You may copy a modest amount of material from a thesis with full attribution as defined in law see Copyright law explained: Exceptions. In all other circumstances you should contact the rights-holder for permission. Go to YorSearch , enter your search terms and click Search. All available University of York theses can be found using this method, including electronic versions held in the Digital Library and White Rose eTheses.
All available University of York theses can be found using this method, including electronic versions held in White Rose eTheses. Clicking the search everything tab and performing the search above will also include PhD theses from Leeds and Sheffield universities held electronically on White Rose eTheses.
White Rose eTheses holds electronic copies from onwards, as well as a selection of pre theses. We also hold a selection of digitised undergraduate dissertations for certain subjects. They are:. Based on my initial goals, then, my fieldwork was a failure in many ways.
I did not end up with anything approaching a comprehensive legal geography of queer adoption. Though I perhaps have represented faithfully the few interviewees I had, I certainly do not profess to have discovered anything resembling the queer adoption experience.
Left with less-than-expected interview materials, I was forced to re-imagine what form this thesis would take, and what political work it could now accomplish. Indeed, you will find that although my fieldwork informs how I think about many of the issues raised here, the fieldwork itself features prominently only in Chapters 3 and 4.
Instead, my failures afforded me a certain degree of freedom in constructing this thesis. Compared to what I originally envisioned, this thesis is both less and more — it may lack the qualitative richness that high number of interviews could bring, but I would argue that the current version is more ambitious in its theoretical outlooks.
The chapters, when read together, may lack a single coherent argument, but in each of them I gesture toward some conceptual problems in social and geographical theory that could be taken up more fully in the future. In each chapter, I take up a particular field that is familiar to geographers and make it strange Mills — be it urban studies or population geography — by considering what queer folks have to say about themselves and what has been said about them.
This argument — or observation, rather — is certainly not new. Feminist geographers have also argued that family, as a primary site of social reproduction, cannot be relegated into the background of debates on economic restructuring or development Mitchell, Marston, and Katz ; Katz Oswin , This question is an inevitable result of an identity politics that presumes existing autonomous identities like race, class, gender, and sexuality , so it is perhaps unfair to single out this particular statement rather than proposing an alternative understanding of politics that accommodates imbricated identities.
Nonetheless, the proliferation of such statements, especially in our classrooms, indicates an area of profound neglect in geographical scholarship that this thesis seeks to redress. Productive Failures I borrowed the subtitle of this preface from Judith Halberstam, whose recent work The Queer Art of Failure provided inspiration while I struggled to finish this thesis.
How can we think of failure as a method? Lesbians are deemed as feminine failures, falling outside of patriarchal and heteronormative frameworks. In other words, failures can be particularly productive toward a different way of life — a different being — that works against dominant and oppressive political frameworks.
It is helpful, then, to understand people and their actions in this thesis as productive failures — in some instances, failing over and over. In Chapters 1 and 4, we see queer parents in central New York negotiating against different sets of political frameworks in order to establish their own ways of life and being. For some, this process involves working against metronormative notions of queer identity, while others may find personal relationship turmoil and heteronormative legal restrictions particularly challenging.
Queer parents are not the only productive failures in this thesis. In Chapter 2, queer community organizations struggle against what it means to be visible, both in our communities and on different maps.
Although metronormativity often reduces queer visibility to, literally, the display of rainbow flags, these non-profits sometimes choose to allow such a cartographic representation of themselves in order to tap into state financial support.
In Chapter 3, the failure of the public adoption system to comfortably incorporate queer foster and adoptive parents leads to a renewed consideration of the emotional work of parenting, especially in light of the history of adoption in the U.
In all of these cases, it is not the point to determine who the winners and the losers are, respectively. Rather, it is through these complex negotiations against multiple standards of success, that the standards themselves are destabilized.
So instead of recognizing that losers often lose because winners write the rules, these intellectuals ask the losers to follow their rules instead, trampling some other losers along the way. The people in this thesis are not necessarily successful all the time. Their struggles are often uneven and contradictory. From my point of view, some may even replicate the kind of conservative rhetoric that delegitimizes themselves and their families.
Yet their failings demonstrate the elasticity and instability of the political frameworks they are struggling against and sometimes in concert with. Stylistically, then, this thesis imitates the kind of illegibility that characterizes everyday life.
In part, my fieldwork experience necessitates this illegibility. The four chapters that follow this preface do not together sustain a central argument. The chapters together do not piece a complete picture of the phenomenon of queer adoption.
If this thesis is to chronicle the research process, then I think it would be a disservice to erase all the detours — the failures — from the final product. Such illegibility also reflects the kind of productive failures that many people featured in this thesis engage in. Situating Knowledges This thesis explores how various people and institutions confront the phenomenon of queer adoption in central New York.
Based on the subject matter, it shares a strong intellectual affinity with the geography of sexuality, and I trace some of this disciplinary lineage in Chapter 1. But this thesis, because of its structure, fails to fit easily within the literature from which it draws much inspiration. If the geography of sexuality literature is such a forest, then the chapters here are like weeds sprouting among the trees and along the edges. Not only do they complicate the field management, but they have a strong centrifugal tendency to go with unrelated and irrelevant impulses.
Here, I will briefly triangulate the layout of the forest, so to speak, by exposing a few prominent trees. Then, we can hopefully get to see where and how my weed-like chapters sprout out in and beyond the field. Progress of Human Geography recently commissioned a series of progress reports on the geography of gender and sexuality. It also has had a huge legacy in fostering the relations between queer theory and activism.
By relating sexuality with other — and perhaps well-tread — axes of difference like race and gender, queer activists are able to better articulate a politics of solidarity and collaboration. Intersectionality, through its inclusions and exclusions, continues to inform how this significance is negotiated differently by different people. To avoid the ironic resurrection of identity politics in our scholarship, then, we must attend to the contextual specificities of identities.
The collection of papers demonstrates the resurgence of interest in urban geography by queer geographers, and some managed to complicate the metronormative depictions that have dominated queer urban geography. I single this special issue out, however, to demonstrate the ways in which geographers think about queer visibility in relation to the state. What I wish to emphasize here is not about specific exclusions.
Recognition and incorporation require visibility, quite literally Winders But it is not only the state that must be able to see all the queer people as its citizens — we all must see one another that way as well. Seeing like a state, then, works not only at the conceptual level, but also the embodied level.
Maps showing the concentration of same-sex couples may illustrate a conceptual visibility, but they depend crucially on their power to conjure up these embodied images in our minds see Chapter 2. This is not to say that visibility completely determines our expression of subjectivities — for instance, not all queer couples follow the wedding conventions.
But the examples above should demonstrate that our struggle to secure state recognition is not for just the recognition itself and the many material benefits it brings.
Finally, this very visibility has increased dramatically since queer families entered the public consciousness. This is perhaps the most explicit illustration of the governmentality that I discuss in Chapter 2.
It also begs the question: How do people transform themselves from households — a part of the population — to families? Is it just the natural progression in the life course? Is it legal recognition from the state?
Is it through performing certain rituals, such as commitment ceremonies? Is it by having children and becoming parents? Queer families, like any other family then, must continually make those meanings, and I argue in Chapter 2 that maps are one place where these meanings are made and contested.
It also demonstrates that the tyranny of visibility may determine some of those meanings, but it will never determine all meanings. Chapter 4 then tells how three same-sex households make themselves into queer families in their everyday life. Charting the Error Log All in all, this is a book about alternative ways of knowing and being that are not unduly optimistic, but nor are they mired in nihilistic critical dead ends.
It is a book about failing well, failing often, and learning, in the words of Samuel Beckett, how to fail better Halberstam , It seems to me that all sorts of people keep failing when it comes to queer families with children, especially queer adoptive families. Sociologists have a hard time telling us what they are. Demographers have a hard time telling us who and where they are. Queer theorists worry that they are repressing their queer sexuality in order to have kids. Everything is really difficult!
It is difficult for me to write, and — I imagine — will be difficult for you to read. Not to mention, it documents all sorts of difficulties when people confront queer adoptive families.
Chapter 1 introduces the concept of metronormativity in order to challenge the urban-centric ways scholars theorize queer lives in the U. I take queer demographers to task in Chapter 2 in order to demonstrate how metronormativity and, by extension, the politics of proximity severely impacts the ability of community organizations, such as the Queer Families Development Project, to faithfully represent and advocate on behalf of their constituents.
Chapter 3 transports us to foster care and adoption information sessions for queer prospective parents, where all participants — child welfare workers included — must confront the racial and imperial histories of U. And finally, three queer families speak out in Chapter 4 about their paths to becoming adoptive parents, with different challenges at different points along the way.
It should be obvious by that point that families are incredibly difficult too! A wise man, i. I am certain that I will continue to make mistakes — maybe different ones, although I certainly would not put it past myself to repeat some of them.
Scholarship is built upon these error logs, in the same way families are made out of error logs too. It is in this spirit that I write this thesis, where hopefully we all continue to fail well, fail often, and learn how to fail better. The few weeks prior had been filled with anxiety, as I worked hard to make contacts with potential interviewees for my research project.
After two rounds of calls for participants sent over e-mail listservs, as well as direct contacts with key actors of various private adoption agencies, non-profits, and county departments of social services that serve the gay and lesbian community around central New York, I finally was able to schedule an official interview.
Josh 1, who works at a health-related non-profit, responded to my call for participants over e-mail. Initially, I was quite hesitant. I confessed that I did not have any personal experience with local adoption agencies, and I was interested in speaking with gay and lesbian parents who had already adopted. But I was not having any luck getting on-the-record interviews, so we all agreed to meet, and on a weekend, I hopped into my car and started driving.
Chenango County sits within the triangle made up of three interstate highways — I connecting Syracuse and Binghamton to the south, I the New York thruway, and I that cuts northeast from Binghamton to the Capital Region. Unlike the Finger Lakes to the southwest of Syracuse, which is famous for its wineries and Cornell University, Chenango County looks like an empty space on the map. It contains a number of state forests and a number of small towns here and there. As I drove on U.
As a graduate student, I was literally driving out of place. The routes were connected by a string of small towns, with a short main street, the sundry storefronts, and — never without fail — a gas station. More importantly, queer adoptive parents? As a gay couple living in this rural area, though, their lived experience with this uneasiness is vastly different than mine, ostensibly only a passer-by. This chapter deals with the queer engagement with the rural and the non-metropolitan, and the divergent subject positions this engagement produces.
On the one hand, the challenges of recruiting gay and lesbian adoptive parents for my project proved to be almost insurmountable, not because there were too few of them, but rather due to an almost universal reluctance to go on the record with an academic researcher. The parents I contacted often expressed this reluctance in two ways: first, they questioned their own ability to make any contribution to my project; and second, they questioned the value of my project.
These two responses often depend upon a discourse of normality and tolerance that hangs in delicate tension. For one to be tolerant, it is necessary to recognize a perceived negative difference, which contradicts the claim to normality.
Such a discourse has been criticized by many radical queer theorists Lehr ; Duggan , though clearly there is an alternative politics at work in my encounter with, for example, Josh and Todd. My first goal in this chapter, then, is to avoid generalizing a global queer politics, and instead look to the ways in which these gay and lesbian parents choose to be political in the everyday. As one based in Syracuse, Chenango County is on the outer edge among the places I went to for interviews, or to convince people to go on interviews with me.
As a researcher and an urban queer, to drive out is to profoundly displace myself from the bubble of a university campus to the countryside or, on a grander scale, my own earlier displacement from hip Seattle to central New York. My displacement — and my affective reactions to it — reveals a largely metronormative subject position that recent queer engagement with the rural has been critiquing.
Much of the political organizing around sexual rights implicitly depends upon this metronormative discourse as well. However, many people I talked to, during official interviews and informal conversations, hotly contested this metronormative discourse. They argued that their mere presence residentially in these places should at the very least suggest that gay and lesbian lives are not universally metropolitan or universally queer, i.
The efficient way to tell this story is to consider metronormativity as its overall strategy, i. Metronormativity, as one of the normativities that must be critiqued, masks the multiplicity of queer lives in places and renders particular forms of political action, especially those based in rural areas, invisible.
Even when rural queer lives are being represented, they are always portrayed under metronormative terms Spivak So far in this paragraph, I have told a very efficient story, one that I am comfortable with theoretically for the most part. But I find this story lacking in practice. For one, it makes sense to summarize stories efficiently, but telling an efficient story necessarily precludes attending to the multiplicities of identities and affects.
For this chapter specifically, this efficient story does not explain how a normativity comes to be normative; it only describes the resulting effects. Often, a particular discourse, such as metronormativity, becomes hegemonic through popular representations, and cultural studies in particular have taught us how to read these representations.
In this chapter, I weave these two practical concerns together to tell a less- than-efficient story about how the urban comes to be hegemonic in queer politics. Shannon is a lesbian who adopted four children on her own through the Monroe County Department of Social Services with her former partner.
Now living outside of Rochester in suburban Wayne County with her girlfriend, she gushed over her suburban relocation during the interview. Shannon: Yeah. Sean: Does [the suburb you live in] feel more like that kind of an environment, more comfortable for raising kids? Shannon: Yeah, it does. Interview, July Shannon, like several others whom I spoke to, cited the conditions of urban schools as one of the major reasons why moving out of the city was a good idea.
When pressed, however, her feelings about the relocation were much more ambivalent. I quote Shannon at length for several reasons. In addition to parenthood and its demands on her time, Shannon did not point to the fear of homophobia as an explanation for this separation which some others, including Josh during his interview, had implied.
Rather, she attributed it to geography. Unfortunately, she also recreated it through essentially an environmentally deterministic logic. Her neighbors and her lesbian friends do not interact because they are geographically separate and contained, to the point where she only sees her lesbian friends at pride festivals — not coincidentally, always in the city. In gay and lesbian narratives, coming out is often enabled, or followed, by moving away from home into a large city, where the presence of other gays and lesbians allows for sexual exploration.
In other words, to be a proper queer sexual subject is to be metrosexual; that is, away from hostile heterosexuals and leaving the childhood innocence behind. Halberstam argues that metrosexuality is largely a temporal narrative. One loses childhood innocence, achieves sexual maturity, and eventually leaves home with or in search of sexual partner s — it is the universal temporal trajectory of growing up. As such, the rural is always devalued while the urban conflated with queer visibility.
In fact, she was quite ambivalent about many aspects of her relocation. Can metronormativity, as a dominant discourse, accommodate such ambivalence and contradiction?
Or are these potential openings for dismantling metronormativity? Halberstam is rather on the fence about this question. As a theorist who thinks about normativity, discourse, and representation, she is certainly cognizant of discursive formations overlapping and colliding with one another.
But she is suspicious of a knee-jerk impulse to resist, as it tends to be individualistic and runs to the other extreme of the existing discourse: romanticizing rural lives is equally careless, both analytically and politically, as demonizing them. These diverse sets of social relations and interactions that Halberstam gestures toward here allow us to see the production of hegemony. Rather, within a hegemonic discursive formation, certain accounts become inflated as if they are universal while others are marginalized and overlooked.
In similar ways, I then explore how the geographic literature is one discourse that contributes to the production of metronormativity. The Origin Story There is now quite a diverse and vibrant literature on sexuality and space within the discipline of geography, and I do not attempt to provide an exhaustive overview of this literature. To that end, I borrow heavily from existing literature reviews from three major edited volumes — Mapping Desire , De-Centring Sexualities , and Geographies of Sexualities — to sketch out how sexuality and space as a subdiscipline developed within geography.
In particular, I draw attention to the production of metronormativity in this intellectual chronology, especially the marginalized presence of writings on the rural. For any chronology, it is essential to pay attention to its origin story. The origin story becomes a foundation to the formation of discourse, and those who come after continually harken back to it to situate their own stories within that discourse. For sexuality and space, although there had been some engagements very early on with sex and sexuality by geographers e.
In the s, this intellectual engagement with gay ghettos intensified, but unlike the aforementioned attempts, geographers such as Manuel Castells ; Castells and Murphy and Larry Knopp ; a, b; ; Lauria and Knopp were keen to avoid telling an efficient story of marginalization. Initially, the growing residential concentrations of gay men alongside gay businesses was explained by rural-to-urban migration and coming out Bell and Valentine , 4; G. Brown, Browne, and Lim , 6.
However, the residential influx of gay men accelerated gentrification so that many gay ghettos are ghettos in name only. This origin story of sexuality and space literature is very much animated by an engagement with urban homosexuality. He found aggressive investment and targeted marketing strategies directed towards, developed by and through, a network of relatively affluent gay men.
Early comers among them were able to buy up cheap, dilapidated housing, fix them up, and flip them for a profit to other gay men looking to relocate. This exchange of money and real estate was lubricated and sped up by the extensive social network among affluent gay men; these personal connections enabled words of a house on sale to get out quicker than usual and for the sellers to target desirable buyers, i.
However, this process priced out many original residents in and around the French Quarter, and was looked upon with mixed feelings by local, working-class gay men. On the one hand, they recognized the growing concentration of gay men and the visibility and clout it brought, which might provide a means to greater political representation.
On the other hand, if they were not able to remain in, or buy into, the neighborhood, then any benefits they might receive from increased political representation would be limited at best. This research demonstrates at least two key points.
As the ambivalence of working-class gay men suggests, sexuality is but one set of social relations at work in shaping the constitution of New Orleans as a place.
Second, it reinforces the assertion that any set of social relations, sexuality included, is inherently geographical. Part of the aforementioned ambivalence arises precisely from the geographical mismatch among political representation, sexuality-based communities, and residential locations.
If the origin story of the sexuality and space literature is urban-centered, as I and others have suggested above, then it is necessary to explore what metronormativity masks and overlooks within it. One major exclusion is a gendered analysis of sexuality, what G. Brown, Browne, and Lim , 7. Thus, gay men were more likely to appropriate urban spaces as homogeneously gay to shelter against that greater oppression.
This discursive appropriation of gay urban spaces is problematic and is contested by geographers. For one, these explanations offered above do not attempt to challenge the economic structures that oppress lesbian women through both sexism and homophobia. Brown, Browne, and Lim , 7 used Ettorre as a very early example to challenge the perception that lesbians did not participate in urban politics. These are some of the issues excluded from the urban-centered, gay men- dominated origin story.
Furthermore, Bell and Valentine , 6 argued that Castells did not find visible lesbian urban communities because he simply did not know where to look. Linda Peake and Gill Valentine a, b, c; both found lesbian ghettos in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and a small English town, respectively, but they were constituted differently from gay ghettos that Castells and Knopp found.
There are very few lesbian commercial spaces, and the lesbian spaces tend to be exclusively residential, more spread out, and visible only for those in the know from personal networks. Thus, there were no essentially gay spaces like a gay bar. This visibility of sexuality, where there are literal traces of sexuality on the landscape, is a double-edged sword.
On the one hand, Knopp has shown that visibility can be an effective political strategy for gaining recognition. On the other hand, this focus on urban visibility — which metronormativity depends on to discursively make the anomaly appear the norm — necessarily obscures sexual relations that are not visible in the landscape or at least visible in the same way. Feminists have critiqued this over-reliance on vision and considered alternative ways to conceptualize vision e.
Kwan Under metronormativity, not only did nonmetropolitan accounts of sexuality become obscured, so too did nonmetropolitan accounts in academic discourse. As the sexuality and space literature comes to understand the city as a space appropriated by gay men, sexism and urban gay identity work to push lesbians who, in reality, obviously live in all sorts of places, urban and rural and nonmetropolitan expressions of sexuality out of place, and out of sight.
Metronormativity functions precisely in such a way so that metropolitan accounts of sexuality appear as the entirety of possible sexual expressions, and in so doing obscure other, nonmetropolitan accounts. In its introduction, Phillips and Watt drew on Brokeback Mountain to demonstrate a sexuality that is rooted, and only possible, in a particular place.
While mainstream media praised the movie for its portrayal of universal love, Phillips and Watt insisted that the sexuality in it was, in fact, not universal. It was not a gay story either, as Jack and Ennis, the protagonists, did not subscribe to nor practice metronormative gay sexuality.
It is in this spirit that Natalie Oswin , 96 urged queer theorists to "abandon[…] the search for an inherently radical queer subject and turn[…] attention to the advancement of a critical approach to the workings of sexual normativities and non-normativities. Among those who are overlooked, their key strategy to dismantle metronotmativity is to de- center the hegemony. Contrast her version to De-Centring Sexualities , which practices a form of geographic militant particularism and insists on revealing particular forms of homo sexuality that are fixed in particular places.
These two could be read as opposing arguments — the former focusing on networks, the latter territories. But they need not to be read as a binary, especially if we were to translate this theoretical dismantling of metronormativity into practice.
But we do know people who have children […] and I think that is another situation where it would be received differently with two women than two guys. Sean: Is that a big concern, gay men adopting children vs. Todd: Honestly, I never really thought about it. It's funny growing up in the area, like I've been here on and off for 33 years, you know. So to me I've never been, especially in a small town, the first thing that I've never been known for is my sexuality.
So I feel like we got a lot of respect in the sense of we're not treated like the typical gay couple or whatever, and we don't live our life that way. We're just like any other, where I've never once felt shame walking down the street, or, our neighbors, he'll make comments all the time, like, on a daily basis stop us and speak to us, especially being such a small town, invite us over for wine or whatever. It's just, like, I've never felt perceived as anything different than just a couple.
Interview, July Josh and Todd disagreed over how they should position themselves in their town. Josh is African American and grew up in the south side of Syracuse, and he only relocated because it was Todd's hometown.
He understood his experience living in a rural town against his previous experience both growing up in a predominantly African American neighborhood and later living and working in the city. In his narrative, race and sexuality are parallel equivalents where the experience of being a racial minority helps him prepare for being a sexual minority and how he might be perceived.
Further, he drew on heteronormative and, ironically, metronormative languages to articulate themselves. They are a gay couple, but Todd has "never been known for [his] sexuality. If anything, Todd was exceedingly insistent throughout the interview that they were not like the typical gay couple. Josh and Todd's disagreement points to the difficulty of positioning queer subjects entirely outside of metronormativity, but it does suggest that there are multiple positions queer subjects occupy within it.
Mapping out these multiple positions, then, allows a first cut into understanding how metronormativity functions in practice. In particular, I want to point to "Queer Diffusions" as a model of how this critical mapping might be accomplished. In Knopp and Brown's assessment, 2 Interestingly, the way my interviewees perceived me seemed to make them much more comfortable to talk about race.
Josh's discursive move here, equating being racial and sexual minorities, occurred more than once. For example, Shannon, when describing her occasional discomfort for being a lesbian during the foster care application process, said the following to me: "I mean, it's hard, and you're Asian — I don't mean to be pointing that out, but when you're in a room full of a bunch of white people that have like no idea what it's like to be Asian, and you have to be aware of that at least, that uncomfortable feeling" Interview, July Although both accept the subjective dimension of queer sexuality, Shannon experiences the ascriptive dimension quite strongly while Todd does not see Moya for a discussion of subjective and ascriptive identities.
This diffusion narrative, together with its geographic inverse — the queer coming out narrative — forms the whole of metronormativity politically and demographically. From interviewing a number of queer people in Duluth, Minnesota, and Seattle, however, they concluded that structures of power, such as heteronormativity or metronormativity, are "in fact much more spatially disjoint and diffuse than many existing discussions of queer lives would suggest" p.
Demographically, people's coming out narratives are incredibly varied, and revealing this variety makes metronormativity — the mapping of "a story of [queer rural-to-urban] migration onto the coming-out narrative" Halberstam , 36 — a much more difficult myth to sustain.
Although at the first glance, many people did come out after moving to a bigger city, their understanding of queer sex might have come from rural or military origins.
In particular, these sexualities often take a particular form outside the urban and only become named in the city e. Phillips and Watt However, Knopp and Brown , were keen to insist that this was but one narrative, and their interview evidence "strongly suggests… upward, sideward, and indeed multidirectional and multiscalar flows of people and ideas.
These networks were not at all contained within a single town, as the ones Valentine had found in her fieldwork, and they also took place via many media, including the Internet. Knopp also drew on his personal experience to demonstrate how despite "a supportive family and gay-friendly cultural environment" while growing up, it actually took a relocation to Iowa for graduate school in the s, and later to Duluth, for him to come out as a gay man.
These and many more are all narratives that deviate from the metronormative version. Politically, Knopp and Brown , suggested that "a rather wide range of interventions can constitute 'resistance'," and these different queer narratives, as "simple survival strategies[,] can be as meaningful and important in people's lives as revolutionary social change.
Knopp and Brown quoted an interviewee from Duluth as an example. A business owner and occasional gay rights activist, this interviewee often leads protests against national organizations such as the Human Rights Campaign for their ignorance of queer lives in places like Duluth.
He points to the success of Minnesota state legislature and local governments on passing more inclusive legislations than the federal government at the time as an evidence against metronormative queer politics. However, his organizing acumen as an activist came largely from emulating strategies of organizations in large cities elsewhere, some radical and some mainstream.
Knopp and M. This example points to the complexities and contradictions in engaging with metronormative queer politics, similar to the complex and contradictory ways Todd understands himself as a gay man against the metronormative, "typical" gay men. What I wish to gesture toward here, at the end of this chapter, is the political potential of such a critical mapping of queer subjectivities within, and perhaps beyond, metronormativity.
I have shown the formation and functions of metronormativity in geography and beyond, and by no means do I wish to suggest that it is all encompassing. But rather than starting from an overarching political strategy of resistance, I want to highlight the various dimensions queer subjectivities may work against, in concert, and sideways of metronormativity in different times and places.
As geographers, it behooves us to pay attention to the incredible spatial variations queer subjectivities can take and, as Karen Tongson did so well in the suburbs of southern California, to the places and scales where these queer lives might be away from the spotlight. In the same spirit, perhaps some "simple survival strategies" for queer parents may emerge from writing this thesis. It turns out that I was both right and wrong.
But we have not seen one single map so far! In this chapter, then, I take the process of mapping out of the discursive and metaphorical realms. How to critically map queer subjectivities on an actual map? What are some of the challenges in representing real lives cartographically? Do such representations remain metronormative?
What are their politics? It was a presidential election year where the issue of same-sex marriage played center-stage. Bush Lewis Or so the popular logic went. Nonetheless, it was clear that this popular narrative did hold some merit, as debates about morality dominated the conversation leading up to the election and continued afterward.
Nonetheless, Gary Gates, a well-known demographer and the lead author of the Atlas, was interviewed by many media outlets, including a feature spot on the National Public Radio. The first cartographic representation of the gay and lesbian population with nationally representative data from the U.
Census , it received ringing endorsements from academics, policy wonks, and politicians alike. And given its timing, it is entirely appropriate to read its publication against the political backdrop of the day. Under this light, the Atlas is undoubtedly a political text. It is a mobile application, which allows users to share their photos and videos to their followers Dubovik, According to Instagram as cited in Dennis, Instagram first started off with providing functions on editing and sharing photos and later on added in the functions of sharing videos and photo messaging directly to another user.
According to Otto n. According to Systrom as cited in Maravic, Instagram started to develop when Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger want to focus on the HTML5 check-in application named Burbn, which allow the function of location check in, earn point upon meeting friends and post photos. Instagram is said to be the third most popular social network among the college students in the United States Salomon, Following the press released from Instagram cited in Maravic, in the year , Instagram has million monthly active users, 40 million photos were uploaded per day, 8, likes and 1, comments gained per second.
Aside from having an account in Facebook and Twitter, new social media platform is coming in to provide another platform for many marketers. According to an article published on BBC News , study has said that a large amount of the top brands around the world are using Instagram as one of their marketing strategy.
Instagram can help a company to promote their products or services Bevins, The point that makes Instagram different from other social media is that Instagram is applying a visual based strategy Hird, Everything about Instagram is about photograph Linaschke, Additionally, Instagram can help one in saving cost for brand designing.
Every image taken for a product can be edited and filtered using the Instagram functions Herman, Dennis also mention that by clicking the hash tags, it allow the Instagram users to view pictures and videos that is relevant to the hash tag. Therefore, many fashion companies are now having an Instagram account to promote their products.
Moreover, social media also provide the marketers an easier way to understand their customers. In the case of Instagram, leaving comments and receiving comments on the photo posts can gain more feedback from the customers on the product. Followers are often interested to see the interaction between the organization and the users, so being attentive to the comments would help in improving the relationship with customers Dennis, Furthermore, Instagram has included a function known as direct messaging.
This function could give the VIP customers another way to communicate and interact with the organization Herman, Herman has stated that the direct message function allows the user to send message that only receiver can view and each message can send out to 15 users each time. Instagram terms of use and privacy policy Just like the other social networking sites, Instagram also faces privacy issue. In late , months after Facebook has taken over Instagram, Instagram has changed its terms of use and privacy policy BBC News, The changes made have received many negative responses from the users, as users were not satisfied with their decision.
However, due to the difficult wording used, it was difficult to understand what the terms are meant; therefore, there are many users still using Instagram without knowing the changes to the terms and condition Nelis, Users who are aware about the changes have shown disappointment and some decided to quit Instagram BBC News, As a result to it, Instagram co-founder has released a statement to clear the dissatisfaction by mentioning that they do not intend to apply the terms like that and they will remove the language that confused the users Gross, Following the strong negative responses, Instagram has changes back the terms to the original version that had been launched in Geron, In this era where everyone is always busy, many customers would prefer looking at visual based advertisement such as pictures and videos than advertisement filled with words.
Therefore, the social networking site that best fit the marketing strategy is the Instagram. The popularity of Instagram is rising day by day. Besides being well known among the young people who is active in using social media, Instagram is also getting more popular in the business industry.
Many business people uses Instagram as their new platform to market their products and services. The functions of Instagram do not only attract the attentions of all the social networkers but also the marketers. This research paper discussed that Instagram is one of the favorable platforms to market a product or service. These benefits given by Instagram to the marketers have make Instagram in becoming one of the strong tool in the social network marketing strategy.
Nevertheless, every social networking site does face privacy issue. In the case of Instagram, they have been through a controversy on the changing of terms and conditions in They updated their policy to make it easier to share information with Facebook but it has brought in a lot of negative responses from the users. Due to the massive negative responses received, they have decided to revert the policy back to the original ones.
Although Instagram was shown to be a very useful marketing tool in the new era, there are still disadvantages to be possibly gained by using Instagram as a marketing tool. Conclusion Instagram is now one of the popular social networking sites used as a mobile application. It helps in getting people interacting nationally and globally. Instagram have gathered all the people around the world who are interested in photography, as it is an application focus on photographic functions.
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