250-500 worded abstracts to be sent to the session organisers at: 

tridibmj@gmail.com 

aravind_raveendran.phd23@krea.ac.in

Urban spaces are associated with the visibility of “deviant sexualities,” evident in queer neighbourhoods, cruising spaces, red-light areas, Pride events, and other sites enabling sexual diversity. These “heterotopic” spaces (Foucault, 1967) are produced through the social and spatial practices of queer, trans* and sex worker communities, and are tied to the movements that made them possible—unsettling the heteropatriarchal moralities of residents and city planners (Yeros, 2024; Ghaziani, 2020; Hubbard et al., 2015). These spaces, however, are being transformed by the interrelated forces of neoliberal capital and  authoritarian governance. These forces are reshaping urban life through intensified policing, gentrification, moral regulation, cultural appropriation and the criminalisation of informal livelihoods. Such transformations have disproportionately affected queer, trans, and sexually marginalised populations whose survival depends on informal economies, precarious housing, and fragile urban commons.

The impact of such transformations are visible globally. Across urban centres such as Vancouver, Sydney, Rio de Janeiro, and Bangalore, redevelopment and “revitalisation” schemes have displaced or criminalised cruising and sex-work sites, intensifying policing, and generating new vulnerabilities for queer, trans*, and sex-worker populations (Weitzer, 2009; Ross & Sullivan, 2012; Lyons et al., 2017; Di Lisio et al., 2019; Neethi & Kamath, 2022). Other practices such as corporatisation of Pride events and consumerist queer visibility point out to the appropriation of queer identities by capital, often pushing agendas variously described as “pinkwashing” and “rainbow capitalism”. Such practices have privileged consumerist sensibilities while marginalising the working-class queer subjects who had historically shaped and led queer spaces (Horton, 2020; Conway, 2024; Tandon, 2023).

This panel, thus, examines such questions of urban transformations induced by neoliberal capital and the rise of authoritarian, neofascist regimes and their impact on the “sexual deviants” in the urban space. We are looking for contributions from various regional contexts which map these transformations, while being attentive to the intersections of citizenship, race, class, caste and labour. The panel also attends to papers which document how queer subjects—especially those engaged in informal and sexual labour—navigate, resist, and rework such authoritarian–neoliberal urban landscapes.

We particularly welcome empirical and methodological work grounded in “methodologies from below”—ethnography, life histories, activist research, and collaborative knowledge production with grassroots movements—and seek to create a space where activists and scholars can think together about urban struggles, solidarities, and futures.

Possible themes and questions include (but are not limited to):

1. How are capital– and state–led gentrification practices reshaping and shrinking spaces of queer-cruising, solicitation, and public sex?

2. How does housing precarity including evictions (formal and informal),
   displacement, gentrification and landlord violence reshape the queer urban life, and the production or erosion of queer urban commons

3. How sex workers and their participation in the informal economy is being affected by the “revanchist” practices of the state and the propertied classes which frame them as a threat to the urban order

4. How do digital queer intimacies and forms of online sexual labour such as social media, dating apps, live streaming, and platform based sex work- reshape urban belonging, vulnerability and community formation within increasingly surveilled and neoliberal authoritarian urban spaces or cities?

5. What forms of queer and trans* kinship and chosen family emerge in authoritarian and neoliberal urban landscapes, and how do these relational practices sustain care, survival, and collective belonging under conditions of exclusion?

6. What forms of resistance, refusal, and everyday negotiation emerge as queer and sexually marginalised subjects confront intensified repression?

7. How do the corporatisation of Pride, the rise of consumerist queer visibility and pinkwashing strategies reconfigure participation, belonging, and the politics of queer representation in the urban spaces?

By placing queer, trans, and sexually marginalised lives at the centre of urban analysis, this panel expands debates on urban justice beyond infrastructure and housing to include questions of desire, intimacy, embodiment, informality, and survival. It reimagines the “common city” not as a harmonious or stable entity, but as a continuously contested terrain shaped through struggle, care, and collective becoming.

For the book of sessions, visit: https://www.uu.se/en/department/housing-and-urban-research/research/the-...