For example, standard scholarly accounts point to economic forces, especially gentrification, to explain why gayborhoods form and change (Christafore and Leguizamon 2018 Collins 2004 Ruting 2008). Regardless of whether they ask about origins, change, resonance, inter-group dynamics, or spatial variability, scholars who work in this area generally propose macro-structural arguments. Scholars ask why gayborhoods first formed (Castells and Murphy 1982 Knopp 1997 Lewis 2013), how they have changed over time (Kanai and Kenttamaa-Squires 2015 Rushbrook 2002 Stryker and Van Buskirk 1996), their cultural significance for queer people (Doan and Higgins 2011 Greene 2014 Orne 2017), why they appeal to heterosexuals (Brodyn and Ghaziani 2018 Ghaziani 2019d), and their diverse spatial expressions ( Brown-Saracino 2018 Ghaziani 2019a Whittemore and Smart 2016). One area of research focuses on the origins and ontology of these districts (Compton and Baumle 2012). The field of gayborhood studies consists of four major streams. 1 Today, new works are published at too rapid a rate for me to capture in just one citation (e.g., Baldor 2018 Bitterman 2020 Callander et al. Research in this area focuses on the properties of urban gay districts, including their spatial, historical, prototypical, institutional, and comparative features. 2004), and urban studies (Delany 1999 Fischer 1975) as part of a distinct field of “ gayborhood studies” (Ghaziani 2014b, 2015b, 2019c).
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2002), feminist studies (Rupp 2009 Wolfe 1979), geography (Brown 2014 Hubbard 2012 Nash and Gorman-Murray 2014), history (Aldrich 2004 Chauncey 1994 Heap 2003 Kennedy and Davis 1993), sociology (Castells 1983 Laumann et al. Although the spatial expressions of queerness are a relatively recent object of inquiry, I see foundational works in anthropology (Newton 1993 Rubin 1998 Weston 1995), Black queer studies (Nero 2005), economics (Black et al. The association between sexuality and the city is as established experientially as it is affirmed in the academy-from sexological counts of sexual practices to thick ethnographic descriptions of the moral regions of urban sexual worlds (Kinsey et al. The reasons that residents provide for why their neighborhoods appeal to them showcase the analytic power of the streets for understanding what places mean and why they matter. More generally, my findings caution against adopting an exclusively supra-individual approach in urban studies. By shifting the analytic gaze from abstract concepts to interactions and embodied perceptions on the ground-a “street empirics” as I call it-I challenge the claim that gayborhoods as an urban form are outmoded or obsolete. In this chapter, I use the residential logics of queer people-why they in their own words say that they live in a gay district-to show how gayborhoods acquire their significance on the streets.
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Existing research in this emerging field of “gayborhood studies” emphasizes macro-structural explanatory variables, including the economy (e.g., land values, urban governance, growth machine politics, affordability, and gentrification), culture (e.g., public opinions, societal acceptance, and assimilation), and technology (e.g., geo-coded mobile apps, online dating services). Urbanists have developed an extensive set of propositions about why gay neighborhoods form, how they change, shifts in their significance, and their spatial expressions.