Infrastructure – material and social – 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. — Alison Bain and B. Wiley Sharp

In an article titled Hacking suburban social infrastructure: glitch subjects and queer practices of social reproduction published in Urban Geography, Bain and Sharp (2025) challenged the ongoing epistemic violence of mainstream urban studies by reorienting scholarly debates on social infrastructure and suburbanisms through feminist conceptualizations of social reproduction and queer theorization of “glitch” subjects and their “hacking” practices.

Canada is touted for its international reputation as being inclusive of LGBTQ+ given their extensive federal legal rights and protections, and yet the lived realities of members in this community, particularly of racialized immigrants, continue to be shaped by the exclusions of social infrastructure. The paper is part of a larger comparative research project that documented LGBTQ+ suburban lives in Canada, specifically those residing in the peripheral municipalities of Mississauga, Brampton, Markham, and Ajax, located within the Greater Toronto Area (GTA).

Bain and Sharp analyzed a set of 19 photo-elicitation interviews (and their accompanying 192 photographs) with queer and trans-identifying suburban residents conducted from 2019 to 2020. Participants engaged in focus groups, where they negotiated knowledge sharing while collectively mapping the queerness of suburban environments. Participants documented queerfully meaningful places and objects and selected images for which they described and shared their memories and stories. They also conducted a quantitative content analysis of the photo dataset, which provided an overview of everyday queer suburban spatialities, along with a qualitative thematic analysis that offered a more nuanced articulation of queer suburban socio-spatialities through participants’ narration of their self-selected photo archives.

The authors demonstrate that seemingly mundane, improvisational hacks of social infrastructure including places like homes, parks, social venues, and public and private transportation, can constitute a “quiet politics” (Askins, 2015), “nudge[ing] established patterns of control and authority” in anticipation of queer and trans futurities (Staeheli et al., 2012, p. 630).

The paper shares the struggles of queer and trans-identifying suburban residents who minimize their physical presence by concealing belongings and avoiding conversation, who are pressured into “disguising, hiding, or even downplaying one’s sexuality” to blend in or must compromise their commute time or their budget to access the urban core. Hacking may be necessary for emergent queer forms of social reproduction, but it alone is not sufficient to undo cisheteronormative social infrastructure; it only constitutes one practice of unbuilding an iteration of everyday social reproductive labour that takes care-full responsibility for glitch others (Bain & Sharp, 2025).

Homes are hacked through strategic spatio-temporal routines of use to avoid encounters with other family members. As a lesbian Chinese-Canadian Bramptonian (29 November 2019) explains:

I live in a very conservative household and my parents frankly don’t like LGBTQ people, I tend to find community and find connections outside, and I tend to hang out in those spaces until I come back home very late … I like to stay outside as much as possible … away from that household where I have to be confined into my parents’ expectations … of what I should be.

Here the home is avoided. Work and socializing routines build a life of “elsewheres”. When home is returned to, it is to retreat into the privacy of the bedroom behind a closed door.

Compared to homes, on the other side, the flexibility and openness of park space in conjunction with their relative lack of surveillance technologies makes feelings of freedom and anonymity possible. As a gay condo-dweller in Mississauga (13 January 2020) notes, while you’re walking around, you see all these other different groups of people who are using this space … where everyone feels like they’re here for their own reasons and everyone’s getting various things out of it, but no one’s really interfering with anyone else’s use of the spaces – no one’s policing how you’re using it.

Social venues like bars, clubs and theaters allow queer and trans people of color to organize and build community. As one Mississauga drag queen explains, these performative social venues create queer of color communion through the collective rhythms and movements of artists and audience:

That was one of my favorite performances ever … it was in a club, and there were a ton of people there: most, if not all, [were] people of color, black and brown people. My friend who’s also a performance artist — a drag king — produces a show for queer women and trans women and nonbinary people …

The paper argues that unjust affordances of suburban social infrastructure reproduce cisheteronormativity and render queer and trans people as glitches in the infrastructural system. Bain and Sharp explored and demonstrated the ambivalent relationship between hacking and social infrastructure, showing that it is not an inherently subversive practice. As the case of hacking the architecture of the home demonstrates, these practices can be complicit in the very forms of infrastructural injustice that marginalize glitch subjects in the first place. Since homes function as a central nexus that enables multiple aspects of social reproduction, then public parks, social venues, and transportation networks must augment these domestic capacities, creating assemblages of social infrastructure that make suburban queer and trans life possible.

As the case of Toronto illustrated, these practices of hacking are necessary because of the unjust provision of social infrastructure, explicitly queer or otherwise, throughout city regions. Bain and Sharp argue that broader constellations of mutual aid and grassroots social reproduction are necessary to create spaces where queer and trans life can flourish, both within and beyond the suburbs. Such movements may demand that the state recognize the public dimensions of social reproduction, redress infrastructural inequities, and provide the material resources for glitch subjects in suburban space.

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Dr. Alison L Bain is Professor at the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change and is the Graduate Program Director in Geography. She teaches urban geography at both the undergraduate and graduate level. Bain is a feminist urban social geographer who studies contemporary urban and suburban culture. Her research examines the complex relationships of cultural workers and LGBTQ2S populations to cities and suburbs in Canada and Germany. She recently co-authored a book titled Queerburbia: LGBTQ2S Suburban Place-Making (2025).

B. Wiley Sharp (they/them) completed their MA in Critical Human Geography at EUC, supervised by Alison L Bain. Their master’s thesis used go-along interviews and participatory photography to examine how queer and trans youth created communities and engaged in everyday resistance in suburban Toronto.

An urban and cultural geographer whose research explores how gender and sexual outlaws navigate shifting landscapes of precarity in urban and suburban spaces, they are now pursuing the PhD in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto.