AAA Paper Abstract Draft: March 26 2017

Word limit: 250

Tricking in Toxic Space: Discarded and Queered Life in Late Industrial Providence
Elijah Adiv Edelman and Peter Little
Department of Anthropology
Rhode Island College

At its heart, this paper explores the conceptual and literal overlap of urban political and
queer ecological theories and practices. While many urban centers across the United States have
been spatially and ideologically reworked through both late industrial (Fortun 2014) or peri
capitalist (Tsing 2015) frameworks, Providence, Rhode Island is unique in both its antiquity and
continued reliance on industry for income. As the capital of the state, Providence remains one of
the few cities across the northeast corridor of the US to still rely heavily on industrial production
and waste, as well as a booming scrap metal industry. Additionally, Providence also remains an
outlier in current US urban politics regarding the management of sexually liminal space and
practices, as evidenced by the presence of erotic bookstores, gay bathhouses and strip clubs in
the citythe largest concentration of such spaces in the region. In a move to augment urban
political ecologies of what we call discarded and queered life, we draw on ethnographic and
historical research conducted along a specific industrial strip in Providence, a road that stretches
several miles along a riverbed from the urban center of the city, into a neighboring town.
Importantly, along this strip we find both active industrial and waste sites alongside liminal
sexual spaces, wherein discourses of contamination have been used by city officials and
persons in positions of authority to reference not just the land and water, but also the bodies that
occupy and travel through these spaces.