Queer space making across greater Los Angeles: reimagining urban autonomy through collective care

AbstractThis paper analyzes the lives of whom I call poli-creatives and how they reimagine space making and urban autonomy across greater Los Angeles through a queer and feminist praxis of collective care. Using women of color feminisms, queer of color critique, and transnational feminisms, this paper introduces the concept of mycorrhizal assemblages. As a theoretical and analytical tool, it draws from subterranean webs of mycelial fungal strands to conceptualize how poli-creatives use their work to navigate their everyday socio-political economic conditions by building interconnected spaces and nurturing local queer, feminist, working class, immigrant communities. Drawing on ethnographic observations and life-history interviews with five key poli-creatives, this paper discusses one kind of mycorrhizal assemblage rooted in informal spaces and practices; intimacy, trust, and vulnerability; and anti-surveillance and -policing. I show how these spaces do not depend on visibility and representation in public space, gayborhoods, nor the neoliberal state and formal institutions. Instead, I argue that although they are decentralized and ephemeral, they stay connected by a transnational and queer politics of local community building through DIY practice, holding spaces for embodied trauma, and divesting from institutional and settler-colonial state power. This study responds to the limitations within urban studies and discourses about queer communities by centering how poli-creatives use their transnational experiences, intimate communities, and embodied traumas and knowledges to lay down new soil for collective survival across greater Los Angeles and a future otherwise.Keywords: EthnographyLatinxsqueer of color critiquespaceurban studieswomen of color feminisms AcknowledgementsI am endlessly grateful for the generous and invaluable support and guidance of Dr. Ghassan Moussawi.Disclosure statementThe authors report there are no competing interests to declare.Additional informationNotes on contributorsJessennya HernandezJessennya Hernandez is a brown Xicana PhD candidate in the Sociology and Gender and Women’s Studies departments at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her current dissertation research focuses on working-class queer Latinx feminist communities who use art and creative practices to build urban autonomy and collective care across greater Los Angeles. She looks at how their embodied knowledges and transnational spaces nurture interconnected queer networks and reimagine political practice and space making across greater LA’s urban landscape. Her larger research interests include sexuality and gender; race; women of color feminisms; queer of color critique; intersectionality; transnational feminism; and urban sociology. Her larger goals are to highlight queer forms of knowledge production and elevate the interests of queer Black, Indigenous, and people of color through research, teaching, and mentorship.