Events

Thursday, Feb 20, 2025

Spring 2025 Sciame Lecture Series: Jack Jen Gieseking

Lesbian Bars/Queer Parties: On How We Can Never Afford Them and Why We Need Them Anyway

 

Thursday, Feb 20, 2025

5:30 pm - 7:00 pm

Sciame Auditorium (Room 107)
141 Convent Avenue
New York, NY 10031

Headshot Of Jack Jen Gieseking
 

This in-person lecture is part of the Spring 2025 Sciame Lecture Series, "Still Making Space for Gender."

Jack Jen Gieseking (they/he) is a cultural geographer and environmental psychologist who writes about lesbian, queer, bisexual, and trans spaces, both physical and online. Their first monograph is A Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queers (NYU Press, 2020). He is working on their next book, Where Shall We Meet to Plan the Revolution?: Dyke Bars* for the End Times, and analyzing the national survey of LBQT*S online dating app experiences at https://linktr.ee/lbqtsdating. They can be found at jgieseking.org.

"Lesbian Bars/Queer Parties: On How WeCan Never Afford Them and Why We Need Them Anyway": When there were only 16 lesbian+ bars left in the United States in 2019 and only a handful spread throughout the rest of the world, the mainstream media began to amplify a lesbian bar extinction narrative. But what the dyke bar* was and is—the unique and important role to lesbian bars and queer parties to LBQT*S people and in US cultural geographies—remains to be written beyond a narrative that Mairead Sullivan calls "lesbian death." This talk is part of my larger book project, Dyke Bars*: Queer Spaces for the Ends Times, which asks: Why do we care that so few of these spaces exist now, why does their physical design captive in past and present, and why are dyke bars* still necessary in an ever-more digital world? What can an analysis of lesbian bar death, disappearance, and reappearance political economy reveal that these mainstream narratives obscure? And, more so, what of the lesbian and straight, trans and cis obsessions alike over such spaces?

Suggested Reading: Gieseking, Jack Jen. 2020. A Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queers.

"Still Making Space for Gender" centers women and LGBTQIA+ folk in the built environment. While the discourse framing gender morphs and gender identities broaden and become more intersectional, the predicament remains the same. Women and LGBTQIA+folk continue to struggle against exploitation and fight for equal rights and equity opportunities in the United States, with this situation troubling unrelenting claims of exceptionalism at home and abroad. Although gender politics are ever present, achievements are hard-won and sometimes rolled back in the face of misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and other ingrained expressions of exclusion. Buildings, cities, and landscapes are not only where battles over gender unfurl, but these spaces also foster identities and incite change. In this lecture series, trailblazing women and LGBTQIA + design practitioners, scholars, and activists—working in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design—insist that gender must remain in sharp focus if we are to shape equitable and just built environments.

All lectures are free, open to the public, and held in the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture Sciame Auditorium. For live captioning, ASL interpretation, or access requests, please contact ssadean@ccny.cuny.edu.

This lecture series is made possible by the Spitzer Architecture Fund and the generous support of Frank Sciame ’74, CEO of Sciame Construction.

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