Can We Be Queer Here? The Formations and Extinctions of Queer Women's Sexualities

• In Event: 306 - Section on Sociology of Sexualities Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 16. Violence

Abstract

To get at how anonymous street interactions impact society, I examine cat calling and LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer) directed microaggressions and harassment on the streets of New York City. These interactions disproportionately affect women and LGBTQ people in an unsafe public space. Because these interactions appear fleeting and unimportant and are not documented through any redress process, not much is known about their short-term and cumulative effects. That such gendered and sexual inequalities persist despite gains made by the Women’s and LGBTQ movements makes this a particularly urgent study.

For my dissertation, I conducted seventy interviews with sixty subjects experiencing harassment, twenty interviews with cat-callers and spent months observing these interactions. I conclude that cat-calling and LGBTQ-directed microaggressions and harassment have a lasting, cumulative effect on people’s gender and sexual identities, uphold structural inequalities like sexism, homophobia and transphobia and shape racial, class and spatial relations in New York City.

In this paper, I specifically address how contemporary queer women’s sexualities are borne out of by sexism, homophobia and harassment in and out of the public sphere. I offer this analysis alongside an oral history of a prominent transgender activist, which speaks to significant changes in queer women’s sexual landscape in New York City, from the formation of the first Dyke March to the erasure of grassroots activism and possibilities for sexual community in the public sphere, over the past four decades.

Author

• Simone Alexandra Kolysh, City University of New York-Graduate Center