Queer Nightlife as Urban Infrastructure: Community and Counter-Hegemonic Practices in the Post-Pandemic Neoliberal City

• In Event: Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 16: Sociospatial Boundary-Making

Abstract

Urban sociology has increasingly turned to infrastructure as a lens for understanding how cities are socially reproduced beyond formal systems of transport, housing, and utilities. This paper extends these debates by conceptualizing queer nightlife venues as critical forms of urban social and cultural infrastructure. Based on ethnographic research and in-depth interviews with venue workers, organizers, and patrons in Berlin, Germany, Manchester, UK and New York City, USA, I argue that queer bars, clubs, and party spaces function as socio-spatial infrastructures that sustain community life under conditions of gentrification, austerity, and political backlash.
I argue that queer nightlife venues operate as relational infrastructures that mediate belonging, intimacy, safety, and political subject formation in the neoliberal city. These spaces provide more than entertainment: they facilitate informal care networks, circulate knowledge, and cultivate collective capacities for navigating urban precarity. Through door practices, spatial design, performance cultures, and everyday interaction rituals, community is actively produced and rehearsed. In this sense, nightlife becomes a site of social reproduction and urban learning.
At the same time, queer venues often function as counter-hegemonic urban spaces that challenge dominant logics of commodification, heteronormativity, and securitization. By foregrounding nightlife as infrastructure, this paper bridges scholarship on social infrastructure, cultural economies, queer intimacies and urban inequality. It demonstrates how marginalized communities construct durable socio-spatial formations within and against the political-economic restructuring of contemporary cities, and argues for recognizing queer nightlife as integral to urban resilience and democratic life.

Author

• Anna Marie Steigemann, University Regensburg