Amin Ghaziani

Cultural Anchors and the Organization of Differences: A Multi-method Analysis of LGBT Marches on Washington

Social scientists describe culture as either coherent or incoherent and political dissent as either unifying or divisive. This article moves beyond such dichotomies. Content, historical, and network analyses of public debates on how to organize four lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Washington marches provide evidence for an integrative position. Rather than just describe consistencies or contradictions, we contend that the key analytic challenge is to explain the organization of differences. We propose one way of doing this using the mechanism of a cultural anchor. Within and across marches, a small collection of ideas remains fixed in the national conversation, yet in a way that allows activists to address their internal diversity and respond to unfolding historical events. These results suggest that activists do not simply organize around their similarities but, through cultural anchors, they use their commonalities to build a thinly coherent foundation that can also support their differences. Situated at the nexus of culture, social movements, sexualities, and networks, this article demonstrates how the anchoring mechanism works in the context of LGBT political organizing.

The Queer Metropolis

The queer metropolis has developed across three periods of time. During the closet era (1870—World War II), “scattered gay places” like cabarets and public parks were based in bohemian parts of the city. Distinct gay neighborhoods , such as the iconic Castro district in San Francisco, first formed during the coming out era (World War II—1997), and they flourished in the “great gay migration” that ensued following the Stonewall riots. Queer moral refugees of this generation romanticized gay neighborhoods as beacons of tolerance in a sea of heterosexual hostility. Today’s post-gay era (1998—present), however, is characterized by an unprecedented societal acceptance of homosexuality. Many existing districts are “de-gaying” (gays and lesbians are moving out) and “straightening” (heterosexuals are moving in) in this actively unfolding cultural context. This chapter reviews research on the dynamic relationship between sexuality and the city across these three sexual eras.

Review symposium on There Goes the Gayborhood

Gays come to the city; this is an old story. But how they come and what happens next, that is a newer story and one that informs Amin Ghaziani’s There Goes the Gayborhood? For urban scholars, those schooled in the classics of urban sociology in particular, the case of the gayborhood goes against the inherited analytic grain—in ways taken up with wide-ranging intelligence by a group of critics whose remarks follow this introduction. The distinctive demographic and cultural texture of a particular group has transformed the meaning of places and their occupants. Before there were gay people, there were “homosexuals” relegated to the “zone of transition”—the city’s social dumping ground where investments ceased while awaiting the higher and better uses to come. Granted some degree of refuge through this neglect, gay people’s beings could not be discussed much less be featured in urban analysis. The muck of deviance was residual. What a flip! In the new model of urban dynamism, gays come to be branded as creative heart. The ethnic groups and remaining subalterns may continue the trudge across the concentric rings and into the suburban sectors, but their distinctive potential dissipates as inter-mating and cordiality take their toll. There is, of course replenishment through the new migrants from around the world, sometimes celebrated for their “energies” (or at least cheap labor). But settlements of the other Americans—the great white washed—have become dynamically useless. The opinion surveys reveal that for no other group has public attitude so shifted as toward gays and lesbians—in an overwhelmingly positive direction. Indeed, the stigma system has almost been turned on its head: gays (the men in particular) are where it is happening. Good economic and networking cred comes from associating with their lifestyle, whether as gayborhood resident, once resident, or just part of the alliance. Of course, as Ghaziani notes, the US is not free of gay oppression, and some of it is systemic and violent. But the gayborhood, as it exists and is widely interpreted, sits as shining beacon: the ghetto on the hill not only for those whose sexuality makes them dream of such a place, but for anyone who dreams that powerful shifts in social and political life are possible.

Performative Progressiveness: Accounting for New Forms of Inequality in the Gayborhood: PERFORMATIVE PROGRESSIVENESS

Attitudes toward homosexuality have liberalized considerably, but these positive public opinions conceal the persistence of prejudice at an interpersonal level. We use interviews with heterosexual residents of Chicago gayborhoods—urban districts that offer ample opportunities for contact and thus precisely the setting in which we would least expect bias to appear—to analyze this new form of inequality. Our findings show four strategies that liberal–minded straights use to manage the dilemmas they experience when they encounter their gay and lesbian neighbors on the streets: spatial entitlements, rhetorical moves, political absolution, and affect. Each expression captures the empirical variability of performative progressiveness, a concept that describes the co–occurrence of progressive attitudes alongside homonegative actions. Our analyses have implications more broadly for how conflicting visions of diversity affect placemaking efforts; how residents with power and privilege redefine cultural enclaves in the city; and the mechanisms that undermine equality in a climate of increasing acceptance.

Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of ViolenceSafe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence, by HanhardtChristina B.Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. 358 pp.

to scholarly discourse and public discussion about the complex quest that some individuals and their families undertake to access the ever-shifting bridge to social, material, and ideational resources and legal statuses that could potentially stabilize their lives. In addition to graduate and senior undergraduate students in immigration, political and citizenship studies, or structural social work, the book will be of interest to social service providers and policymakers who deal with or whose policies impact persons living with precarity. Notably, the salience of this book is not limited to North Americans who reside above the 49th parallel.

25.95 paper. ISBN: 9780822354703.

Virtually every academic in the United States, not to mention the reading public, knows too little about Iran (the fact that this is even truer for Iraq explains part of the reasons for that catastrophe). And I would recommend this book to every academic in the United States, especially in the social sciences and humanities. As someone who has undertaken a 500-year history of social change in Iran, who sees social movements through the prism of race, class, and gender, it was eye-opening to encounter so much that I did not know about the country. ‘‘Sexual politics’’ refers in this book to at least three things: (1) the struggle for women’s equality with men, (2) the struggle for gay and lesbian rights, and (3) the relationship of gender to social movements, cultural freedoms, and, in the case of Iran, revolutions. Janet Afary’s accomplishment is to document painstakingly the complexity of sexual politics across 200 years of Iranian history, and to present us with a new take on its surprising, and mixed, record. The author ultimately makes the case that sexual politics is intimately (as it were) connected to politics tout court. She goes far beyond the existing literature (some of it very good indeed) on ‘‘gender and Iran,’’ which has focused till now predominantly on women and almost exclusively on heterosexual matters. As befits a superb historian of Iran—her first book was a history of the 1905–11 Constitutional Revolution—she digs deeply and creatively into the archives for primary materials of all kinds and combs an extensive secondary literature in several languages. As an accomplished theorist who has coauthored with Kevin Anderson a wonderful book, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, she forges a highly original theoretical and conceptual interpretation of this material at the same time, on a scaffolding that includes Foucault’s ‘‘ethics of love;’’ James Scott’s ‘‘hidden transcripts’’; psychoanalytic insights from Freud, Fromm, and Marcuse; and a command of both Western and Third World feminist theory from Simone de Beauvoir to Chandra Mohanty, Deniz Kandiyoti to Minoo Moallem. The book is further graced with 80 valuable illustrations, including seventeenthcentury paintings showing homoerotic scenes, nineteenth-century black-and-white photos and sketches from the shah’s harem and other sites, political cartoons from the Constitutional Revolution of 1905 through the turmoil of the 2000s, images from women’s magazines of the last 40 years, political posters and photographs of women’s participation in the Iranian Revolution and after, and portraits of many of the key players on all sides of sexual politics in Iran. The 16-page introduction, which presents the issues and previews the main characteristics of the last two centuries, is alone worth the price of the book. Although the book’s title tells us that it is a study of sexual politics in modern Iran, we are treated in Part One to 100 pages of deep background on ‘‘Premodern Practices,’’ which sensibly provide a baseline for the developments of the past century. These pages focus on nineteenthcentury patterns, meanings, and practices around marriage (including love and divorce), sexuality, law, religion, and resistance in its many guises. A turning point occurs during the authoritarian modernizing reign of Reza Shah, who seized power in a 1921 coup abetted by the British, had himself crowned king in 1925, and thereby started the Pahlavi dynasty. This would consist of himself until 1941, and his son, Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (known to us simply as ‘‘the Shah’’) who would be deposed and see the monarchy itself abolished in the course of the 1978–89 revolution. In these chapters, Afary continues to cover all the topics above, and begins to document the changes in gender relations and social and cultural norms as Iran moved