Editorial: Gender and sexual geographies of blackness: anti-black heterotopias (part 1)

This editorial theorizes the spatialization of black gender and sexual minorities. We examine the ways in which race, gender, and sexuality work to complicate the geographies of black gender and sexual marginality. Drawing on insights from Foucault's theory of heterotopia, we develop the concept of anti-black heterotopias to understand the spatial ordering of black gender and sexuality within the larger geographies of black people. We contend that if anti-black racism forces black people to live within contained landscapes that exist on the margins of whiteness, then black gender and sexual minorities, who are subject to violence and public ridicule, live in a placeless space, a location with no coordinates. In other words, the heterosexism/homophobia toward black gender and sexual minorities that is expressed in socio/spatial terms is complicit with the spatialization of anti-black racism. We also use anti-black heterotopias as a way to situate the eight articles in parts 1 and 2 of this themed section, as well as to highlight the theoretical linkages between them.     

Gender and sexual geographies of Blackness: new Black cartographies of resistance and survival (part 2)

The articles in part 2 of the themed section Gender and Sexual Geographies of Blackness focus on the creation of new cartographies of resistance, struggle, and survival in which black gender and sexual minority communities are engaged. Using black feminist readings of gender, sexuality, and geography as a point of departure, we consider the complex challenges that black gender and sexual minorities pose to conventional feminists and queer readings of space. These articles map unexplored sites of black struggle, resistance, and survival where black gender and sexual minorities confront marginalization and create new spaces of sociality, community, desire, pleasure, support, and love.     

Seismic Response of Secondary Systems Supported by Torsionally Yielding Structures

Substantial damage sustained during several recent earthquakes was non structural in nature. The economic consequence in terms of non structural component damage far exceeded the structural damage. Currently, there are several analytical studies that address the interaction between non structural components or Secondary systems (S-systems) and the main supporting structure or Primary system (P-system). Only a few of these analytical approaches have been proposed to evaluate and characterize the response of the S-systems attached to torsionally coupled P-systems. In addition, the experimental verification for the analytical approaches is scarce.

In the current study, the results and observations of an experimental research program conducted to characterize the behavior of both stiffness eccentric and mass eccentric torsionally coupled Primary-Secondary systems (PS-systems) are presented. From this experimental investigation it was found that the torsional yielding of the primary system has significant implications on the deamplification of near tuned secondary system response. The location of the S-system mounted on the P-system affects the peak response amplification, and interaction with the coupled P-system.