Infrastructures of Intimacy: Queer (re)configurations of cultural space

Abstract

This thesis explores queer people’s everyday encounters with forms of governance and social regulation in contemporary Sydney, Australia. It considers how queer people and communities are impacted by recent policy decisions and debates. These include the regulation of queer party cultures through zoning laws; the formal recognition of non-heterosexual relationships through marriage; and sustained ‘heteroactivist’ campaigns against LGBTIQ-positive education programmes. To that end, this thesis utilises a mixed-methods approach, combining analysis of policies, policy debate, and media coverage with qualitative interviews and cartographic mapping techniques. This blend of approaches enables an account of how the constraints of governance also animate the formation of new relations, places, communities, activisms, and politics. Tracing what I call ‘infrastructures of intimacy’, I thus set out to map where and how ordinary queer lives are lived and sustained despite sometimes adverse circumstances. Although the forms of power which may seek to contain such lives can be acknowledged in such an approach, my emphasis is not on exposing oppression or marginalisation, and in this respect my thesis is committed to what Eve Sedgwick calls a ‘reparative’ mode of analysis. This resists queer theory’s dominant framing of ‘normal culture’ as a regimenting and totalising arrangement in which queer spaces and lives figure as exemplars of resistance to ‘the powers that be’. This logic simultaneously disregards the dispersed infrastructures of contemporary queer life, neglects the multiple exclusions which operate in supposedly progressive ‘queer spaces’, and dismisses the ordinariness which is crucial to queer lives in practice. Instead of positing transgression and assimilation as opposed choices, I argue that queer intimacies are better understood as pluralisations of the continually shifting cultural formation that is ‘normal’ life.