Publications and Research

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2015

Abstract

As a focal point of neoliberalism in the US, New York City has been made the advance guard of both welfare reform and order maintenance policing, making the 2008 recession all the more destabilizing among low-income LGBTGNC (gender nonconforming) residents. At the same time, expanding gay rights have accompanied this neoliberal turn, defining while masking new intersectionalities of oppression, policing some raced and classed sexualities and genders while protecting others, producing an urban landscape conducive to neoliberal aims (Ferguson, 2004; Puar, 2007). In the process of attracting capital, homonormative discourses and practices have increasingly bolstered white and multicultural classprivileged gay space at the expense of low-income racially and ethnically diverse LGBTGNC communities.

Such contradictions have been seen most clearly by those managing the brunt of policy change. A team of low-income LGBTGNC co-researchers set out in a participatory action research (PAR) project to explore these dynamics, including a survey of 171 low-income LGBTGNC residents of NYC. Following McKittrick's (2007) application of paradoxical space to black geographies, case examples demonstrate low income LGBTGNC spatializations of homeless shelters as paradoxical constructions of freedom that challenge neoliberal conceptions of freedom for capital and the homonormative, multicultural individual freedom to consume.

Comments

This article was originally published in ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies.

This work was published under Creative Commons licence: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works.

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.