The Design of Gay (Male) Desire: Race, Gender, Labor, and the Southern California Built Environment
Jih-Fei Cheng
Assistant Professor of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Scripps College
Prior to the 1980s, downtown Los Angeles served as a site for queer community. However, the intense policing of Black and Brown peoples, the poor, the homeless, and queers, led to the late-twentieth-century establishment of West Hollywood as the “gayborhood.” Since the turn of the new millennium, the revitalization of downtown Los Angeles has attracted capital investment to reshape it into a “gay-friendly” metropolitan center. The upscale renewal of downtown commerce, residence, and queer nightlife has prompted greater demand for policing against an imagined racial and criminal element. This talk attends to how the fashioning of downtown LA into the image of a “global city” involves contestations over its queer past. That is, the restructuring of downtown, as well as resistances to it, depend upon the dual remembering and erasure of the racialized, gendered, and sexual bodies whose labor continue to symbolically and materially shape the Southern California built environment.
Jih-Fei Cheng holds a B.A. in Communication with minors in Chinese Studies and World Literatures from the University of California, San Diego; an M.A. in Asian American Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles; and a Ph.D. in American Studies and Ethnicity, with emphasis in Visual Studies, from the University of Southern California. He is developing a book project tentatively titled “AIDS and it Afterlives: Race, Gender, and the Queer Radical Imagination.” Cheng has served as the managing editor for American Quarterly, the official publication for the American Studies Association. Previously, he worked in HIV/AIDS social services, managed a university cultural center, has been involved in arts and media production and curation, and has participated in the boards of various queer of color community-based organizations in Los Angeles and New York City, such as the Fabulous Independent Educated Radicals for Community Empowerment! (FIERCE!). His organizing work has addressed queer and transgender health, immigration, gentrification and youth homelessness, police harassment and brutality, and prison abolition.