In his new book, "There Goes the Gayborhood?," Amin Ghaziani explores whether queer-dominated neighborhoods are destined to disappear as LGBTs become more accepted into mainstream culture.
Drawing on a wealth of evidence – including census data, opinion polls, hundreds of newspaper reports from across the United States, and more than one hundred original interviews with residents in Chicago, one of the most paradigmatic cities in America – "There Goes the Gayborhood?" argues that political gains and societal acceptance are allowing gays and lesbians to imagine expansive possibilities for a life beyond the gayborhood. The dawn of a new post-gay era is altering the character and composition of existing enclaves across the country, but the spirit of integration can coexist alongside the celebration of differences in subtle and sometimes surprising ways.
Exploring the intimate relationship between sexuality and the city, this cutting-edge book reveals how gayborhoods, like the cities that surround them, are organic and continually evolving places.
Ghaziani is associate professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia and an affiliate with the Institute for Advanced Studies and the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice. He earned his Ph.D. in sociology from Northwestern. Before arriving in Vancouver, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Princeton Society of Fellows.
Ghaziani is dedicated to bringing the study of sexuality into the mainstream of sociology. Specifically, he studies topics that range from measurement to mobilization and the metropolis. Despite this diversity, however, there are common questions that motivate his work: How can we characterize the social organization of sexuality? And how do these relational arrangements change over time, across political contexts, and in different urban and non-urban settings?
Ghaziani has used these broad questions to carve three distinct research programs in culture (focusing on how to measure meanings using qualitative approaches), social movements (thinking about the relationship between infighting and insurrection) and urban sociology (exploring the spatial expressions of sexuality).
