About this Event
Free event. Registration required.
About the book:
How writers and artists have used city planning strategies to push back against harm
Black queer feminist thinker Audre Lorde famously declared that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” This language is normally understood as a metaphor, but as author Davy Knittle argues in this provocative book, queer and trans activists have long used the tools of city planning and urban design to create written and visual art that critiques those in power and offers points of resilience to their own communities.
A close look at the ways queer and trans writers and artists resisted predatory redevelopment in New York City from 1950 to 2020, Urbanist Desire draws on the work of James Schuyler, June Jordan, David Wojnarowicz, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, and Zeyn Joukhadar, exploring how they intervened in major political flashpoints like the War on Poverty, the AIDS-era housing crisis, and gentrification in Brooklyn and Queens. Presenting a new cultural history of New York City, Knittle explains how urban change and the more-than-human life of cities have been foundational concerns for queer and trans cultural production since the 1950s.
Ending with analysis of the 2022 speculative novel Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072, Urbanist Desire looks to the past to imagine a better future for New York City and for all marginalized people. Knittle demonstrates how to move past a recuperative response to harm and toward one that can change the structure of society by documenting how queer and trans activists have engaged the strategies of planning and design to address spatial, social, and economic inequality.
Davy Knittle Bio:
Davy Knittle is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Delaware, where he works at the intersection of queer and trans literature, the health humanities, and urban cultural history. His first book, Urbanist Desire: Queer and Trans Survival in the City, will be published by University of Minnesota Press in November 2026.
Erica Quinones Bio:
Erica Quinones is a PhD candidate and Graduate Award Scholar at the University of Delaware, where they study how Americans use science fictional images of AI to debate what relationships to gender are not only possible but desirable. When not knee-deep in research, Quinones is leading the creative non-fiction section at UD’s undergrad lit journal, Caesura, and birdwatching with their household cat.
Event venue & nearby stays
Huxley & Hiro Booksellers, 601 North Market Street, Wilmington, United States
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