What Sexuality Is This Place? Building a Framework for Evaluating Sexualized Space: The Case of Kansas City, Missouri

ABSTRACT:

We intend to build on previous work in planning and geography to develop a new framework for characterizing the everyday spaces that queer people move through and to capture their experiences of the city. Our hypothesis is that all spaces reflect social norms around gender identity and sexual orientation. We will explore how these norms play out in urban spaces by adapting a Lynchian framework that characterizes space by performance characteristics, such as fit, access, and control, using Kansas City, Missouri as a case study. Our results show that queer people read most spaces as heteronormative. They also show that there is a set of spaces with common performance characteristics that are preferred by queer people in Kansas City. We conclude with recommendations for future research and suggest connections to planning practice.

Notes

1 We pay very little attention to sex itself, and to the queering of space that sex produces, as these sites did not come up in our interviews. Public sex, cruising grounds, gay bathhouses, tearooms, or saunas, for example, offer a different form of queering (see Hubbard, 2009, 2011; Hubbard & Whowell, 2008; Hubbard et al., 2008; Prior & Crofts, 2011).