Gayborhoods as Antiblack Homotopias: Antiblackness, Gay Sociality, and (Neo)Liberal Spatiality in the (Philadelphia) Gayborhood

• In Event: After Dark: Empire, Race, and the Political Economy of Nightlife

Abstract

Marc Ridgell’s paper situates the gay neighborhood (i.e., “gayborhood) in the global North as an “antiblack homotopia.” Through critical ethnographic scenes of nightlife in Philadelphia’s Gayborhood, building a theory of the “antiblack homotopia” challenges analytic paucities that haunt universalizing theories of gay sociality and the larger sociological field of “gayborhood studies.” Ridgell argues that metropolitan spaces of contemporary gay nightlife in the global North remain inextricably tied to the expropriative, post-slavery, and/or settler landscapes that they are situated in. The historical legacies of Philadelphia’s spatialized coloniality, particularly as the “Birthplace of America,” scaffold how gay bars, clubs, and businesses (which primarily serve cisgender white/nonblack gay male clientele) manage Black LGBTQ+ residents’ participation in the contemporary Gayborhood’s nightlife economies. In the context of late-stage U.S empire, Ridgell’s ethnographic analyses demonstrate how antiblack social relations and relations of sociality in Philadelphia’s Gayborhood manifest through late liberal (Povinelli, 2011) and homonational (Puar, 2007) forms of governance and policing. To be sure, the antiblack homotopia only begins the conversation in detailing how antiblackness ordinarily arises in the field and is experienced by Black subjects. In the ethnographic notes, Black subjects in the antiblack homotopian terrain still refuse violent governance, afflict sousveillance and opacity against the Gayborhood’s structure, and practice ephemeral pleasure.

Author

• Marc Ridgell, University of Pennsylvania