Twelfth International Conference on The Constructed Environment

Abstract

This paper explores the shifting geographical contours of the “trans stroll” - a countercultural gendered and sexualized urban landscape that challenges dominant conceptions of spatial order rooted in heteronormative ideology. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, K Street had a notorious reputation as DC’s “open-air market” for sex work. Black trans women and trans women of color appropriated the public spaces of the streetscapes using creative placemaking tactics to affirm their identities and invoke their citizenship rights. In the early 2000s, this started to change as urban policies and planning interventions in the District of Columbia, such as enacting the Prostitution Free Zone (PFZs) ordinance in 2006, functioned to exclude and displace “unwanted” bodies from space. This paper interrogates the racialized and gendered, albeit silent, undertones of planning interventions and how they engender urban landscapes that concurrently challenge and reproduce heteronormative ideologues.