What is the value of queer?

Queerness’ emancipatory potential is increasingly being co-opted and folded into various kinds of violent capital-accumulating projects. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork conducted on queer spaces in London and Buenos Aires, the seminar explores the ways in which queerness lubricates gentrification in urban space, focusing on the labour that queers and queer spaces perform in these contexts, the value they generate, and for whom. At the same time, the seminar also sketches avenues for unlocking queerness’ more utopian capacities, envisioning ways to nurture its potential in the making of alternative possible worlds and forms of value/valuing.

Dr Olimpia Burchiellaro (she/her) is a Senior Lecturer in Management at the University of Essex, where she teaches modules on social economies and alternative understandings of value and finance. Her research is at the intersection of queer anthropology and international political economy. Her work on queer spaces and gentrification looks at the growing incorporation of queerness into the productive spheres of capital in aspiring ‘global’ cities such as Buenos Aires, Nairobi, London, and Sao Paulo. She has published work in both English and Spanish in journals including Sexualities, Organization Studies, the International Feminist Journal of Politics and Relaciones Internacionales. She is the author of The Gentrification of Queer Activism, published with Bristol University Press in 2023. Since 2021, she also sits on the Management Committee of The Friends of the Joiners Arms, a Community Benefit Society that aims to open London’s first community-owned, community-run, queer venue.

For further information please email rflood@essex.ac.uk or visit CISC