Hacking suburban social infrastructure: glitch subjects and queer practices of social reproduction

Infrastructure - material and social - enables urban life for some people and not others. Unevenly distributed between centers and peripheries, it affords differential capacities for action and shapes regimes of social reproductive labor. This paper explores Toronto's queer suburbanisms, foregr...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Urban geography Vol. 46; no. 9; pp. 1943 - 1969
Main Authors: Bain, Alison L., Sharp, B. Wiley
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Abingdon Routledge 21.10.2025
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Subjects:
Elicitation
Foregrounding
Gestures
Hacking
Infrastructure
LGBTQ
LGBTQ people
photo-elicitation interviews
Public life
Public works
Regions
Sexuality
social infrastructure
Social reproduction
Suburban areas
suburbs
Urban areas
Urban geography
Urbanism
ISSN:0272-3638, 1938-2847
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Infrastructure - material and social - enables urban life for some people and not others. Unevenly distributed between centers and peripheries, it affords differential capacities for action and shapes regimes of social reproductive labor. This paper explores Toronto's queer suburbanisms, foregrounding the lives of LGBTQ+ suburbanites who have been epistemically erased by urban geographies that discount sexuality and geographies of sexuality that overlook the suburban. It inductively analyzes 192 images from 19 photo-elicitation interviews conducted in the peripheral municipalities of Ajax, Markham, Mississauga, and Brampton in Canada's largest city-region, Toronto. It shifts attention away from object-centric notions of social infrastructure to prioritize its public social reproductive dimensions and affordances. In turn, it argues that LGBTQ+ suburbanites can be "glitch" subjects that "hack" suburban social infrastructure of homes, public parks, social venues, and public and private transportation, to afford the capacity for queer and trans public life to persist. Broader coalitions are still needed to unbuild cisheteronormative infrastructure and transform city-regional infrastructural landscapes. These quiet political gestures, however small, are nevertheless meaningful attempts to imagine yet-to-be-built suburban worlds.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
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ISSN:0272-3638
1938-2847
DOI:10.1080/02723638.2025.2468071