Years of Pride

Queer Spatial Joy as Radical Planning Praxis

Bibliographic Data

ID22018302
AuthorsMarisa Turesky (0000-0002-0735-1896, University of Southern California), Jonathan Jae-An Crisman (0000-0003-0091-4630, University of Arizona)
Year2023
Volume8
Issue2
Publication date2023-04-27
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueUrban Planning (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2183-7635 • E-ISSN: 2183-7635
PublisherCogitatio (PUBLISHER • PT)
DOI10.17645/up.v8i2.6373
OpenAlexW4367181142
LanguageEN
Citations received9
References cited41

Planning has historically been used as a tool to regulate queer people in urban space and parades have long been a vibrant, yet overlooked, practice for resisting such municipal regulation—although parades themselves require spatial planning practices. We analyze the 50-year history of the Los Angeles Pride parade through archival materials, asking to what extent and how the historical planning of LA Pride demonstrates a radical planning praxis, especially in relation to policing. We find that LA Pride was initially (a) a ritual of remembrance and (b) a political organizing device. In contrast to heteronormative readings of Pride as an opportunity to “come out” and transform the “straight state,” we argue that the early years of Pride demonstrated intersectional and insurgent planning wherein heterogeneous queer people claimed agency through collectively expressing joy as an act of resistance to municipal governance. Based on theories of Black joy and the feminist killjoy, we conceptualize this experience as a “spatialized queer joy.” This concept is particularly germane given ongoing debates regarding the relationship between queer and BIPOC urban life and policing. We suggest that spatialized queer joy complicates conventional readings of Pride and queer urban space, offering instead powerful tools for radical queer planning praxis

Aesthetics · Art · Political science · Politics · Praxis · Pride · Queer · Social science · Sociology · Gender Studies · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy · Urban Planning and Governance