T
his is a wonderful book. That is all.
I guess I should expand on that remark. And I'd love to: it is a real and deep pleasure to read such a forceful reminder of the value and beauty of long-term, committed, considered, slow scholarship. It's rare to read a book like this one that not only builds on extensive empirical work, organised by a nuanced theoretical framework, with a generative sense of a tight relation between the two, but is so beautifully written so that the book not only informs but is full of feeling. I had a lot of feelings reading this book, while also learning and thinking. What more can you ask for as a reader, or indeed aspire to as an author.
I want to start by emphasising its empirical richness. The book explores the geographies of lesbians, dykes and queers in New York in the period between 1983 and 2008. In so doing it draws on a wide range of sources and uses a variety of methods. That the book pulls these together so elegantly is testimony to the considerable thought given to every aspect of its methodological framework. Memories articulated in multigenerational group interviews are integrated with maps drawn by interviewees as well as many maps and other documents in various archives, and there is a strong sense of the situatedness of all these knowledges as well as the book's own.
There is also a clear theoretical framework which engages constructively with a wide range of theorists to develop an argument that I'm sure will inspire work in lots of other cities, and with other marginalised positionalities. Gieseking argues strongly against the assumption that the only way that women and transgender or gender nonconforming people produce urban space and thus gain rights and citizenship is by owning long-term, fixed spaces: bars, neighbourhoods, cafes and so on - what Gieseking calls "neighborhood liberation" (198). Instead, Gieseking thinks about queer space otherwise, and evokes a mobile, scattered and evanescent network of diverse lesbian and queer bodies as the enactment of urban queer space. To develop this account, Queer New York generously cites a lot of scholarship. But there are very few mentions of the 'giants' of urban theory. Indeed, I only spotted Walter Benjamin, Frederic Jameson and Neil Smith in passing and, great as those greats are, it is exhilarating to read a book which simply sidesteps those behemoths instead draws on a very wide range of feminist, queer, Black, indigenous, other scholars speaking from and to marginal positionalities. This is inspirational, exemplary and rigorous. Specific work is drawn on in detail to develop an analysis of the complex geographies and temporalities of queer lives in a particular city: in spaces public, domestic and neither.
And that brings me to another aspect of this book I love: the multiple kinds of spatialities that it works with. There are material spatialities of buildings and building design, and imaginary spaces of neighbourhoods, zones and territories. But there is also the central concept of 'constellations'. Constellations, says Gieseking, are not mappable territories. Instead, these are spaces through which material locations and embodied identities are organised otherwise, as mobile, elusive, shifting and relational, part of a sense of shared corporeal subjectivity both marginal but very much present. Gieseking both jokes about but also makes a resonant connection between the idea of a constellation and a lesbian and queer fondness for astrology as simultaneously material, imaginary and mythical. But constellations are also part of a wider critical vocabulary which theorises space as 'paradoxical' (Rose 1993 – thanks for the shoutout, Jack). I’m thinking here of other work like Simone Browne’s (2015) account of ‘unvisibility’, or Anna Munster’s (2006) of digitally mediated embodiment as ‘doubled’ between the corporeal and the virtual. I find these uncertain sorts of spaces very productive to think through, not least because, in terms of properly critical theory, they can admit the complexity of subjectivities as well as spaces, their ambiguities and ambivalence as well as their uneven investments in many kinds of relational subjectivities and the power articulated by those relationalities. Certainly the constellations that glimmer and fade in this book are configured as much by class relations and racialisations as much as they are by queerness.
But there’s something affective about constellations for me too, something about their light brightness, their evanescence. There are affects throughout this book, conjured by the author and the reader together through Gieseking’s wonderful writing, affects which are by turn earnest, careful, passionate, funny and cautious, as well as critical and respectful. Which makes the ending of the book very powerful and even quite shocking, to me as I read through to it. For the book ends with an account of a New York taken over by condos and heteronormative cis patriarchy. The final chapter is full of distress (and anger) for endlessly lost queer possibilities, which is not tempered by a knowing acknowledgment that every generation feels nostalgic for what they think has just been lost forever (a point the book makes elsewhere). Instead, Gieseking grieves a real loss of the enactment of queer community in New York while also insisting that its potential remains, particularly if its histories are remembered.
Gieseking attributes that loss mostly to the New York housing market and to Trumpian politics, but also in passing to social media, specifically to smartphones and social media apps and the tech bro industries that profit from them. The book’s history ends at almost the same moment as the iPhone went on sale. As I was reading Queer New York, I started playing around with the idea of contemporary digitally-mediated constellations, thinking about how digital networks as they are materialised through smartphones are also networked forms of light and energy, their glow shining through wifi networks and servers and screens, held by bodies that don’t want to be parted from them… but the final chapter rejected that line of thought very strongly. Gieseking suggests there that the digital has allowed online versions of embodied, physical constellations, but that these are insufficient: affectively attenuated, infected by platform capitalism and its voracious extraction, commodification and algorithmicization of data. This is a bleak end to the book and also to a sense of a historical project that, alongside its hierarchies and exclusions, did nonetheless contain the potential of a different kind of urban life, more open and more just. On this point and this point alone, I differ from this extraordinary book – and hope for digital constellations.
References
Browne S (2015) Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. London: Duke University Press.
Munster A (2006) Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, University Press of New England.
Rose G (1993) Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Gillian Rose is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oxford. She is a cultural geographer whose current interests focus on the digital mediation of urban space.
