Abstract
Author Japonica Brown-Saracino starts How Places Make Us: Novel LBQ Identities in Four Small Cities with a puzzle: why do women of similar demographic characteristics think of their sexual identity differently when they move to a new city? Why does one woman start to embrace her butch identity when she moves to Portland, Maine? Using concise analysis and extensive qualitative research, How Places Make Us theorizes that the features of places shape how individuals understand and express their identities. Places literally make us.
Brown-Saracino spent over five years studying four small cities that have large percentages of female same-sex households. She observed and interviewed lesbian, bisexual, and queer (LBQ) women and genderqueer people in Portland, Maine; Ithaca, New York; San Luis Obispo, California; and Greenfield, Massachusetts. Although her project began as a study of gentrification and lesbian migration, the research quickly became directed toward explaining why LBQ people expressed their identities in such similar ways in each city. Whether one’s sexual identity was centrally focused on being a lesbian, whether it was seemingly insignificant, or whether it was specified by one’s involvement in smaller micro-identities like femme depended on the city of residence.
The sexual identity cultures of LBQ people are shaped by the local ecologies of each city: whether or not individuals understand a city as abundant and accepting, the place-narratives about what the city is like, and the “socioscape” or demographic and cultural profile of the city. These distinct, local city ecologies profoundly shape the way people experience their identities. For example, Ithaca and San Luis Obispo provide a study in contrasts. In Ithaca, the widespread visibility and acceptance of lesbians in the small city creates a kind of ambient community in which there are few formal LGBTQ organizations and people are more invested in their neighborhoods and interest groups. Ithaca LBQ people lament the absence of a lesbian community but also seem post-identity-politics. In San Luis Obispo, lesbian identity is embraced with a strong identity-politics ethos. Brown-Saracino argues that this situation is shaped by both the embracing of the San Luis Obispo place-narrative of being “the happiest place in America” and a sense of scarcity due to inhospitable elements of living in the city. San Luis Obispo lesbians are more likely to be cautious about being out and thus forge ties primarily with the lesbian community in the city. The regular gatherings of the lesbian community are diverse in terms of age and class but still prone to internal social and cultural divisions.
How Places Make Us is a critical contribution to the study of the city, sexualities, and social identity more broadly. This work underscores the importance of multi-site studies for understanding any kind of social identity, but especially sexual identities. If the author had picked any one of the four sites for a focused case study, she would have come to different conclusions about the nature of LBQ sexual identities. Without a comparative case, this research could have quickly become a study in the importance of micro-identities, the persistence of lesbian identity, or the creation of ambient community connections that do not necessitate having separate lesbian community organizations.
How Places Make Us is a textbook example of how to generate theory with qualitative comparative studies. Brown-Saracino systematically examines and eliminates existing theories about sexual identity, such as demographics and movement generations. She also challenges existing research that tries to homogenize the urban experience of LBQ people based on sexual identity in a few major cities. Many theories of sexual identity are based on gay men’s experiences in the major cities of the United States, including San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. The urban experiences of LBQ people are significantly understudied in sociology, and there is virtually no prior research on LBQ people in smaller cities.
There are a few places where How Places Make Us could be stronger, namely the geographical selection of cases and the racial diversity of research participants. Brown-Saracino openly acknowledges that the book is focused on northern and coastal small cities and explains the logic of case selection in the methods appendix. However, these case decisions were a missed opportunity to study small cities in the South with sizeable female same-sex couple populations, like Decatur, Georgia, or Gulfport, Florida. Over one-third of the LGBTQ population lives in the South, and it is often neglected by sociologists. In addition, the sample studied in this book is overwhelmingly white, and most of the theories in this book only explain the white LBQ experience. More critical analysis of the way whiteness shapes relationships to place and identities would have strengthened this book. Although Brown-Saracino acknowledges the disadvantages of her case selection and provides some analysis of race in each city, this narrow focus of her cases does limit some of her theoretical generalizations. That said, this book demonstrates the power of qualitative inquiry, the strength and flexibility of LBQ identities, and the profound ways that places make us.