M.5.1 An Urbanism of Queer Kinship: How Old School Ballroom Challenges Old School Conventions of Architecture and Urbanism

• Malcolm Rio, Columbia University

In 2016, the Library of Congress inducted Jennie Livingston’s 1991 documentary, Paris Is Burning, into the National Film Registry to be preserved as an emblem of American film history. Paris portrays the lives of homosexual and transgender Black and Latinx—or, queer people of color (QPOC)—New Yorkers in the late 1980s that invented their own systems of kinship, affirmation, and validation in spite of their own systemic oppression through organizing and participating in Houses and Balls. The film makes visible the fabulousness and ingenuity of queer-racial alterity: queers-of-color engaged in subcultural productions of spaces that creatively refused the values and categorical positions society wished to regulate them to. Yet, despite the film’s unprecedented commercial success, its cult-like adoration, or its explicit attention to the politics of urban spaces—Houses, ballrooms, parks, piers, streets, and spaces of exclusion predicated on race, class, gender, and sexuality—any reference to Livingston’s documentary or acknowledgment of its subject matter is absent within discipline of architecture.

This omission begs the question of “how architectural historians and theorists think about radical spatial alterity” and “radical alterity for whom, by whom,” if they cannot provide a framework to address stories and experiences like those described in Paris. This absence is especially striking given the numerous architectural texts, projects, exhibitions, and critical-practice studios centered on topics such as counter-cultural practices, the politics of resistance, occupation, or radical alterity. Yet, this absence is nonetheless consistent with the broader ideological, pedagogical, and methodological circumscription of problematic bodies and practices from architectural canons and their modes of historical reconciliation; even with the tremendous contributions and efforts from architectural scholars and practitioners like Mabel O. Wilson, Charles Davis II, and Mario Gooden, there still remains an extraordinary lack of sexual, racial, gendered, classed, and Othered architectural histories. At the core of this absence is a question of the conditions of architecture, as abstract knowledge practices and as physical objects, to delimit and/or give rise to cultural understandings of spatialized and embodied ontologies of blackness?

In writing an architectural history of the subculture queer kinship Livingston’s documentary captured, which I distinguish as house-ball culture, this paper seeks to position both ballroom’s history and Livingston’s Paris as proper architectural and urban texts. This racialized thread of queer subculture—as its cores, alternative family, and identity performance—offered QPOC peoples a heterotopia from increasing social, state, and media marginalization and violence—the War on Drugs, the Reagan-Bush culture wars, AIDS, homelessness, cable media caricatures—definitive within New York City’s development out of its 1975 financial crisis. Central to house-ball’s production of safe spaces was its use of “realness,” which reflects the intimate link between identity, its performativity, and urban space. For the QPOC body—embodied with multiple identity categories that must negotiate multiple antagonisms—movement across New York’s urban fabric required constant performative shifts or else risk violence from a hostile exterior, exposing that the design of identity is simultaneously the design of space and vice versa.

M.5.2 Sexual Imperialism in the Mexican Border Cities: Moral Cleansing and Resistance

• Germán Pallares-Avitia, Rhode Island School of Design

American border residents and visitors have crossed the border to México since its demarcation, either to take advantage of the closeness to a foreign country, or to participate in entertainment not available in their country. Entertainment regardless of its legality, has gone from bullfights, and charreria, to drinking alcohol, sexual services, gambling, and others. Consequently, Mexican border cities have been infamously categorized as centers of vice, where law does not exist. Historically, the Mexican government has promoted urban restructuring programs with the aim to maintain an amicable commercial relationship with the US. These repressive regimes have attempted to segregate spaces occupied by the entertainment industry, from the emergence of the red-light district during the Mexican Revolution, through PRONAF's (Programa Nacional Fronterizo – National Border Program) public moral crusades during the 1960s, to the walled-off ghettos during the 1960s. Throughout this paper, I will explore how existing historical narratives have denied the role of these places as shelters for sexual dissidents escaping strict puritanical laws in the U.S. or Catholic conservatism throughout Mexico. I will discuss how the México/U.S. border became a target for conservative governments that, through urban development programs, sought to erase the visibility, rights and autonomy of queer, cisgender, and transgender sex workers and others in the sexual tourism industry. Finally, how communities that worked and participated in these industries have managed to resist these attempts of moral cleansing, and have survived by resiliently reorganizing into safe spaces for sexual dissidence.

M.5.3 Fifth and K Street: Where Pleasure and Profit Combine in the U.S. Capital

• Shahab Albahar, University of Virginia

Modern planning is premised on believing that for cities to function efficiently, human activities should be spatially organized and administered temporally. Indeed, zoning remains the most prevalent land use planning tool in the United States, more than a century since its initial emergence in the early twentieth century. The notion that municipal powers can secure spatial and societal order vis-à-vis the exercise of zoning has in many cases led to the compartmentalization of the modern city, wherein the spaces for leisure, labor, and community are maintained mainly as separate realms. But zoning arguably also engenders spatial liminality, which usually manifests along the boundaries that delineate and segregate landuse districts.

Urban theorists have conceived spatial liminality as transition zones characterized by “social deviance and a disorganized urban character in contrast to the more defined and ordered parts of the city” [in Lévesque, 2016: 25]. This line of thinking is followed by work that conceives of liminal space as a void that marks a failure of urban planning [Chevrier, 2011]. Throughout the 1990s and the early 2000s, Washingtonian trans women of color, primarily Black, occupied what would be considered a liminal space in the American capital. For over two decades, Black trans women [BTWs henceforth] straddled the line that separated the commercial zone of Downtown Washington from surrounding residential areas. Scores of BTWs flocked to the intersection of Fifth and K Streets, in Northwest D.C., in search of profit, community, and visibility. Colloquially known as the Stroll on Fifth and K, BTWs transformed a neglected part of the city, experiencing prolonged disinvestment, into a thriving nocturnal landscape where the worlds of pleasure and labor collide.

This presentation explores the spatial practices and meanings attributed to a seemingly mundane urban landscape by a historically marginalized group and speaks to the importance of queer and trans voices in how we interpret spatial liminality.