A curation of articles, essays, book reviews and interviews on critical geographical concerns.
Foregrounding critical, theoretical and political interventions that emerge both from feminist and non-heteronormative perspectives, experiences and geographies. Beyond just identitarian politics, this section provides a platform for writings that explore the social and spatial processes towards which feminist, queer and trans imaginations and politics gesture.
The activist roots of safer spaces reveal an important tension between their political language and that of many of their critics. Where mainstream attacks on safer spaces repeat the liberal notion of free speech as a transcendental good, safe(r) spaces—particularly in the context of radical political organizing—often stem from the failures of such politics to account for structural inequality and protect against racialized and gendered violence.
Our intervention engages with Queer People of Color (QpoC) positionalities as a valuable lens through which to rethink the racial and colonial imaginaries of subjects and space in Europe. We bring together race, gender, class, colonialism and sexuality, inseparably, in a shared analytic.
Schulman comprehends her community through a politics of place and of sexuality. In a brilliant reading of three of Schulman’s novels (1986a; 1990; 1995) through the lens of the historical imagination of Walter Benjamin, Diane Chisholm (2005) describes this intersection of place and sexuality as a lesbian bohemia.
In this article, I think of Berlin’s techno club Berghain as a form of relational aesthetics where encounters mediated by tactile sounds, labyrinthine architecture, and libido-enhancing drugs create an unusually porous sexual subjectivity.