Queer Infrastructures of Social Reproduction in the Covid-19 Crisis

This paper draws on both empirical studies and theoretical work in order to explore, first, the particular impact of the Covid-19 crisis on LGBT and queer populations and, second, the threat that this crisis is posing to LGBTQ infrastructures (including those urban subcultural spaces that have long been threatened with displacement by gentrification and property development). Particular attention is paid to the role that these infrastructures have historically played in the social reproduction of queer modes of life: not only providing forms of employment for many LGBTQ people, but also at times functioning as alternative economic models and forms of solidarity economy. Drawing on the work of Jack Halberstam, Roderick A. Ferguson, Samuel R. Delany, Michel Foucault and others, I address the ways in which these queer infrastructures have often facilitated unforeseen forms of contact among communities typically kept apart, and in ways that have been generative of distinctly queer socialities and forms of what Donna J. Haraway describes as “kin-making”. It is here that forms of care have often been performed among those who have historically been excluded from the social and political institution of the family. (None of which is to romanticize these spaces, of course; as many of these authors have also shown, LGBT and queer subcultural infrastructures have at times themselves served to reproduce and reinforce racialized, gendered, and class-based forms of exclusion and hierarchy.) The paper concludes by suggesting that the urgent defence of these LGBTQ infrastructures, at acute risk of closure amidst the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, would best be approached within the context of both broader and longer-standing projects oriented towards a (queer) right to the city.