Working to appear: The plural and uneven geographies of race, sexuality, and the local state in Sydney, Australia

Abstract

This paper mobilizes an Arendtian understanding of politics emphasizing plurality and appearance in order to examine a series of projects convened by the City of Sydney council between 2010 and 2013 that were intended to address issues faced by queer people from “culturally and linguistically diverse” communities. Drawing on interviews with participants, as well as archival materials, I argue that these efforts carved out spaces in which racialized queer people in Sydney could appear politically and in which the uneven geographies produced by the mutually constitutive regimes of sexuality and race could become an object of differentially shared concern. Yet, these projects were themselves necessarily shaped by the very dynamics of racialization and normativity to which they responded, and the paper asks how we might differently live with and beyond the fantasy of multicultural queer inclusion at work in these efforts. In doing so, this paper suggests a different way of relating to the binaries (radical/assimilationist, disruption/recognition, state/non-state) that have informed many queer analyses and also contributes to literatures in critical urban and political geography that seek to develop contextually-sensitive understandings of politics that can account for more modest forms of political engagement with existing orders.