Rainbow infrastruggles: The infrapolitics of LGBTQ2S surplus visibility in suburban infrastructure
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it