People,protest and place: Advancing research on the emplacement of LGBTQ+ urban activisms

Frame emplacement

The idea of a ‘frame’ comes from Goffman (1974), who was keen to understand the cognitive mechanisms underlying how we make sense of events. Social movement theorists integrated his insights to argue that collective action requires activists to engage in a process of ‘frame alignment’ (Snow et al., 1986). To respond to a situation, people must first define what it means. As a mode of constructing meaning, collective action frames point to the dynamic process by which activists manufacture reality. Snow and Benford (1988) argue that activists engage in three framing tasks: diagnosis (what is the problem, and who is to blame?); prognosis (what are the most viable strategies, tactics and targets?); and motivation (what is the most compelling rationale for action?).

Places, like meanings, are complex, fabricated and multivocal. Activists thus face a fourth framing task, one that Snow and Benford (1988) missed: emplacement. Because ‘places are not inert containers’ (Rodman, 1992: 641), activists must engage in signifying work that links their interests and goals with a place – its politics, cultures, histories and traditions – to inspire protest. But how exactly does frame emplacement occur?

Ramdas (2021) finds that LGBTQ+ women in Sayoni were not successful when they demanded rights as members of a queer minority; they had to reframe their concerns as related to ‘safety and security’ or ‘care and protection’. These conceptions, while more limited, better fit with how the State viewed its responsibilities towards its citizens (‘care and protection’) and its patriarchal definitions of womanhood (‘safety and security’). Pink Dot activists used a similar strategy when they framed ‘love’ as a ‘universal right’. Their frame resonated with the State’s ‘core values of family’. In both cases, I saw activists using frame emplacement to make demands across the spectrum of power. For ‘colonised’ LGBTQ+ people in Singapore, frame emplacement requires them to ‘speak a language the coloniser can understand’. Addressing power in this way can challenge that power, and LGBTQ+ Singaporeans used frame emplacement to do so from the urban margins.

Collective identities

A second way that activists translate structural inequalities into experiential discontent is through the construction of collective identities. This concept addresses the contours of who we think we are. Rather than treating grievances as structurally given, assumed and invariant in a society, movement scholars use collective identity to understand how interests emerge, how they are defined and how activists draw boundaries (Ghaziani, 2011; Ghaziani et al., 2016). The analytic challenge is to determine how places produce distinct configurations between identities and interests, strategies and politics (Polletta and Jasper, 2001).

In their study of lesbian feminist mobilisation, Taylor and Whittier (1992) propose that activists construct collective identities in three ways: they establish social, psychological and physical boundaries between themselves and dominant groups (e.g. lesbian feminists created separate institutions such as health care and rape crisis centres); they cultivate a unique consciousness, or interpretive frameworks that define group interests (e.g. activists expressed the relationship between feminism and lesbianism with the slogan ‘feminism is the theory and lesbianism is the practice’); and they negotiate how to use everyday actions to resist structures of domination (e.g. because activists perceived traditionally feminine appearance as the source of women’s oppression, they adopted alternative styles of gender display). These factors – boundaries, consciousness and negotiation – echo my call for a scalar shift from structures to interactions.

But what about place? The contributors suggest several mechanisms by which places inform collective identities: places nurture distinct sexual cultures (worldmaking practices); places allow LGBTQ+ people to heal from trauma (commemorative practices); and places promote multiple care networks (re-centring practices).

The first of these is evident in the gay, bisexual and transgender men in Andrucki’s (2021) article who engage in worldmaking practices that range from cruising and non-monogamous public sex to serving meals at a homeless shelter. By having sex, and by caring for vulnerable members of their community, activists make and remake the streets of the gaybourhood, and resist the violence of erasure that gentrification produces in San Francisco. Because these worldmaking practices are spatially situated, activists use them to craft distinct sex cultures (Ghaziani, 2017) and styles of political engagement (Ghaziani, 2015b). Worldmak-ing thus evokes an overlooked aspect of collective identity: who we are is a function of where we are.

Hartal and Misgav’s (2021) work on traumatic events in Israel shows that commemorative practices comprise a form of urban activism – and a second way to link places with collective identities. They describe a nightclub shooting in Tel Aviv and a stabbing during Jerusalem Pride as forms of ‘queer urban trauma’. These injuries are more than a psychological response to distressing experiences; they also provide a basis for mobilisation. Sociologists have shown that cultural trauma and collective identities are closely connected (Alexander et al., 2004). Activists go to great efforts to ensure that traumatic events are not forgotten, often by emplacing their remembrances as memorials. How this happens, though, varies by place. Tel Aviv is a destination for global gay tourism, whereas Jerusalem is understood as a holy city with a history of antagonism towards LGBTQ+ presence. This difference in place reputations explains why activists in Tel Aviv were able to organise a mass memorial rally one short week after they experienced trauma, as well as why the municipality and national politicians expressed support for the LGBTQ+ community. In Jerusalem, there was no public event to help the LGBTQ+ community cope with their trauma. The first major memorialisation occurred one year later.

Catungal et al. (2021) re-centre narratives of the HIV/AIDS epidemic on long-term survivors (LTS) who lived outside Vancouver’s gaybourhood. LTS travelled in the distinct social worlds of the Downtown Eastside. Catungal et al. use differences in places to demonstrate the pernicious consequences of centring LGBTQ+ collective identities in one part the city. Doing so conceals ‘diverse geographies of stigma and the politics of socio-spatial exclusions’. Vancouver had multiple care networks that were dispersed across geographical centres of HIV/AIDS. Places, therefore, bind communities with care networks in ways that can reinforce inequalities.

Material resources like money and organisations, along with political opportunities, provide the structural potential for activism to occur, but everyday interactions and meaning-making processes that are situated in specific places mediate between opportunity and action. The contributors show that activists often work in peripheral or otherwise overlooked urban contexts to cultivate responses to the situations they face. In the movements literature, concepts like ‘submerged networks’ (Melucci, 1989), ‘halfway houses’ (Morris, 1984), ‘free spaces’ (Evans and Boyte, 1986), ‘safe spaces’ (Gamson, 1996), ‘sequestered social sites’ (Scott, 1990), ‘abeyance structures’ (Rupp and Taylor, 1987) and ‘underground rivers’ (Podmore and Tremblay, 2015) similarly draw attention to the mobilisation potential of the margins. Because these places are physically and culturally removed from dominant groups, activists can experiment with frame emplacement strategies and counterhegemonic collective identities as a way to incite action.

The global–local tension

How do LGBTQ+ activists link the local context in which they operate with a global spatial imagination? Ruez (2021) uses queer activism in Sydney to examine the fraught relationship between Australia, Asia and the West. He offers ‘worlding’ as a way to understand how LGBTQ+ urban activism is variably emplaced in Australia. Worlding involves imaginatively and materially linking some places to others. During his conversations with racialised queer migrants in Sydney, some of Ruez’s respondents worlded Sydney as ‘Asian’, others positioned it as ‘Western’, while others still worlded Australia and Asia together as a ‘shared Pacific region’. Clearly, Australia is not a static or geographically invariant place: activists construct Australia as ‘part of the Anglo-American centre’, as ‘peripherally down-under’ or as ‘inescapably Asian’.

Variations in worlding practices shape models of LGBTQ+ urban activism. For example, the most common way that racialised queer migrants in Sydney connected Australia with Asia was by referencing Pink Dot activism in Singapore, rather than North American-styled gay Pride parades. The worlding of Australia and Asia also enabled Ruez’s respondents to centre Indigenous histories and thus unsettle Australia’s whiteness and colonial geographies. The intuition here is that places, global and local alike, are accomplished (Molotch et al., 2000) as people relocate, re-worlding the places they know and with which they feel attachments.

Payne (2021) examines Pride parades outside the global North – in Latin America, specifically. Some scholars see these events as a ‘foreign’ cultural practice (Encarnación, 2016). When they examine them in the global South, researchers generally locate them in the national capitals or world cities. Missing from this literature is a study of Pride in smaller cities in the global South. Enter Payne’s work, which contributes to recent mandates to theorise ‘from the middle’ by studying smaller cities (Forstie, 2020: 153–154). By focusing on places outside the global North, Payne documents what I, in another context, call a ‘global–local tension’ (Ghaziani and Ventresca, 2005). Applied to protest and urban places, the global–local tension describes how activists configure place-specific and place-spanning properties of political action. Payne shows that LGBTQ+ urban activists borrow the transnational tactic of Pride parades to create broad awareness about their lives – but they inflect these events with specific local qualities.

For the first Pride march in Chilpancingo in June 2002, activists chose the Statue of Liberty as their primary symbol, and they flanked it with two people holding a rainbow flag. At the back of the float were images of an AIDS ribbon and a smiling condom figure. Without a closer look, this might suggest that LGBTQ+ activists in small Mexican cities emulate globally circulating images. But such a conclusion would miss the significance of local place cultures. Mexican activists exploited a tradition of using public processions in plazas to bring attention to their grievances. They deliberately staged the first Pride event in Chilpancingo’s central plaza, the Plaza Cívica Primer Congreso de Anáhuac, a site that is ‘imbued with profound cultural history and social meaning’. As they organised the parade, activists mixed transnational (e.g. rainbow flags, AIDS ribbons and the Statue of Liberty) and local symbols (e.g. a map of Mexico, the murder of a local activist and traditional Catholic penitential symbolism) to communicate their message. Thus, the analysis of cultural archipelagos must go beyond surface-level similarities across places. Payne’s article shows that activists manage the global–local tension in their mobilisation efforts by emplacing transnational discourses about human rights in locally significant spatial traditions.

Currans (2021) examines intersectional, social justice, queer-affirming and feminist organising practices in a small city of Michigan. The piece examines Love, Resilience, Action Ypsilanti (LRAY), a group of activists working to stage a local demonstration to correspond with the national Women’s Marches on 21 January 2017. LRAY activists experience a sense of acceptance in the surrounding Ypsilanti area. Rather than promoting queer interests, this motivates them to craft an ‘affinity-based’ activist community in which the expression of specific identities was ‘not the focus of connection or organisation’.

The resemblances between affinity-based and ‘post-gay’ politics (Ghaziani, 2011, 2015a) are striking, and Currans’ (2021) piece demonstrates their unexpectedly ‘radical potential’ (Ghaziani, 2015c). Post-gay politics can counterintuitively create space for coalitional, intersectional and social justice work. Activists in Ypsilanti used this mode of political engagement to foreground love and resilience as core emplaced frames of collective action. For Currans’ respondents, post-gay politics acquired a radical character as the result of two conditions: activists used a local organisational structure that had a post-gay ethos to respond to a hostile national political climate; and their mobilisation efforts occurred in a small city with a liberal reputation. Large urban environments can disrupt the ability of activists to work across identity lines, which restates a need to examine place variations.

Comparative analysis

By thinking critically about cultural archipelagos and place variations, we confront a question about commensuration, or the comparison of different places according to a common metric (Espeland and Stevens, 1998). Many contributors, like Misgav, Hartal, Ruez, Payne and Currans, emphasise place specificity, uniqueness and the locally contingent. Can we compare such places, or are they irreducibly idiographic?

Bain and Podmore (2021) examine Surrey and New Westminster, peripheral locations outside the Vancouver core, to show how non-metropolitan placemaking is a function of resource landscapes, political opportunities and inter-organisational relations. They use these variables to explain why New Westminster has a reputation as a ‘progressive suburb’ or ‘compassionate city’, while Surrey is a ‘hotbed of homophobia’. Bain and Podmore cautiously suggest that ‘urbane activist ideals and practices are not easily translated into peripheral areas such as rural small towns, smaller more ordinary cities or suburban areas’ but also offer, in their own words, a ‘comparative case study approach’ that enables nomothetic reasoning.

Comparative analysis can weave together the scalar and spatial components of the framework I have proposed in this commentary. Comparisons draw attention to the spatial pluralism of cultural archipelagos, but they also open up possibilities for examining the mobilisation potential of peripheral places. This is reminiscent of Ramdas’s (2021) arguments about organising from the margins; Catungal et al.’s (2021) sensitivity to multiple geographical centres of care networks; and Rosenberg’s (2021) deep dive into the creases and folds of LGBTQ+ urban activisms.

Rather than offering a descriptive account of each study, in isolation from the others, a comparative lens inspires connections and conversations across articles. For example, scholars can ask about the ‘prototypical characteristics of constructs’ (Shadish et al., 2002: 464) like the ‘margins’, ‘cultural archipelagos’ and ‘frame emplacement’. This enterprise of construct specification, common in the social sciences, is not the principal objective of any contributor, but thinking in this way – identifying transferable features of the sensitising concepts (Blumer, 1954) that animate this special issue – can help us identify the portable attributes of LGBTQ+ urban activisms. It is plausible, for instance, that the frame emplacement strategies that Sayoni activists in Singapore used could guide LGBTQ+ activists in Tel Aviv as they demand a municipal response to their experiences of trauma.

The emerging field of ‘queer methods’ (Ghaziani and Brim, 2019) can also promote the comparative analysis of LGBTQ+ people, urban protest and places. The idea of queer methods evokes an ‘apparent incommensurability’ (Brim and Ghaziani, 2016: 16) – the work can be untidy – but this is precisely its generative potential: augmenting ways of knowing. Although the contributors are not explicitly engaged in a conversation about queer methods any more than they endeavour to identify the prototypical features of concepts about the people–protest–place nexus, their work implies several proposals in my mind. One set of articles offers conceptual tools. Ruez’s (2021) notion of ‘worlding’ is an approach that researchers can use to compare how activists socially construct a place, especially in relation to its metronormative, colonial and temporal character. Catungal et al. (2021) instruct researchers to use ‘re-centring’ as a queer methodological strategy to document the counter-remembering of historical narratives across neighbourhoods.

A second collection of articles proposes strategies for data collection and case selection. Knopp and Brown (2021) use Damron guides to understand the ‘politics of cataloguing’: LGBTQ+ people use them to territorially claim urban spaces and to situate them in an ‘epistemological grid’. The guidebooks are thus forms and facilitators of activism that can dismantle the isolating and invisibilising effects of the closet. From a methodological standpoint, the guides blend conventional and queer methods by providing a data set that researchers can use to measure concepts like the ‘gaybourhood’, ‘spatial imaginaries’ and ‘placemaking’ while comparing the emplacement of those concepts. Rosenberg’s (2021) auto-photographic walking interviews with Black queer homeless youths in Toronto offer a method of data collection that also blends conventional and queer methods by combining corporeal movements, interviewing and visual approaches to reveal the ‘spatialisation of queer racism’ in urban gay districts. Finally, Payne’s (2021) use of a photojournalistic visual archive draws attention to the temporary occupation of urban public spaces as a way for activists to ‘bend local politics’ to accomplish their objectives. The queer methodological insight here is about case selection: the ‘fleeting moments’ (Muñoz, 1996: 6) represented by events like the Pride parades that Payne studies, or the pop-ups featured by other urban sexualities researchers (Ghaziani and Stillwagon, 2018; Stillwagon and Ghaziani, 2019), reveal the unexpectedly enduring effects of ephemeral events.

All the contributors make a point about the practice of research that is worth stating directly: the data we use to study the people–protest–place nexus are not objective entities for us to collect at arm’s length. Every time we gather our data, and in each moment of analysis, we are also engaging in a political act.