Research into queer activist geographies has focused on political challenges to the heteronormative social order as exemplified by public demonstrations and public space appropriations in large cities. One of the challenges with the emerging urban scholarship on queer activisms is its metronormative focus on the central areas of world gay cities and on highly visible, spectacular, and media-covered activisms. This geographic focus is due, in part, to the often greater concentration of LGBTQ2S organizations, queer-friendly spaces, and LGBTQ2S-identified residents in central city areas, an association between urbanism and sexual liberation, and the symbolism of downtown public spaces as reference points for the public sphere itself. But LGBTQ2S activisms occur within and beyond the city’s edge, in many kinds of contexts and spaces in the global North and South and often in response to demographic shifts and population displacements. LGBTQ2S activisms also involve different approaches and strategies while prioritizing issues of social inclusion, health, safety, and political visibility in response to shifting and complex socio-spatial dynamics and lived realities within city-regions. Much of this activism is informal and ephemeral in its responsiveness to local social and health service needs, is reliant upon community-based voluntary labour and social networks that circulate through the private and public spheres, is supported by practices of queer allyship, and is not underwritten by substantial public or private sector infrastructure, staffing, or programming investments. This session seeks to multiply the scholarly portraits and theoretical understandings of LGBTQ2S activisms by interrogating the non-metrocentric and perhaps less visible, grassroots, and micro spatial scales and organizational strategies of queer political (sub)urban interventions.
Moderator: Julie Podmore, John Abbott College
Displaced Queers: Suburban LGBTQ2S Activisms in the Vancouver City Region Julie Podmore, John Abbott College; Alison Bain, York University
Sub/Urban Queer Activism: Re/Placing Diva Citizenship Patricia Wood, York University
Youth for A Change: Young, Queer, and Here as Advocates, Educators, and Activists Jennifer Marchbank, Simon Fraser University
Endowed with a Visual Archive: Encountering an LGBTTTI Sector in Southern Mexico Through Images of Pride Marches William Payne, York University
