Student: Samson Harman
Graduation date: May 2016
Type: Concentration (single major)
Date approved: February 2015
Go to concentration landing page
Summary
The politics of space is a critical element in environmental studies that examines how interactions among humans and with non-human elements sculpt and are influenced by constructions of naturalness. My concentration relies on transgender renderings of space by analyzing how “every day co-productions of space and identity support or inhibit social, spatial, and economic justice” (‘Queer(ing)’ 2015) with close attentiveness to sexuality and gender. The People, Place, and Space Reader insists: “many conceptions of the person sever the individual from the environment without recognizing the extent to which humans come into being and live inextricably connected to places, people, and their material and cultural histories and geographies” (Gieseking et al. 2014). I will be exploring the effects essentialist ideas of gender have on transgender and gender non-conforming individuals in gay spaces specifically, and the role of the state in negotiating social and sexual identities of place. Gay space is a collective designation of neighborhoods, entertainment centers, bars, baths, parades, ecovillages, cruising grounds, and areas where gay people cluster to seek autonomy and safety in both material and symbolic forms (Lesher 2008). The crux of my concentration is uncovering how gay space ‘naturalizes’ some inhabitants and rejects others. Essentialism refers to the view that “for any specific kind of entity, there is a set of characteristics or properties all of which any entity of that kind must possess” (‘Essentialism’ 2015). An essentialist understanding of sex and gender recognizes a person’s sex assigned at birth as an indication of their authentic gender, includes only two categories of sex/gender, and privileges heterosexuality as inherently natural and therefore superior. Transgender identities, as a part of queer narratives, “disrupts ‘natural’ dichotomies such as heterosexual/homosexual and gender/sex” (Doan 2007) by contesting the ideology that cigender bodies are stable and determinate. Through the utilization of a critical race and queer epistemological framework, my concentration will observe how transgender experiences challenge essentialist ideas of gender by distinguishing categories of identity, including race, gender, ability, and sex, as historically constructed and incomplete. Various standpoints and experiences are at work in the formation of knowledge and are necessary to collapse in order to expose the origination of constructions of the body and to move towards a comprehension of sex/gender that acknowledges gender as a spectrum. Heterosexism, or a “socio-cultural system dominated by a heterosexual perspective, one in which the only legitimate sexual relationship allowed is between opposite genders and in which the male gender is dominant” (Koonts 2000) is deeply embedded in essentialist and patriarchal ideologies. Contemporary manifestations of heterosexism disadvantage non-white subjects, poor people, and queer individuals through the “basis of their being ‘uncivilized’, closer to animals and the natural world” (Seymour 2013). For this reason, ecofeminists and other such thinkers scrutinize present-day race and gender hierarchies that work to dehumanize trans, queer, and non-white people. In a case study by Doan, transgender people report that gay space is viewed as a breach from the “hetero-normative gaze” (Doan 2007) however, the gendered dimensions of queer space fails to fully support or protect trans and gender variant people. Evaluating intersections of heterosexism and essentialist thought in transgender perceptions of space provides necessary insight into how the ‘natural order’ of humans is relentlessly reproduced in order to administer rigid gender roles and systems.
W.D. Myslik reasons that “most are ignorant of the degree to which sexuality, especially heterosexuality permeates space” through affirmations and public announcements of heterosexist gender identities and behavioral patterns (1996). Groups or individuals that deviate from sex/gender norms (read: heterosexuality and cisgender identities) are keenly aware of their visible transgressions. The return effect creates a climate of “fear and violence attempt(ing) to render queers and queer activity invisible”, for “the queer body made public produce(s) anxieties about gender roles, and more importantly, frustration over social relations in public spaces” (Koonts 2000). The accumulation of gay bodies spatially structures not just community but identity (Brown 2014) however; the role of heterosexism and the state affects the accessibility, construction, and surveillance of gay space and its patrons. To offer context, gay spaces emerged most notably in the late 1980s (and under other names), when queer people flocked to metropolitan areas to find commonality under the slogan “get thee to a big city!” (Weston 1995). Historically, cities are theorized as a haven for the depraved and the delinquent (‘Queer(ing)’ 2015) including the homosexual, who, even in recent history, is often perceived by heterosexuals as “urban pollution” (Jacobs 1961). The urban/rural binary of queer experiences erases rural queers by dint of a term coined ‘metronormativity’, or the tendency to conflate the city as a space that allows the “full expression of the sexual self in relation to a community of other gay/lesbians/queers…” (Halberstam 2005). Despite the presence of ‘gay spaces’ in large cities, gay enclaves consistently privilege cisgender white gay men, who have been able to flourish and develop in urban areas with greater access to wealth, leading to the argument that “all space seems to have a gender identity dominated by masculinity even in the confines of queer spaces” (Koonts 2000, emphasis mine). The presence of normalized sex/gender embodiments in gay spaces eradicates a discussion of difference in race, class, citizenship, and ability by pinkwashing the realities of the city and the treatment of non-conforming and/or non-white subjects. The public/private binary of metropolitan space suggests cities as a site for men, while women are confined to the privacy of the home, often out of anxiety of harm, and are made invisible. Environmental design is a key component in regulating the activity of women and sexual minorities in public and private spaces (Koonts 2000), which lends itself to the ability to reverse current trends and create a space rich with agency and access. The task becomes further asking what forces of state intervention directly imbalances queers share of power, how inner queer shares of power are imbalanced, how institutional governing differs along class, race, and sex/gender lines, and what steps could be taken to remedy state and social control of gender autonomy.
The built environment is reflective of heterosexist use and separation that the state determines and preserves through family zoning practices, landscape planning, public funding, redlining, immigration laws, and changes in acceptable or criminalized behaviors. The government plays a major part in regulating and shaping space in a span of measures, including the subsidization of suburbs, sponsorship of home-ownership, funding for highway construction, welfare projects, policing, maintenance of infrastructure, and housing the incarcerated. The everyday lives of people that stray from social norms form through gendered encodements of useable space, influenced by state interest. Policing, for example, impacts how class, gender, age, and ethnic norms are produced in gay spaces (Crofts et al. 2013) and other symbolic or social settings. Dean Spade, a trans/queer poverty lawyer, explains “people who don’t fit into their prescribed categories and roles, or who are hard to read, are considered suspicious and face surveillance, criminalization and violence, or they’re considered disruptive, and excluded from the programs and institutions that operate through these binaries” (Spade). To comprehend how transgender bodies are “made-up out of relationships between, within, and beyond them” (Nast et al., 2005) requires ontologically discovering how gay spaces combine with the state in regulating patrons. Ontology focuses on the nature of being and existing; a feminist ontology comprehends that the personal (or the every day) is political and underscores “connections between personal experience and larger social and political structures” (‘The Personal is Political’ 2014). Gay spaces, in an effort to assimilate into a heterosexist society, generally embrace essentialist understandings of sex and gender, effectively subduing the security of transgender individuals from state forces and a hostile public. To open inclusivity in gay spaces first requires changing underlying social institutions, including racialized gender norms, and altering the geographical imagination or composition of the built environment to ultimately echo the vastness of human experience. Transgender identities demonstrate a node of variation in the sex/gender system and advocate for relationality as a means to foster a recognition of difference foremost, with new principles of social, economic, and spatial equity following. Analyzing co-productions of space and identity in the lens of transgender acuities calls measures of state intervention into question, acknowledges difference, queers norms, probes ‘natural’ rhetoric, and prioritizes both safety and self-determination within and apart from gay space.
Crofts, Penny, Phil Hubbard, & Jason Prior. 2013. “Policing, Planning and Sex: Governing Bodies, Spatially.” Australian & New Zealand Journal of Criminology 46 (1): 51–69. doi:10.1177/0004865812469974.
Doan, Petra L. 2007. “Queers in the American City: Transgendered Perceptions of Urban Space.” Gender, Place & Culture 14 (1): 57–74. doi:10.1080/09663690601122309.
“Essentialism.” Princeton University. Accessed January 23, 2015. https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Essentialism.html.
Gieseking, Jen Jack, William Mangold, Cindi Katz, Setha Low, & Susan Saegert. 2014. The People, Place, and Space Reader. Routledge.
Halberstam, Judith/Jack. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. NYU Press.
Hanhardt, Christina B. 2013. Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence. Duke University Press.
Jacobs, Jane. The death and life of great American cities. Random House LLC, 1961.
Koonts, Dean Webster. 2000. Perceptions of unsafe landscapes in urban queer spaces. Thesis (M. Landsc. Arch.)–University of Washington, 2000.
Lesher, Scott Richard. 2008. “The Making and Meaning of Gay Space: The Case of The Castro in San Francisco.” New Jersey Institute of Technology. http://archives.njit.edu/vol01/etd/2000s/2008/njit-etd2008-015/njit-etd2008-015.pdf.
Myslik, W. D. 1996. “Renegotiating the Social/Sexual Identities of Place: Gay Communities as Safe Havens or Sites of Resistance”, in N. Duncan (Ed.) BodySpace: Destabilising Geographies of Gender and Sexuality. Routledge, London: 56-169.
Nast, Heidi, and Steve Pile. 2005. Places Through the Body. Routledge.
“Queer(ing) New York | A CLAGS Seminar in the City, Led by Jen Jack Gieseking.” 2015. Accessed January 23. http://jgieseking.org/CLAGSqNY/.
Seymour, Nicole. 2013. Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination. University of Illinois Press.
Spade, Dean. 2008. Compliance Is Gendered: Struggling for Gender Self-Determination in a Hostile Economy. SSRN Scholarly Paper ID 1209984. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network. http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1209984.
“The Personal Is Political.” 2014. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_personal_is_political&oldid=638598204.
Weston, Kath. 1995. “Get Thee to a Big City: Sexual Imaginary and the Great Gay Migration.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 2 (3): 253–77. doi:10.1215/10642684-2-3-253.
Questions
- Descriptive: What are the epistemological roots of difference in sex, sexuality and race? What are the current attitudes of gay people regarding transgender people in shared enclosures? How does the state gender, sexualize, manipulate and administer gay spaces within racialized, classed, and closed discourses?
- Explanatory: How do constructions of naturalness and the body feed into the placement, discrimination and surveillance of trans people by the state in the context of gay space? What motivates the queer urban/rural binary where rural landscapes reign with ‘backward’ ideas and urban landscapes contain a community and resources? How do the physical and social structure of gay spaces sustain rigid, classed, gendered, racialized and dis/abled segregations among inhabitants?
- Evaluative: To what extent do trans people and people of color feel unwelcome in white gay spaces? Why? How do normalized notions of queerness cultivate or inhibit the everyday experiences of transgender individuals seeking economic justice, social equity and freedom from violence?
- Instrumental: How can gender be re-envisioned to increase the safety of trans, gender variant, black, and people of color in gay spaces?
Concentration courses
- ENVS 350 (Environmental Theory, 4 credits): Spring 2014. Builds on the critical analysis my concentration requires through the exploration of epistemology, ontology, values, knowledge-producers, political bodies, social influences, and experts that shape gay space, namely.
- SOAN 498 (Green Capitalism, 4 credits): Fall 2014. Emphasizes the possibilities of capitalism to incorporate human and non-human well-being as a principle of business; opens my concentration to economic futurity for queer people, poor people, people of color, and other disenfranchised groups.
- GEND 440 (Feminist Theory, 4 credits): Fall 2014. Examines sex, race, gender, class, biology as the product of social hierarchies that become naturalized, and explores transgender exclusion as well as sexism, (dis)ability theory, and ethnic studies.
- HIST 338 (Crime & Punishment, 4 credits): Spring 2015. Assesses the growing impact of the prison industrial complex, studies the evolution of acceptable and unacceptable behaviors and specifically studies the roles race, transgender status, queerness, class, and gender has on affecting treatment.
Arts and humanities courses
- PHIL 215 (Philosophy and the Environment, 4 credits). Pre-approved A&H course; no justification required.
- HIST 239 (Constructing the American Landscape, 4 credits): Fall 2014. Broadly combs through the production of the urban/rural binary, complicates gendered ideas of ‘nature’ and reveals how social hierarchies are formed and imprinted on land use.