Queerying Peripheries: Approaching Europe's Queer Urban Margins Through the Post-Suburban

Abstract

Over the last 20 years, geographies of sexualities have increasingly challenged imaginations of “metronormativity” and “heterosuburbia” by merging queer and suburban interventions into the field. Yet, these interventions have largely focused on the specific suburban formations of the Anglophone Global North, raising questions about their applicability to the analysis of queerness in the heterogeneous, transforming, and fragmented urban margins of continental Europe. In this article, I explore the theoretical and analytical innovations possible by thinking the “queer suburban” through the lens of the post-suburban which stresses relational modes of thinking, unsettles binary conceptualizations of center and periphery, and outlines new modes of suburban and regional governance. I apply this approach to three key sites of queer suburban intervention: suburban diversification, the governance of suburbanization, and suburbanisms as “ways of life”. First, I argue that adopting a post-suburban perspective allows us to more adeptly grasp the increasingly superdiverse European urban margins by foregrounding an analysis of queerness in relation to other dimensions of heterogeneity. Second, I argue that post-suburbanization processes reshuffle the modes and scales of the governance of queerness. This leads to new neoliberal governance logics such as multi-scalar “diversity politics” aimed at the inclusion of depoliticized queerness in the urban margins. Third, I argue that the post-suburban draws our attention to the possibilities of queer resistance, coalitional claims-making and intersectional organizing in urban peripheries. I conclude by outlining the need for a relational and comparative research agenda on the queer peripheries of Europe.