Low Income LGBTGNC (Gender Nonconforming) Struggles Over Shelters as Public Space

As a focal point of neoliberalism in the US, New York City has been made the advance guard of both welfare reform and order maintenance policing, making the 2008 recession all the more destabilizing among low-income LGBTGNC (gender nonconforming) residents. At the same time, expanding gay rights have accompanied this neoliberal turn, defining while masking new intersectionalities of oppression, policing some raced and classed sexualities and genders while protecting others, producing an urban landscape conducive to neoliberal aims (Ferguson, 2004; Puar, 2007). In the process of attracting capital, homonormative discourses and practices have increasingly bolstered white and multicultural classprivileged gay space at the expense of low-income racially and ethnically diverse LGBTGNC communities. Such contradictions have been seen most clearly by those managing the brunt of policy change. A team of low-income LGBTGNC co-researchers set out in a participatory action research (PAR) project to explore these dynamics, including a survey of 171 low-income LGBTGNC residents of NYC. Following McKittrick\u27s (2007) application of paradoxical space to black geographies, case examples demonstrate low income LGBTGNC spatializations of homeless shelters as paradoxical constructions of freedom that challenge neoliberal conceptions of freedom for capital and the homonormative, multicultural individual freedom to consume

Producing Bodies, Knowledge, and Community in Everyday Civilian Struggle over Surveillance

In a global context of rapidly expanding security practices, those cast as social threats are themselves often most risk of harm. In this dissertation, I develop the concept surveillance threat (ST) to describe the perception or experience of impending or actual harm faced by targeted civilians when they are stopped or screened by law enforcement. Singled out by race and other lines of sociocultural force, those stopped risk physical, legal, sexual, and spatial consequences. Yet focusing solely on the risk of harm limits the full meaning of this encounter. As I show in my research, civilians persistently struggle against these threats. Using the police practice of stop and frisk in New York City as a case study, I analyze ST and civilian response from the civilian perspective. In my mixed methods approach, I bring together survey and narrative data on stop and frisk, widening the unit of analysis from unidirectional harm to multidirectional struggle. Shifting attention to the interaction as a dynamic reframes these relations of power as more than a simple, imbalanced opposition. Instead, based on my findings, I theorize an embodied civilian psychology of responsiveness to threat that enables those targeted to engage the encounter as an active site of conflict. I find civilians consistently claim their rights, protect themselves and others, assert social power, construct critical knowledge, and pursue justice. Applying Abu Lughod\u27s (1990) insight where there is resistance, there is power, I then study how civilians enact urban civil life through their interactions with police, recognizing a collective imaginary civilians draw on to influence the conditions of their daily lives. With concern for the ways police practice is restructuring urban environments by enforcing particular raced sexualities and genders, I bring a special focus to civilian constructions of racialized, sexual, and gender-infused space

How/Can Gestalt Therapy Promote Liberation from Anti-Black Racism?

Anti-Black racism is an interruption of contact that often takes place out of awareness, and is continuously enacted through innumerable fixed gestalts at every level of human experience. Gestalt therapy as a movement does not leverage its great potential for undoing fixed gestalts of anti-Black racism, or supporting fluid gestalts of racial liberation; this article explores GT theories and practices that do so. I first discuss how concepts of the field, ground, awareness, consciousness, and contact can be informed by ideas such as intersectionality and double consciousness from Black liberation history as well as theorists such as Crenshaw, DuBois, Fanon, Freire, and the Black Lives Matter movement. I then offer a case example and explore how socialization into whiteness can lead to everyday forms of anti-Black dehumanization by white therapists. I conclude with questions toward furthering this work in our movement

Affect & race/(Blackness)

We question the question of affect and race as one that has already built itself upon blackness and anti-blackness, such that the question a priori for an affect theory seeking to address race, we argue, is that of black ontology. We first examine various works in affect theory that theorize race through new mechanisms of discourse, works that theorize interpersonal and emotive affects, and works that have contributed to a biopolitical understanding of race, affect, and assemblage. Delving deeper into a Deleuzian legacy of affect as capacity we assert that the theoretical works of afro-pessimism and black optimism (as black ontology) allows for generative thought around the materializations, value, and productions of racialized capacity-specifically the affective capacity of blackness. This work points to a vital direction for affect theory that can no longer dismiss or transcend race in a bid for a universal masked/marked posthumanism.Cuestionamos la cuestión de afecto y raza como una pregunta que ya se ha construida a sí misma por sobre la negritud y la anti-negritud, de tal manera que la cuestión a priori para una teoría del afecto que busca abordar lo racial es, segun nuestro argumento, una ontología de lo negro. Primero examinamos varios trabajos dentro de la teoría del afecto que teorizan la raza a través de nuevos mecanismos de discurso, trabajos que teorizan el afecto interpersonal y emotivo, y trabajos que han contribuído a un entendimiento biopolítico de lo racial, el afecto y el asemblaje. Indagando más profundamente dentro del legado deleuziano del afecto como capacidad, aseveramos que los trabajos teóricos de afro-pesimismo y optimismo negro (como ontología negra) permiten un pensamiento generador alrededor de las materializaciones, el valor, y las producciones de capacidad racial--específicamente la capacidad afectiva de la negritud. Este trabajo señala una dirección vital para la teoría del afecto que ya no puede descartar o transcender lo racial en su apuesta por el posthumanismo universalista enmascarado/marcado

Affect & Race/(Blackness)

We question the question of affect and race as one that has already built itself upon blackness and anti-blackness, such that the question a priori for an affect theory seeking to address race, we argue, is that of black ontology. We first examine various works in affect theory that theorize race through new mechanisms of discourse, works that theorize interpersonal and emotive affects, and works that have contributed to a biopolitical understanding of race, affect, and assemblage. Delving deeper into a Deleuzian legacy of affect as capacity we assert that the theoretical works of afro-pessimism and black optimism (as black ontology) allows for generative thought around the materializations, value, and productions of racialized capacity—specifically the affective capacity of blackness. This work points to a vital direction for affect theory that can no longer dismiss or transcend race in a bid for a universal masked/marked posthumanism

Affect and subjectivity

Editoria

Reflections on the BGJ Anti-Racism Seminar

In this Letter to the Editor, Billies (2021) responds to critical and supportive opinion pieces in the British Gestalt Journal (BGJ) following their plenary presentation at BGJ’s 2018 annual seminar (see Asherson Bartram, 2019; O’Malley, 2019). As author of the companion article How/ Can Gestalt Therapy Promote Liberation from Anti-Black Racism?” (Billies, 2021), Billies, who identifies as white, discusses the intent at the seminar to support white people to increase accountability and reduce harm in dialogue with people of color, while supporting the work and needs of people of color on their terms from a Gestalt perspective. Describing a fishbowl exercise in which white participants discussed their experience of white privilege in front of the multiracial, predominantly white group, Billies identifies the typical defenses white people employed, while white participant self-reflection, honesty, and openness to shame and discomfort demonstrated important, while partial, anti-racism practices

Producing bodies, knowledge, and community in everyday civilian struggle over surveillance

In a global context of rapidly expanding security practices, those cast as social threats are themselves often most risk of harm. In this dissertation, I develop the concept surveillance threat (ST) to describe the perception or experience of impending or actual harm faced by targeted civilians when they are stopped or screened by law enforcement. Singled out by race and other lines of sociocultural force, those stopped risk physical, legal, sexual, and spatial consequences. Yet focusing solely on the risk of harm limits the full meaning of this encounter. As I show in my research, civilians persistently struggle against these threats. Using the police practice of "stop and frisk" in New York City as a case study, I analyze ST and civilian response from the civilian perspective. In my mixed methods approach, I bring together survey and narrative data on stop and frisk, widening the unit of analysis from unidirectional harm to multidirectional struggle. Shifting attention to the interaction as a dynamic reframes these relations of power as more than a simple, imbalanced opposition. Instead, based on my findings, I theorize an embodied civilian psychology of responsiveness to threat that enables those targeted to engage the encounter as an active site of conflict. I find civilians consistently claim their rights, protect themselves and others, assert social power, construct critical knowledge, and pursue justice. Applying Abu Lughod's (1990) insight "where there is resistance, there is power," I then study how civilians enact urban civil life through their interactions with police, recognizing a collective imaginary civilians draw on to influence the conditions of their daily lives. With concern for the ways police practice is restructuring urban environments by enforcing particular raced sexualities and genders, I bring a special focus to civilian constructions of racialized, sexual, and gender-infused space