Concrete and Dust: Mapping the Sexual Terrains of Los Angeles by Jeanine M. Mingé, Amber Lynn Zimmerman (review)

Mapping ethnographic data, especially relating to psychic space (e.g., affect, agency, memory), can be a challenging yet rewarding task for ethnographers because of the uncharted methodological territories. Toward these ends, much is to be learned from the arts. In Concrete and Dust: Mapping the Sexual Terrains of Los Angeles, Jeanine M. Mingé and Amber Lynn Zimmerman offer an artistic ethnographic exploration of sexual agency in different neighborhoods of Los Angeles, California. Mingé and Zimmerman’s “mapping” of psychic space is personal and political, surveying various issues including sexual trauma, body objectification, exploitation, and commodification, ecological awareness, and spiritual understandings in the specificities of place. The push of ethnographic methodological boundaries is what gives the book its value. The lack of engagement in existing academic conversations, however, might take away from its impact.

The impetus for the book is to provide an “insider’s perspective” of Los Angeles’s underbelly, or the constant struggle in everyday experience as opposed to the usual glamorous representations. The book explores six neighborhoods in 11 chapters: Los Angeles River, Burbank, Chatsworth, Hollywood Hills, West Hollywood, and Topanga Canyon. Mingé and Zimmerman arrange these chapters through a methodology they call “arts-based autoethnography of place.” They split up each location into two chapters. Mingé provides autoethnographic accounts of place in the first of the couplet. The second consists of Mingé and Zimmerman “revisiting” Mingé’s accounts to theorize sexual agency in relation to place.

Mingé moved to Los Angeles from Florida after graduate school following her then-girlfriend. She begins her L.A. journey in Burbank where she struggles to “feel rooted, planted.” Though she attributes her detachment to the expanse of the city, it seems that Hollywood’s entertainment business where her partner works has fostered an abusive relationship. Their breakup incites in Mingé questions about memory and the subjectivity of body and place, which she begins to document. The narratives in the subsequent chapters chart similar psychic and physical space in relation to sexual agency. In Chatsworth, the world’s porn capital, Mingé deals with the slippery negotiations between agency and the commodification/sexualization of the body as she doubles up as an adjunct faculty member at California State University, Northridge, and a bartender at a local bar. In Hollywood Hills, Mingé struggles against what she calls the plastique, a reproduction of Hollywood-esque sexual beauty archetypes as status symbols. It is ironic that as a queer woman, Mingé finds herself to be invisible in West Hollywood, a decidedly “queer community.”

Mingé and Zimmerman revisit each of the locations to theorize Mingé’s first-person narrative. Every revisiting chapter begins with a cowritten narrative that sensualizes movement within each neighborhood, followed by a theorization of the interconnections between sexual identity and Mingé’s experience of place. For instance, Burbank and its history is linked to a “frontier” story that continually “(dis)places/(dis)members” its inhabitants with capitalist development and the production of fragmented desires. Chatsworth is viewed through an eco-feminist lens to link environmental violence, especially in Stoney Point, to the violence against women’s bodies, which are actively made abject through commodification. The Hollywood Hills serve as grounds for an age-old critique of Hollywood’s role in reproducing body-image insecurities; the turn from traditional critiques is that, for some, Mingé’s narrative of walking with her head held high might be instructional in navigating and negotiating similar iterations of body politics in different spaces. In West Hollywood, Mingé and Zimmerman critique intra-queer exclusionary practices based on visual performance. They advocate, instead, for an inclusionary aesthetic that goes beyond the visual.

“Topanga Canyon, Revisited: A Sensuous Consciousness” is one of the strongest chapters in the book. Topanga Canyon is where Mingé finally “feels at home” after navigating life through the rough...