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Book Review | Gayfriendly: Acceptance and Control of Homosexuality in New York and Paris
In Gayfriendly: Acceptance and Control of Homosexuality in New York and Paris, Sylvie Tissot positions herself cautiously against linear progress narratives to take on gayfriendliness as a contingent process and to map out, spatially and relationally, its boundaries. Through interviews and ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Park Slope and Marais neighborhoods of New York and Paris, respectively, Tissot joins scholars examining the dominant rather than the dominated. She demonstrates how the increased banality of gays and lesbians creates the conditions for cis-straight people in these neighborhoods to simultaneously accept and distance themselves from homosexuality through various strategies that reinscribe their heterosexuality and limit LGBTQ+ expression.
Book Chapter | The Magical (Racial) Contract: Understanding the Wizarding World through Whiteness
Abstract: Race is foundational to J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. I argue that we can understand the structural context of race in our world and the Wizarding world philosophically by drawing on Charles Mills’s The Racial Contract (1997) to illuminate what I call the Magical Contract. I use Mills’s philosophical scaffolding to demonstrate the logic behind the magical racial order where Wizards—like White people—sit atop a racial hierarchy with other magical beings—like non-White people—positioned below them. I deploy additional scholarship to argue that 1) human mixing across blood status (pure, half, Muggle) approximates the historical and sociological process of immigrant assimilation into Whiteness rather than interracial acceptance, and that 2) true miscegenation—reproduction between humans and non-humans—is exceptional and largely repudiated. I provide a heuristic aided by concepts and examples from legal studies, sociology of migration, political science, and history to understand the Wizarding world.
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Article | Toward a sociology of global comparative placemaking
Abstract: I call for a globally informed sociology of comparative placemaking that integrates historical and contemporary processes and includes the ephemeral, institutional, and personal. By placemaking, I am referring to the explicit or tacit cooperation among people to create, maintain, and give meaning to places in space through bodily occupation given differential resources and constraints. I review select place, space, and community-based literature about urban, Black, migrant, LGBTQ, and international populations to think about how we can build upon and integrate multiple theoretical, methodological, and epistemological insights to form an explicit placemaking research agenda. A US focus on neighborhoods contrasts with a comparative examination of global urban networks, social polarization, and transformation of the built environment in the interdisciplinary field of global urban studies (Ren, 2018). I argue for a placemaking research agenda that bridges insight from US Urban Sociology with Global Urban Studies to consider how various structures and actors constrain and facilitate place projects. With a globally reaching and comparatively informed sociology of placemaking, we can illuminate our multi-structured story of place and agency in context. We can answer questions about how and why we co-create and are simultaneously disciplined by the process of creation.
Article | Queer Integrative Marginalization: LGBTQ student integration strategies at an elite university
Abstract: I draw on the oral histories of 44 LGBTQ Princeton alumni who graduated from 1960 to 2011 to examine student strategies for negotiating marginal identities when integrating into an elite university. Even with greater LGBTQ visibility and resources at the institutional level, LGBTQ students’ experiences and strategies suggest that we question the larger social narrative of linear progress. Across time, students navigate space by highlighting difference to belong as queer students in explicitly LGBTQ circles or muting difference to belong as token queer students in heteronormative circles. Integration of an LGBTQ person does not necessarily mean incorporation of an LGBTQ identity and vice versa. These strategies are largely contingent upon students’ social positions: intersectional identities, structural location, and available models. Student strategies are structurally tempered by queer integrative marginalization: the process of select predominantly elite LGBTQ people’s achieving special status among the heteronormative mainstream.
