What Sexuality Is This Place? Building a Framework for Evaluating Sexualized Space: The Case of Kansas City, Missouri

Nusser, Sarah Parker; Anacker, Katrin B.

doi:10.1111/j.1467-9906.2012.00618.x

Cited by 21 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 64 publications

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“…Throughout its history, the rainbow has been a public symbol flown to challenge the political and social status quo (Nusser, Parker, and Anacker 2013). Young people encounter these uses in the media and online, at pride festivals that began as protest marches and as acts of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer solidarity that continue to be political acts when flags are flown at pride events held across the world (Horton, Rydstrøm, and Tonini 2015; Kelley 2015; Zamon 2015).…”

Section: Findings and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Chasing the rainbow: lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer youth and pride semiotics

Wolowic

Heston

Saewyc

et al. 2016

Culture, Health & Sexuality

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While the pride rainbow has been part of political and social intervention for decades, few have researched how lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer young people perceive and use the symbol. How do lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer youth who experience greater feelings of isolation and discrimination than heterosexual youth recognise and deploy the symbol? As part of a larger study on supportive lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer youth environments, we conducted 66 go-along interviews with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer youth people from Massachusetts, Minnesota and British Columbia. During interviews, young people identified visible symbols of support, including recognition and the use of the pride rainbow. A semiotic analysis reveals that young people use the rainbow to construct meanings related to affiliation and positive feelings about themselves, different communities and their futures. Constructed and shared meanings help make the symbol a useful tool for navigating social and physical surroundings. As part of this process, however, young people also recognize that there are limits to the symbolism; it is useful for navigation but its display does not always guarantee supportive places and people. Thus, the pride rainbow connotes safety and support, but using it as a tool for navigation is a learned activity that requires caution.

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Section: Findings and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Chasing the rainbow: lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer youth and pride semiotics

Wolowic

Heston

Saewyc

et al. 2016

Culture, Health & Sexuality

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…moving to an area highly trafficked by heterosexuals and perceived as a largely heterosexual, anti-queer area (c.f. Nusser & Anacker, 2013)) and followed the "normalization-via-consumption" strategy by moving Pride to a highly securitized upscale commercial district. Both of these moves were criticized by the queer community, whose story I turn to next.…”

Section: David Later Addedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Welcoming Diversity? Symbolic Boundaries and the Politics of Normativity in Kansas City’s LGBTQ Communities

Candidate

2015

Journal of Homosexuality

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Using document analysis and ethnographic field work, this article examines the debate within the LGBTQ community of Kansas City over the decision to hold its Pride festival in the Power and Light District (P&L), a renewed downtown area with a controversial dress code. Despite the developers' and city's goals of creating a cosmopolitan urban space that welcomed diverse populations, the P&L acquired a reputation as an anti-Black, anti-queer space due to its dress code and redevelopment history. I argue that the debate surrounding this controversy reveals limits to notions of diversity and diverging approaches to sexual politics within the LGBTQ community that are normally obscured by political actors within the movement but that work to create symbolic boundaries that exclude "non-respectable" members of the LGBTQ population. Recovering queer perspectives allows us to imagine a more capacious definition of diversity and inclusion, both within the LGBTQ movement and in urban space.

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“…Social scientists across disciplines detail how characteristics of place, to include geography and localized cultures, inform sexual identities and the search for sexual partners (Bell et al 2001;Brown-Saracino 2017;Green 2014;Laumann et al 2004;Noor et al 2017;Scheim, Adam, and Marshall 2017). Studies linking place to sexual practice assert the attachment of meaning to physical sites, with subsequent effects on how individuals come to make sexual decisions in these spaces, though these works tend to examine the cultivation of unique sexual cultures in commercial spaces, such as bars (Casey 2004;Hammers 2008;Weinberg and Williams 2014), or across cities (Brown-Saracino 2015;Nash and Gorman-Murray 2014;Nusser and Anacker 2012), rather than within organizational settings.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Campus Sex in Context: Organizational Cultures and Women's Engagement in Sexual Relationships on Two American College Campuses

Pham

2019

Sociological Forum

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An "inhabited" approach to the study of institutions examines how organizational actors produce locally distinctive meaning in response to similar institutional forces. Adopting inhabited institutionalism to the study of campus sexual life, this study draws on interviews with 54 undergraduate women at two four-year universities in the United States-Ivy U and State U-to show campus cultures unique to a university inform women's decisions to engage in hookups and/or relationships. For women attending Ivy U, an elite institution where pressure to succeed is palpable, both hookups and long-distance relationships alike are posited as advantageous for the time-crunched, preprofessional student. At State U, a public school with a party reputation, women explain their engagement in hookups as part of the "fun" of college life, while women seeking or involved in committed relationships are obligated to negotiate the effects of the party culture in their partnerships. This study challenges the notion of a monolithic sexual culture across university settings by showing how campus cultures cultivated at the local level create unique organizational conditions within which undergraduate women forge and explain their engagement in hookups and relationships alike.

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What Sexuality Is This Place? Building a Framework for Evaluating Sexualized Space: The Case of Kansas City, Missouri

Cited by 21 publications

References 64 publications

Chasing the rainbow: lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer youth and pride semiotics

Chasing the rainbow: lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer youth and pride semiotics

Welcoming Diversity? Symbolic Boundaries and the Politics of Normativity in Kansas City’s LGBTQ Communities

Campus Sex in Context: Organizational Cultures and Women's Engagement in Sexual Relationships on Two American College Campuses

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