In the Daylight of Our Existence: Architectural History and the Promise of Queer Theory

In 1991, poet, author, and professor June Jordan encouraged radical alterations of the built environment as crucial to a new politics of sexuality, eliciting her audience’s imagination to conceive a place for living and showing affection openly without fear, what that space would look and feel like, and what else it would make possible. This book takes up Jordan’s theoretical premise to work against normative ideas about gender and sexuality through environmental transformation. It present methodologies of writing feminist and queer histories of architecture by investigating planning and urbanism, refusal and resistance, and women’s health and communal life in various cities.