Jen Jack Gieseking

Shoestring Democracy: Gated Condominiums and Market-Rate Cooperatives in New York

ABSTRACT: This article develops the concept of shoestring democracy as a way to characterize the resulting social relations of private governance structures embedded in two types of collective housing schemes found in New York City and the adjoining suburbs: gated condominium communities (gated condominiums) and market-rate cooperative apartment complexes (co-ops). Drawing from ethnographies of gated condominiums and co-ops in New York City and neighboring Nassau County, New York, we compare these two forms of collective home ownership regarding the impact of private governance structures on residents and their sense of representation and participation in ongoing community life. “Shoestring democracy” encompasses a broad range of behaviors utilized to insulate residents from local conflicts and disagreements, and limits rather than promotes political participation. The greatest differences between the co-ops and gated condominiums were found in discussions of safety and security, in that condominium residents have developed an elaborate discourse of the fear of crime and others, especially racialized others, to explain why they moved to their secured communities. Co-op interviewees, on the other hand, generally felt a sense of safety in their buildings, often due to the gatekeeper effect of the co-op board and doormen. In gated communities, covenants, contracts, and deed restrictions (CC&Rs) guarantee that most problems are resolved before they start. While the same can be said for co-ops, interviewees find that these rules and regulations seem to mystify everyday governing practices for the average co-op resident. Moral minimalism and a lack of structural and procedural knowledge may insulate residents from local conflicts and disagreement, but also may discourage civic participation. Exploring the apathy residents expressed about participation and a lack of representation suggests that although the Rochdale principles of cooperation that are the legal and social basis for co-ops may have been important at one time, current practices of private governing boards do more to restrict participatory democratic practices than encourage them. The policy implications are outlined with suggestions of how to make homeowners associations and co-op boards more accountable and encourage greater adherence to the original co-op mandate.

Queering the Meaning of ‘Neighbourhood’: Reinterpreting the Lesbian-Queer Experience of Park Slope, Brooklyn, 1983–2008

The lesbian or lesbian-queer neighbourhood is a slippery idea, and for many women throughout the world it is an elusive ideal, even in LGBTQ meccas such as San Francisco, London, Berlin, and New York City. Renowned enclaves such as the Castro district, Soho, Schoneberg, West Village, Lower East Side, and Chelsea developed as cities within cities, where LGBTQ people could safely find one another and build communities together. But practices of territory-making and place-claiming are antithetical to women’s economic and social abilities in the urban sphere, and the urban is a historically unwelcoming environment for women. I suggest, then, that lesbianqueer neighbourhoods, then, do not work in ways identical to gay and queer men’s neighbourhoods, but, as Tamar Rothenberg’s quote reveals, they are still spatialised ‘communities’. As Sarah, a participant from my research, describes in the quote above, the Park Slope neighbourhood in Brooklyn is produced as lesbian-queer in the way it affords these women safety and refuge. So what then is a lesbian-queer neighbourhood to lesbians and queer women? What does it afford them in their everyday lives? Dynamics of gender, race, and class have not been fully accounted for in studies of LGBTQ neighbourhoods; however, recent work has begun to confront assumptions that all LGBTQ people will be granted equal access and can politically and economically maintain such properties over time (Manalansan, 2005; Taylor, 2008; Moore, 2011).

Messing with the attractiveness algorithm: a response to queering code/space

Abstract Responding to the collection of articles, ‘Queering Code/Space,’ this article discusses how algorithms affect the production of online lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) spaces, namely online dating sites. The set of articles is well timed: lesbian bars have closed en masse across the US and many gay male bars have followed suit so that online spaces fill – or perhaps make – a gap in the social production of LGBTQ spaces. I draw on Cindi Katz’s idea of ‘messy’ qualities of social reproduction and the necessity of ‘messing’ with dominant narratives in order to think about the labor, experience, and project of queering code/space.

Size Matters to Lesbians Too: Queer Feminist Interventions into the Scale of Big Data

How can we recognize those whose lives and data become attached to the far-from-groundbreaking framework of “small data”? Specifically, how can marginalized people who do not have the resources to produce, self-categorize, analyze, or store “big data” claim their place in the big data debates? I examine the place of lesbians and queer women in the big data debates through the Lesbian Herstory Archives not “big” enough lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) organizing history data set—perhaps the largest data set known to exist on LGBTQ activist history—as one such alternative. In a contribution to critical data studies, I take a queer feminist approach to the scale of big data by reading for the imbricated scales and situated knowledge of data.

Safe space: gay neighborhood history and the politics of violence

and gender subjection, making it appear that other subjects are capable of talking by themselves about the body of another. The idea that science and technology can be used as tools for resistance and larger cultural change is made clearer in Chapter 4, in which the author discusses sterilisation as a tool for displacing the idea of woman away from that of the mother. But sterilisation can also be used to undermine autonomous concepts of the individual, by taking into account those women that are forced to have a sterilisation under the argument of incapacity for maintaining an ‘acceptable’ life for the eventual product. on the other hand, some women can be misjudged if they decide to be sterilised if this decision is made before some undetermined age and if they are childless. in both cases, the enforcement is more appealing to an individualistic sense of future harm than to the real autonomy or choice of women. But here is where Denbow can see a possibility of transformation, giving women freedom of choice, even when their behaviour can be qualified as an eccentricity, a step to push the boundaries of cultural limits and make a real change in the power balance for women. This book is a good introduction to some topics around regulation of reproduction in the Us, even for those unfamiliar with post-structuralism or philosophy, and is a good tool to rethink how laws under a neoliberal regimen sometimes use the idea of choice as a form of imposing surveillance over individual acts. even while only focused on the Us, the argument is helpful to analyse other frames, such as the way in which the circular link between technology and politics operates to regulate life and behaviour. in terms of its own objectives, the book covers successfully its aims; and more than having a missing point could be a good start for more critical explorations of the ways that race and poverty play a role in the life of some women, particularly in the poorest countries where some indigenous groups are forced to make decisions over their reproduction under the cover of health and wealth discourses, such as in Mexico. This text would be of interest to scholars interested in gender as construction, technology of reproduction, science as governance and critical women’s studies; it also can be useful for anyone interested in a critique of the politics of reproductive technologies, even if at moments the conceptual tools could be difficult to grasp.