Rainbow infrastruggles: The infrapolitics of LGBTQ2S surplus visibility in suburban infrastructure

Abstract

ABSTRACT Municipal rainbowization has proliferated globally in tandem with LGBTQ+ equalities gains. The rainbow—a globalized aesthetic of an imagined community that symbolizes LGBTQ+ empowerment, belonging, and safety—is increasingly integrated into municipal infrastructure as a neoliberal place-branding tool of social inclusion and performative progressiveness. On urban peripheries, the rainbowization of infrastructure embeds LGBTQ+ imaginaries in heteronormative suburbia, simultaneously evoking rainbow infrastruggles—morality-led conflicts over questions of representational excess and legitimacy. In the absence of queer infrastructure on the Vancouver city-region periphery, this paper examines how municipal rainbowization generates infrastruggle through bureaucratic processes that perform progressiveness by aestheticizing LGBTQ2S social inclusion in generic crosswalks, city hall plaza lighting, and flagpoles. It argues that as a metaphoric policy intervention, such rainbow aestheticization performs surplus visibility as progressiveness and confines LGBTQ+ issues to the symbolic realm. To compensate for inaction on more substantive LGBTQ+ social inclusion, municipal rainbowization is a rhetorical move in which queer bodies are absented in a quest for political absolution that maintains citywide heteroneutrality. The neologism infrastruggle contributes an understanding of infrastructure as a buried site of heteronormative political assumptions and a way of seeing the inconspicuous infrapolitics of a subordinated group in the public realm.