CUDC Spring Lecture Series - Stathis G. Yeros

18 March 2022 from noon-1pm

Virtual lecture - Zoom link

The San Francisco Bay has been a hotbed for LGBTQ+ activism in the United States since the 1950s. Neighborhoods such as the Castro, Folsom, Mission, and the Tenderloin have become symbolic sites for the development of homosexual and transgender politics and queer aesthetics with global significance.

Stathis G. Yerros will present a historical account of queer urban spaces and highlight their distinct physical and cultural attributes. He will demonstrate how physical environments contributed to shaping modern queer and transgender identities and why specific groups felt the need to create their own spaces, which in turn reflected new identity formations. He will present queer urbanism as a historical process, introducing the Foucauldian notion of “histories of the present” and explore how we can overcome gaps in archival records that are the result of exclusionary practices in the built environment. Finally, the talk will trace the emergence of a discourse on queer space in architectural scholarship since the mid-1990s through key contributions to the field and examine their relevance for non-binary design practice.

Stathis Yeros is an urban historian, designer, and architectural theorist. He completed his PhD in Architecture - History, Theory, and Society at the University of California Berkeley, where he is currently a Teaching Fellow. He researches how space affects and is affected by struggles for social justice.