias Of Gay Bar Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Small–City Gay Bars, Big–City Urbanism

Mattson

2020

Despite the widely hailed importance of gay bars, what we know of them comes largely from the gayborhoods of four “great cities.” This paper explores the similarities of 55 lone small‐city gay bars to each other and the challenges they pose to the sexualities and urban literatures. Small‐city gay bars have long been integrated with straight people in their often red‐state communities; they are undifferentiated and unspecialized subcultural amenities not just for LGBT people, but for straights as well, fostering cosmopolitan lifestyles for large geographical regions whose residents nevertheless prefer small‐city living for reasons, including proximity to kin or nature, and the fact that many big‐city pleasures can be found everywhere. Contrasts between these findings and previous scholarship reveal the ways in which the latter has often implicitly defined urbanism and cosmopolitanism in terms of commercial diversity, as do studies of gentrification or gayborhoods. Small cities provide a way to integrate studies along the urban–rural interface, including places left to rural studies by both sexualities and urban scholarship. As an analytic object of comparison, small cities can help to disentangle urban effects from the cosmopolitanism of modern life generally.

“…). A significant, underlying assumption of this research is that trends present in urban LGBTQ communities are generalizable to smaller cities, as well as suburban and rural LGBTQ communities (Stone :3).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Theory Making from the Middle: Researching LGBTQ Communities in Small Cities

Forstie

2020

Urban lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) community research in sociology has largely ignored LGBTQ communities in the most common urban form: small cities. In this article, I argue that LGBTQ communities in small cities are an underexplored source of theory making about LGBTQ communities more broadly, and I highlight the ways such research enhances LGBTQ community research. I first discuss a definitional framework of LGBTQ communities in small cities. In other words, what do we mean by small cities, and what do we mean by LGBTQ communities within them? I then discuss the handful of examples of research on LGBTQ communities in small cities, describing the kinds of theoretical questions such research raises. I examine specifically how small‐city LGBTQ communities shift our thinking about urban LGBTQ community research in the following four areas: social networks, spatial and temporal dimensions of community, identity intersections, and allyship. Next, I identify three reasons why a focus on small cities is necessary to theory making in LGBTQ and community research more broadly, including and moving beyond questions of representation. I conclude by highlighting the methodological diversity needed to effectively research LGBTQ communities in small cities and briefly address a few challenges in moving this field of research forward.