A Transecological Poetics of Reterritorialization in San Francisco's Tenderloin

Abstract This article responds to Susan Stryker's call to envision a future of justice for the building at the crossroads of Turk and Taylor Streets—the historic site of the Compton's Cafeteria Riot of 1966, now owned and operated by a private prison corporation. Drawing from Stryker's “transexual poetics,” which explores the transformative potential of trans bodies; Eva Hayward's concept of “transposition,” highlighting the intra-creation between trans bodies and the urban environment; and Lucas Crawford's “transgender poetics of architecture,” which examines the relationship between trans bodies and the aesthetics of public structures, this work proposes to go beyond architectural aesthetics to address social justice and resist the capitalist co-optation of queer and trans identities. Employing a “transecological poetics of reterritorialization,” it proposes a strategy to resist the erasure of cultural formations and social meaning through gentrification. Drawing from Deleuze and Guattari's concept of “reterritorialization”—the reconstruction of those formations—it envisions a transversal communication to enable cross-movement and multispecies coalitions. The article analyzes the creation of the Transgender District as a site where trans liberation has been instrumentalized to “beautify” and create “safe spaces” for the trans “community,” while broadening the divide between groups seeking assimilation and more radical factions that advocate for police abolition and challenge capitalism. Two contrasting sites illustrate the crossroads of possible directions for the future of the building: the Eagle Plaza in the Leather Cultural District, exemplifying the risks of co-opting queer identities for profit, and the Tenderloin National Forest, an alley transformed into a forest, embodying the possibilities of a transecological poetics of reterritorialization. This latter example demonstrates how transmuted structures of sociality extend into the built environment, offering to reimagine Compton's as a utopian space, a microcosm with potential for trans-scalar planetary transition.