5. Space, Locality and Connectivity: The End of Identity Politics as We Know It?

DIY stands for do-it-yourself.

By non-standard intimacies they refer to relationships that are not necessarily linked to couples, domestic spaces, nation, property, kinship and institutional relationships.

Astrid Henry (2004) argued that ‘queer’ offered to feminism the outlaw status, the un-sanitised, non-simplistic element that the lesbian family unit and lesbian citizenship lacked.

The Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013 (c. 30) legalised same-sex marriage in England and Wales.

The strategy falls within the wider Equalities and Inclusion Policy 2008–2014 for the Council (Brighton and Hove Housing Strategy 2009).

The ‘Count Me In’ survey was carried out in 2000 and lead to a five year LGBT Community Strategy 2001–2006, actioned by Brighton & Hove City Council, the local Primary Care Trust, and other local service providers and LGBT groups. The survey continued in ‘Count Me in Too’ (2007–2010), a participatory action research project which identified ‘marginalisation, exclusion, disenfranchisement and need amongst the LGBT in Brighton & Hove’ (Browne and Lim 2008: 3). It examined 20 focus groups and 819 questionnaires. It was a joint project involving the University of Brighton and Spectrum4, supported by Brighton & Sussex Community Knowledge Exchange with funding also provided by Brighton & Hove City Primary Care Trust and Brighton & Hove City Council.

See Campbell (2004) about how this played out in Manchester.

See, for instance, the ‘Gscene Editorial Comment: Where is our Pride?’ by James Ledward, 26 November 2009.

Visit Brighton is one of the Visit Britain websites, the official sites of the British Tourist Authority. According to Marketing Week (Costa 2010), the gay market forms part of a strategic marketing plan for Visit Britain.

The London Gay Liberation Front (GLF) started in 1970 and by1973, GLF had effectively dissipated and had given way to its spin-off organisations. Some of these (like London Lesbian and Gay Switchboard) still thrive today. GLF followed the GLF of New York City which formed after the Stonewall riots of June 1969 – that Pride days continue to mark. In the early 1970s, American and Canadian groups and publications were in the vanguard (Hodges 2000).

The Brighton Ourstory Archive, established in 1989, was a source of information for my research. Brighton Ourstory is a local charitable organisation which collects material about lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) past, in the form of oral history interviews, exhibitions, publications, performances. It aims to increase awareness and visibility of LGB history and lives, and to establish a lesbian and gay history archive in its own premises.

These include GAYBrighton.com and RealBrighton.com, which are partnered web directories of event and business listings; magazines Gscene and 3sixty.

See Olu Jenzen and Irmi Karl ‘Make, Share, Care: Social Media and LGBTQ Youth Engagement’, http://​www.​brighton.​ac.​uk/​research/​our-research/​social-sciences/​research-groups/​transforming-sexuality-and-gender/​make-share-care.​aspx. Livable Lives, http://​liveablelives.​org.

One major network, of which I am also part, is the Brighton and Sussex Sexualities Network (BSSN), ‘an inter-university research network aimed at supporting research and researchers who work on issues of human sexuality within the Universities of Brighton and Sussex and the wider Sussex area’ (BSSN Website 2010).

As it appeared in Tony Blair’s Labour and Bill Clinton’s New Democrats, this rhetoric occupied the political mainstream and advanced politics which were ‘reasonable, centrist and pragmatic’ (Duggan 2002: 176).

DIY ethics and ideology were central in 1960s counter-culture, in punk culture in the 1970s and in the 1990s movements of green radicalism and rave culture (Mckay 1996, 1998). The Riot Grrrl movement and its zine production is also an expression of the 1990s DIY feminism (Reger 2005; Downes et al. 2007). These movements practised anti-consumerism, anti-copyright and non-hierarchical organisation.

Members of Queer Mutiny (QM) and Westhill Wotever agreed that the group names could be identified but all individual names have been changed. Additionally, the chapter uses gender neutral pronouns when referring to participants (See table in Appendix B, Section 5). This is out of respect for the importance of gender pronoun use for the participants, some of whom were transitioning.

Online, I became Facebook friends with most of the members I met at the gatherings. I accessed their network of Facebook friends and groups, their web links, their photographs and the events they attended or organised.

The first Wotever Club night happened in London on August 2003 and has, since then expanded to the Wotever Bar, Film Wotever, Klub Fukk, Wotever Brighton and Wotever Glasgow. The London Wotever World organised its own monthly nights at the Marlborough Theatre, in Brighton.

Riseup.net is hosted by the Riseup Collective, an autonomous Seattle-based body with worldwide members. They provide communication and computer resources to social movements and activists (Riseup Collective 2009).

The Queer Mutiny Brighton Wiki is an Open Source-based page. Its links include Facebook groups of various sub-formations like ‘In Every Home…a Heartache’, and Webpages of QM groups throughout the UK, Queeruption London, Indymedia (Queer Mutiny Brighton Wiki 2009).

The first Queeruption gathering took place in London in 1998 and was announced as ‘three days of Action, Art and Anarchy for queers of all sexualities’. It had a strong anti-consumerist agenda.

Queer Nation formed in 1990 in New York and mobilised against job discrimination, in the abortion rights movement and AIDS activism.

Notably, the Queer Mutiny Brighton zine published in Spring 2009 reproduced the 1990 Queer Nation Manifesto in its last page.

See Heckert and Cleminson (2011) for a collection of essays about anarchism, sexuality and ethics.

Similar arguments, explicitly positioned as anarchist, have appeared in Queeruption texts and other pink-black bloc texts. See Shepard 2002.

Reclaim the Streets is a direct action network, established in 1995, that aims to regain free access on the streets from cars and it follows the Situationist ideas about public space. Apart from parties, often called Festivals of Resistance, monthly Critical Masses are held in various cities, including Brighton.

The first Queeruption happened at the 121 Centre in Brixton, South London, and was announced as ‘three days of Action, Art and Anarchy for queers of all sexualities’. It had a strong anti-consumerist agenda: ‘We believe that there is more to being queer than what is offered to us at the moment, and want to create a radical alternative to the commercial, and a-political gay scene. The festival is open to all, and is about us all taking initiative, creating and participating, instead of just consuming a lifestyle sold to us’ (Queeruption 2009).

The Squatters’ movement launched in Britain in 1968. The movement slowly died out for a while after the south side of Villa Road was, with the squatters consent, demolished in 1977 (see Engle 2006) but was soon revived when social centres started to appear with the anti-globalisation struggle and Reclaim the Streets demonstrations.

California’s State Constitution put the clause ‘Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognised in California’ into effect on 5 November 2008, but did not affect existing domestic partnerships. Campaigns for and against were launched and protests occurred around the country.

In an earlier influential analysis, Arjun Appadurai (1995) examined territories where tourists and locals intersect, and argued that the instability of social relations in such spaces hinders the creation of ‘neighbourhoods’. He thought of neighbourhoods as actual situated localities that provide the context for their subjects’ production and reproduction, and render social action meaningful. Neighbourhoods in Appadurai’s work produce contexts, often in the form of ‘ethnoscapes’, but they also themselves constitute a set of contexts. Appadurai placed these transient communities between the local and the beyond-the-local (the ‘translocal’). The production of locality is, in such spaces, an exercise of power over a hostile environment.

Ghetto is a dance club which hosts ‘diverse nights for boys and girls and their straight friends’, like lesbian mud wrestling (Ghetto Brighton 2009).

See Ward (2003) on Pride and queer cultural capital – for queers with cultural capital.

It is worth here making special mention of a side-project by two activists of QM, the menstrual art blog called Seeing Red Project, hosted on Wordpress. Seeing Red Project illustrates how QM participants found distinct paths in digital media to express certain politics that could not be fully explored from within the group’s communicative platforms. The project was presented at the Queer Feminist Digital Media Praxis conference that I organised in 2013, and was described in the following terms: ‘Seeing Red is a fairly regular photography project and blog exploring menstruation. It deals with social norms, sexuality and art, and hopes to unify as well as disgust. For the workshop, we will initiate a conversation about realness and authenticity online, using our own work as a starting point. How does menstrual activism translate into visual imagery, and how does it survive the squalor of the internet? For us, Seeing Red is about making visible the constant, but often hidden, experience of menstruation. It is recognising and reclaiming the visual strength and beauty in the accidental stain, the purposeful stain and the intimacy of blood’ (Fotopoulou 2013b).The project started in 2009 and involved presentation of own bleeding, always in connection with the body that bleeds. The artwork was exhibited mainly in academic settings and queer feminist anarcha/autonomous social spaces, but as the artists noted, the online version of the curated blog allowed many opportunities for receiving a range of feedback, from expressions of admiration to disgust and trolling. Receiving a steady flow of comments allowed them to explore the different meanings that their artistic work could have for audiences in context collapse. Anonymity allowed commentators to inhabit potentially any subject position, such as that of authority in defining art. But most importantly, for the creators the question of doing political art in an online medium was challenging.