Metropolitics

The Emergence of Transnational Queer Organizing Across a Hardening US–Canada Border

Elizabeth Hessek — 2025-09-30T05:00:00Z

LGTBQ+ refugees in the United States not only face the violence of the nation's immigration policy but are also constrained by international agreements that limit Canada's ability to offer refugee status to them. Elizabeth Hessek describes how these challenges have created opportunities for transnational networks to support queer refugees wherever they may be.
As migration control has surfaced as a barometer of national sovereignty in public debate, recent migration scholarship has rejected

- From the Field / LGBTQ+, queer, community organizing, refugees, United States, Canada, North America, borders, immigration, immigration policy, networks

The Struggle to Preserve Hanlan's Point Beach as Queer Social Infrastructure

Ahmed Allahwala — 2024-05-28T05:00:00Z

The march of neoliberal urbanism poses grave threats to nature and the people that use it. In this article, Ahmed Allahwala considers how activism against the City of Toronto's plans for a music venue on Hanlan's Point Beach, an important site for 2SLGBTQ+ life and history as well as a sensitive coastal area, might inform preservation struggles against such threats, in and beyond Toronto.
Nestled along a wooded stretch of environmentally sensitive freshwater dunes, Hanlan's Point is a sandy

- From the Field / beach, LGBTQ+, queer, social infrastructure, Canada, Toronto

Marielle Franco and Brazilian Democracy at a Crossroads

Natália Alves & Isabella Gonçalves Miranda & Felipe Magalhães — 2018-06-26T05:00:00Z

Marielle Franco's life and death raised questions about the limits of Brazil's New Republic. It revealed the rising stakes, particularly for women and people of color, following the 2016 coup. In this piece, urban activists Isabella Gonçalves and Natália Alves and geographer Felipe Magalhães place Franco's embodied politics as a direct challenge to the regressive policies and aggressive austerity of the current regime.
We live in times when a culture of violence is a vocal minority of the

- From the Field / social movement, security, violence, corruption, neoliberalism, Latin America, Brazil, LGBTQ+, feminism, activism, Rio de Janeiro, queer, critical racial awareness, austerity, militias, queer theory, state violence, coup

Impossible Compliance: Policing as Violent Struggle over Bodies and Urban Space

Michelle Billies — 2016-03-01T06:00:00Z

The absence of charges brought in the case of a police murder of a Black lesbian in front of the homeless shelter where she lived reveals the impossibility of compliance with police authority for those already made criminal by race, disability, class, gender, and sexuality.
Yvonne McNeil, a 57-year-old Black lesbian who used a cane for walking, was shot to death by police in front of the New York City homeless shelter where she was living in 2011. Short news reports of the incident offer

- Debates / public space, gender, police, race, homelessness, brutality, Blackness, queer