Discovers parallels between modern gay and lesbian views of urban life and Benjamin’s Paris, “the capital of the nineteenth century”

Queer Constellations investigates the dreams and catastrophes of recent urban history viewed through new queer narratives of inner-city life. The “gay village,” “gay mecca,” “gai Paris,” the “lesbian flaneur,” the “lesbian bohème”—these and other urban phantasmagoria feature paradoxically in this volume as figures of revolutionary utopia and commodity spectacle, as fossilized archetypes of social transformation and ruins of haunting cultural potential.