There are now thousands of studies on how people use, experience, and are even changed by their use of dating and hookup apps (hereafter: dating apps). I read hundreds of these articles, reports, and white papers that focus on or mention lesbian, bisexual, queer, trans*, and sapphic (LBQT*S) experiences in order to design my imminently launching LBQT*S Dating and Hookup App research survey. In this research, I unsurprisingly found the following:

1. studies of “LGBTQ” people’s use of dating apps or studies about the experiences people from the LGBTQQIA2+ community tend to focus on gay men, almost exclusively assuming these men to be cisgender
2. studies of women almost exclusively assume their research participants are cisgender, and often assume they are or focus just on heterosexual women
3. dating app studies in general focus on the experiences of cisgender people, usually assuming that research paricipants identify as cisgender

In fact, a recent …

In late 1999, I signed myself up for my first dating site, the now long defunct PlanetOut. I landed in New York City thinking I’d never meet anyone that I wanted to talk to at a bar or a club—primarily because I’d spent the last four years in a women’s college where I conveniently met all of my dates and girlfriends in our dorms. Within a few weeks on the site, I made a date with a queer femme who told me she was taken by my description of myself as a tall butch deeply obsessed with the poetry of Frank O’Hara. But the woman who met me out front of the Strand Book Store was not a match for me. Our politics worked; our cultural aesthetics were a fail. I was in management consultant-style non-iron Brooks Brothers (sigh, oh baby Jack); she wore mixed faux tiger-zebra-cheetah prints and had …

Winter is coming (up north first) so that many among us aim to keep the fires of our minds at full flame. Thus, Space for Theory III will continues the project between UK, UW-Madison, and UMN geography faculty and students to read and discuss theory for theory’s sake. In other words, SfT is a space to read important but less popular / out of vogue theory, without necessarily having to think having to think through how these ideas relate to your work or to the discipline and disciplining of Geography. Registration is now closed but I hope many of you will get to hear about and share from our conversation soon to happen there in further chat to come.

Organized by Jack Gieseking, Arun Saldanha, and Keith Woodward, SfTIII will gather at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis all day on Saturday, November 16th, with time for conversation and other …

After years of drafting maps and data visualizations, I am finally launching the A Queer New York website. My aim is to represent the breadth of lesbian-queer life. Therefore, while I include the locations and stories of lesbian bars and feminist bookstores, I also map a wide range of places that speaks to the complexity and depth of everyday lesbian-queer experiences.

Click here to see the full in-progress A Queer New York map.

I explain more about the process of making the map on the AQNY site. I’m launching this map now because I believe it’s important to show the wide-range of lesbian and queer places in New York City that were mentioned, advertised, or listed in New York City and national lesbian publications from 1983 to 2008. Lesbian bars are one of the few places to be called “lesbian,” and much of the everyday experience of lesbians …

I am letting go of keeping updates from all of the conferences I attend and talks I give, but I am always eager to connect with others and want to share what lies ahead. If you are unable to attend, please check @jgieseking for tweets from events.

• Rubbish and Dreams: The Genderqueer Performance Art of Stephen Varble: “The Queer Accumulation of Dispossession: Producing Lesbian and Queer Places in the 1980s” (Paper) – October 19th, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art (with NYU), New York City
• LGBT Studies at the University of Connecticut: “Constellations of Queer History in New York City, 1983-2008” (Paper) – October 25th, Storrs CT
• National Women’s Studies Association: “Imagining Spaces of Impossible Trans Political and Cultural Resistance” (Paper) – November 8th, Atlanta
• American Studies Association: “Trans-Cyberian States of Emergency: Race, Gender, and Disability in Digital Trans Studies” (Chair) – November 9th, Atlanta
• American Studies Association: “

I am thrilled to announce that I have signed a contract with NYU Press for my in-progress book, A Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queers, 1983-2008. While a project of urban feminist historical geography, the book will be the first lesbian- and/or queer-specific history of New York City. I am 3/4 through writing the book and hope to have it on the shelves and online open access by the spring of 2019. Hurrah and gayme on!

I provide a brief excerpt from the introduction of book below.

Blue star tattoos. I saw them on the arms of lesbians and queers for as long as I could remember. They marked Brazilians at queer Kreuzberg, Berlin dance parties in 2010, trans Southerners on the Lower East Side, New York City gay bars in 2003, a bisexual woman from Seattle at my New England women’s college in 1998, and …

Dear Academic Friend,

Over the years, many of you have asked me how to build a website. About eleven years ago, a graduate school friend patiently sat next to me and taught me the ropes using pure HTML. It’s much easier now. If you want a little convincing as to why to do this or want to get firmly rooted on your politics in this, continue reading. If you are already determined to build your own website, click here to skip down. My mantra here: ideas are free; let’s share.

Really, people want to hear about what I do? Let’s begin with the obvious: what you do is important. Wildly important. You may think you are boring, dull, unclear, or talking to your navel, but someone, somewhere needs your work on the lesbian spaces, the history of the lute in 1689, Saharan slavery practices, a rare snail on the …

I am excited to share the pre-print for my article, “Operating Anew: Queering GIS with Good Enough Software.” This piece will be part of the 2018 special issue “Speculative and Constructively Critical GIS,” edited by  Jim Thatcher, Luke R. Bergmann, David O’Sullivan for The Canadian Geographer / Le Géopgraphe Canadien. Disappointed by SSRN’s purchase by Elsevier, I’m only loading this piece to Socarxiv to see if the downloads are comparable and not support a press that has made so much money from and given so little back to the academic community in comparison.

Download “Operating Anew: Queering GIS with Good Enough Software” here.

ABSTRACT

In the last decade, conversations around queering of GIScience emerged. Drawing on literature from feminist and queer critical GIS with special attention to the under-examined political economy of GIS, I suggest that the critical project of queering all of GIS, both GIScience and GISystems, requires …