Hacking suburban social infrastructure: Glitch subjects and queer practices of social reproduction

Bain, Alison, and Wiley Sharp. 2025. “Hacking suburban social infrastructure: Glitch subjects and queer practices of social reproduction.” Urban Geography (forthcoming): 1–28.

Infrastructure enables urban life for some people and not others. Unevenly distributed between centers and peripheries, it affords differential capacities for action and shapes regimes of social reproductive labor. This paper explores Toronto’s queer suburbanisms, foregrounding the lives of LGBTQ+ suburbanites who have been epistemically erased by urban geographies that discount sexuality and geographies of sexuality that overlook the suburban. It argues that LGBTQ+ suburbanites can be “glitch” subjects that “hack” suburban social infrastructure of homes, public parks, social venues, and public and private transportation, to afford the capacity for queer and trans public life to persist. Broader coalitions are still needed to unbuild cisheteronormative infrastructure and transform city-regional infrastructural landscapes. These quiet political gestures, however small, are nevertheless meaningful attempts to imagine yet-to-be-built suburban worlds.