Queering Political Economy in Neoliberal Ironbound Newark: Subjectivity and Spacemaking among Brazilian Queer Immigrant Men

This paper complicates the dominant narrative of Newark’s Ironbound community as an exceptional and heteronormative neighborhood by analyzing the non-heteronormative subjectivities and spaces in them. During the period between 2004-2009, subjects were interviewed, in queer minoritarian spaces, to understand how Brazilian gays/queers reified and contested neoliberal ideologies of nationalism, “good” ethnicity, individualism, and “appropriate” sexual mores. This ethnographic account employs textual and spatial-temporal analysis to generate an alternative narrative of gay/queer life and groupings in the Ironbound.