Beyond “heteronormative ‘impossibility’”: Imprinting metropolitan peripheries through queer suburban placemaking

16.11.2023 12:30 – 14:00

In a suburbanizing world, where city-building is driven from the outside in and not as a linear extension of existing city centres, urban peripheries and their suburbs are complex sites of inhabitation. Yet LGBTQ+ liberation discourses, much like metronormativity, frame suburbs as sites of “heteronormative ‘impossibility’” (Halberstam 2005), fusing individual “coming out” processes with a discursive spatial imperative to “get thee to the big” (Weston 1995, 253) and “liberating” city, bypassing suburbia. To frame suburbs, however, as significant sites of queer placemaking locates LGBTQ+ communities and people in metropolitan time and space. This presentation approaches placemaking as an ongoing, complex, and localized process of socially constructing places through everyday practices that involve the (re)distribution of power, interaction, and representation between divergently positioned stakeholders, inside and outside of planning and public policy arenas (Seamon 2018). With its unsettling subversions, queer suburban placemaking involves alternate and unsanctioned planning, policy, infrastructure, and public space interventions that collide with the specificities and stigmatizations of places designed for heteropatriarchal nuclear family reproduction. Four key questions about placemaking frame the presentation: (1) Who makes place for LGBTQ2S people in suburbs, where, and how? (2) What forms of activism and institutional allyship exist and with what individual and collective placemaking impacts? (3) How do these actions transform the micro-public spaces of suburban everyday interactions that are the lived experiences of places? (4) How do LGBTQ2S suburbanites, therefore, produce liveable lives in place and dream queer suburban futures?

Lieu

Bâtiment: Battelle

Information à venir

entrée libre

Fichiers joints

A3_EnjeuxSociaux-Spatiaux_Automne2023_Print.pdf

2.73 MB