"Queer Constellations investigates the dreams and catastrophes of recent urban history viewed through new queer narratives of inner-city life. The "gay village," "gay mecca," ""gai Paris," the "lesbian flaneur," the "lesbian boheme"--these and other urban phantasmagoria feature paradoxically in this volume as figures of revolutionary utopia and commodity spectacle, as fossilized archetypes of social transformation and ruins of haunting cultural potential. Dianne Chisholm introduces readers to new practices of walking, seeing, citing, and remembering the city in works by Neil Bartlett, Samuel Delany, Robert Gluck, Alan Hollinghurst, Gary Indiana, Eileen Myles, Sarah Schulman, Edmund White, and David Wojnarowicz. Reading these authors with reference to the history, sociology, geography, and philosophy of space, particularly to the everyday avant-garde production and practice of urban space, Chisholm reveals how--and how effectively--queer narrative documentary resembles and reassembles Walter Benjamin's constellations of Paris, "capital of the nineteenth century." Considering experimental queer writing in critical conjunction with Benjamin's city writing, the book shows how a queer perspective on inner-city reality exposes contradictions otherwise obscured by mythic narratives of progress. If Benjamin regards the Paris arcade as a microcosm of high capitalism, wherein the (un)making of industrial society is perceived retrospectively, in contemporary queer narrative we see the sexually charged and commodity-entranced space of the gay bathhouse as a microcosm of late capitalism and as an exemplary site for excavating the contradictions of mass sex. In Chisholm's book we discover how,looking back on the ruins of queer mecca, queer authors return to Benjamin to advance his "dialectics of seeing"; how they cruise the paradoxes of market capital, blasting a queer era out of the homogeneous course of history.

Winner, 2021 Glenda Laws Award given by the American Association of Geographers The first lesbian and queer historical geography of New York City Over the past few decades, rapid gentrification in New York City has led to the disappearance of many lesbian and queer spaces, displacing some of the most marginalized members of the LGBTQ+ community. In A Queer New York, Jen Jack Gieseking highlights the historic significance of these spaces, mapping the political, economic, and geographic dispossession of an important, thriving community that once called certain New York neighborhoods home. Focusing on well-known neighborhoods like Greenwich Village, Park Slope, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Crown Heights, Gieseking shows how lesbian and queer neighborhoods have folded under the capitalist influence of white, wealthy gentrifiers who have ultimately failed to make room for them. Nevertheless, they highlight the ways lesbian and queer communities have succeeded in carving out spaces—and lives—in a city that has consistently pushed its most vulnerable citizens away. Beautifully written, A Queer New York is an eye-opening account of how lesbians and queers have survived in the face of twenty-first century gentrification and urban development.

Queer premises provide vital social and cultural infrastructure – a queer infrastructure – connecting different generations and locations, facilitating the movement of resources, across and beyond the city. Queer Premises offers evidence for how London's diverse LGBTQ+ populations have embedded themselves into urban space, systems and resources. It sets out to understand how, across their different material dimensions, bars, cafés, nightclubs, pubs, community centres, and hybrids of these typologies, have been imagined, created and sustained. From the 1980s to the present, Campkin asks how, where, and why these venues have been established, how they operate and the purposes they serve, what challenges they face and why they close down.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Conflicts about space and access to resources have shaped queer histories from at least 1965 to the present. As spaces associated with middle-class homosexuality enter mainstream urbanity in the United States, cultural assimilation increasingly erases insurgent aspects of these social movements. This gentrification itself leads to queer displacement. Combining urban history, architectural critique, and queer and trans theories, Queering Urbanism traces these phenomena through the history of a network of sites in the San Francisco Bay Area. Within that urban landscape, Stathis Yeros investigates how queer people appropriated existing spaces, how they expressed their distinct identities through aesthetic forms, and why they mobilized the language of citizenship to shape place and secure space. Here the legacies of LGBTQ+ rights activism meet contemporary debates about the right to housing and urban life.

Featuring contributions from a range of significant voices in the field, this volume renews the conversation around what it means to speak of the 'queer' in the context of architecture, and offers a fresh take on the methodological and epistemological challenges this poses to the discipline of architectural theory. Architecture as a discipline, a profession and an applied practice is always subordinate to its own conceptual framework, which is one of orderliness. It refers to buildings, but also to infrastructures of thought and knowledge, to conventions and taxonomies, to structures of governance, hierarchies of power and systems of administration. How, then, can one look at queering architectural discourse when the very term 'queer', celebrated for its elusive nature, resists and attacks such order? Divided into four subsections, the essays in this anthology each pursue a distinct line of inquiry – methods, practices, spaces and pedagogies – in order to help particularize the proposed queering of architecture. They demonstrate the paradoxical nature of the endeavour from a diverse range of perspectives – from questions of mapping queer theory in architecture; to issues of queer architectural archives, or lack thereof; to non-Western challenges to the very term queer, and the queering of basic assumptions across affiliated disciplines. Queering Architecture not only provides a bold challenge to the normative methods employed in architectural discourse but also addresses how establishing 'queer' methodologies is a paradox in itself.

Architecture and the urban are connected to challenges around violence, security, race and ideology, spectacle and data. The first volume of this handbook extensively explored these oppressive roles. This second volume illustrates that escaping the corporatized and bureaucratized orders of power, techno-managerial and consumer-oriented capitalist economic models is more urgent and necessary than ever before. Herein lies the political role of architecture and urban space, including the ways through which they can be transformed and alternative political realities constituted. The volume explores the methods and spatial practices required to activate the political dimension and the possibility for alternative practices to operate in the existing oppressive systems while not being swallowed by these structures. Fostering new political consciousness is explored in terms of the following themes: Events and Dissidence; Biopolitics, Ethics and Desire; Climate and Ecology; Urban Commons and Social Participation; Marginalities and Postcolonialism. Volume II embraces engagement across disciplines and offers a wide range of projects and critical analyses across the so-called Global North and South. This multidisciplinary collection of 36 chapters provides the reader with an extensive resource of case studies and ways of thinking for architecture and urban space to become more emancipatory. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.

Critical Architecture examines the relationship between critical practice in architecture and architectural criticism. Placing architecture in an interdisciplinary context, the book explores architectural criticism with reference to modes of criticism in other disciplines - specifically art criticism - and considers how critical practice in architecture operates through a number of different modes: buildings, drawings and texts. With forty essays by an international cast of leading architectural academics, this accessible single source text on the topical subject of architectural criticism is ideal for undergraduate as well as post graduate study.

"Architecture doesn't just apply to buildings. It can apply to the way we shape our environment and the habitats of other creatures," says Monica Barron. "There's also an architecture to our emotional/intellectual makeups." Deeply aware of how humans read their surroundings, and how these readings become the bones of a culture, Barron takes us from pond to prairie, from beauty salon to abandoned gas station, from fireside loving to winter ice. Often meditative, often whimsical, the songs, sonnets, and postcard poems in Prairie Architecture cluster naturally around ideas or images, though Barron rejects the rigidity of sections with titles. "I've focused on sequencing poems that might help reveal the bones of the body of the book," she says. Thus, we see how environment shapes perspective in "Why We Need Ponds," ("to break the monotony of crops," for example, and "to teach us patience/ when the water we prepared for doesn't come." We see environment shaping perspective again two poems later, in "Kansas makes her think about." In this small and precise poem "banks of wild, cream-colored iris/ mark where a house used to be," and we sense past and present blend in beauty. And just a few poems later, in a set of seven linked sonnets titled "Meditation from West of the River," we watch the poet remembering how "a heart/could hold heat like sand after a sunset," and again, how "a steady heart can hold heat across/ two states. Mine did. Light and color/ sustained me." This seemingly simple means of sustenance gets immediately complicated as Barron names the colors: "the silver of frost on rotting soybeans" and the red of "a carcass left to the dogs as the sun bled/ the afternoon away." The linked poems here together convey a long and rich love in which closeness and distance play their parts, and in which "whatever it is that connects the heart and mind/ it's at the mercy of memory." In the words of Jamie D'Agostino, describing the half-dozen "postcard poems" scattered through the book, "Barron's the perfect poet to write these: armed with the photographer's eye, the traveler's restlessness, and the poet's imagined scrawl on the back of the card, she's out there, missing us, taking in the world she wants to share." Prairie Architecture gives body to the wide expanses of the human heart by quickly, lightly touching the tiny nerves and arteries which feed it--whether they are heated by a funereal bonfire ("Fare Well") or warmed like butternut squash simmering in wine ("Sometimes your only muse is The Minimalist") or as empty as Audrey's Place after the owner shot her husband in the abandoned kitchen ("Hunting Song.") The medieval concept of microcosm/macrocosm finds a natural place here as word-become-image grows into rich, dense, sweet, sharp metaphor, and human concerns find their place in the midst of it all. As Lori Desrosiers concludes, "we will always remember grandmother's signs of rain, and find beauty in this exquisite journey of a book."

Queer Cosmos is a contemporary, fresh look into astrology, personal insight, and relationships for the LGBTQ+ community! Astrologer Colin Bedell from Cosmopolitan and QueerCosmos.com has brought together fifteen years of research, client interviews, and astrological mastery to create a spiritual guide for not only resistance and resilience, but also personal insights and relationship compatibility. Unpacking complex issues like shame and worthiness, Queer Cosmos explores Astrology as an antidote to feelings of hopelessness and provides language for authentic practices of self-expression. Leaving behind gender-normative pronouns and assumptions, Queer Cosmos explores more nuanced patterns of the archetypal energies expressed in queer experiences. After all, the only way to forge deep, meaningful relationships is to first forge a relationship with yourself. Drawing on research from experts in the field like Dr. Harville Hendrix, Brene Brown, and Esther Perel, Bedell goes deep to provide practical relational theory that can empower readers to find successful and healthy relationships.