So for this week's blog I am going to talk about my experience in looking for "queer places" on campus. Of course while I was trying to think of places that I thought were queer I went back and tried to look at what it meant to be a queer place to begin with. According to Judith Halberstam "'Queer Space' refers to the place-making practices within postmodernism in which queer people engage and it also describes the new understandings of space enabled by the production of queer counterpublics" (6). Therefore a place is defined as queer or is made queer through queer peoples engagement with it. Around campus this should translate into footpaths and quirky places like graffiti on sidewalks. This could also extend to several unisex bathrooms around campus where couples go to have sex when roommates are in as well as hang outs where people always go to smoke weed or engage in other illicit activities. If we consider "queer" to be how Sedgewick defines it as a catch-all phrase for anything abnormal it would be easy to argue most of campus is a queer place because "queer" people engage in things all over campus.
One thing I did think of while contemplating this assignment is the idea of a personal queer place. As I will define it a "personal queer place" is a place that you find queer while others may not because there you personally engage in queer activities or it is a place in which something queer happened to you personally. For me, for example, I would include in my "personal queer places" some of the trees on campus. I love climbing trees and I often climb them when I like to think or clear my head. I am almost always in a weird place mentally and I climb my trees to help me work it out. For others these trees would just be trees but for me they are sanctuaries. Perhaps to add to my definition of a "personal queer space" I will add on this additional part of the definition: a "personal queer place" can also be a place you use in a queer manner (e.g. like climbing trees to clear one's mind). I would also include in my list of personal queer places my sophomore year dorm. I had a few personal issues my sophomore year and I spent a lot of time in my room. I begin to tie those feelings to that room and to this day I like to avoid it. For me that is a queer place but to other that would just be a dorm room.
As an extension of personal queer places I would also like to consider places in people are mentally queer. For example could someone be in a queer state of mind? Can that be considered a "queer place?" Also, what about diaries or journals? Are they not a personally queer spot where the owner feels free to write without a filter and record their thoughts throughout the day? Is that not an odd space that can be constituted as queer? When I kept a journal it was full of a smattering thing from poems to essays to accounts of the day to rants about my current state of life. In journals people often write for their own eyes only and that is a queer use of language since we generally use language to commute with other people.
I believe if we look hard enough queer places can be found everywhere. My guess is that people have unique queer spaces that are specific to them personally. Also, I would love to here comments on whether journals can be considered a queer place (especially if the express queer ideas or desires).
Michelle,
ReplyDeleteI think your investigation of personal queer space is really interesting and poses the important question whether there is any meaningful differentiation between queer space and regular space that is not wholly subjective. This broadness is tricky though, because it seems like the idea of differentiation between queer spaces and "regular" space is needed in any effort to protect spaces under attack by anti-pornography or family values campaigns.
As far as your reflection on journals goes, I would agree that this sort of writing is a queer mode of communication in some respect, as its nature as unguarded does separate it from other forms of communication. The potential of the lack of restraint in this sort of writing to contain queerness repressed in other modes of writing also seems significant.
I'm completely with you on queer spaces being potentially anywhere; it's a bit like looking at a word for long enough to start wondering if you've spelled it right, and then it starts not looking like a word at all.
ReplyDeleteI think I talked about this in class, but it's like looking for a "normal" road - there's always going to be something that's a bit weird about it, even if it's something as small as the yellow lines are different than usual dictating that you can't pass from a certain direction. Or even the idea of roads, really; there's a set of yellow lines telling us what side of the road we can be on at any given point. That's a bizarre way of controlling our movement, and it works really well.
What I really like in this post is the idea of personal queer spaces. Did you talk about this in class? I remember you talking about the trees, but I do really like this idea, especially because it makes a personal queer space that much queerer. People could be, say, sitting in the student section for a football game; I was in the student section at one game this year and found it really weird, because I'd been in the marching band and had never learned the student sections' moves and chants. Or people could be at a concert and not be thinking too deeply about that fact, but I might be, because my first date with my boyfriend was a concert (that's a bad example, but you now what I mean). And the fact that I could be sitting there thinking about that I've had a very different experience and that being in a particular place means something different to me than the people surrounding me, and that's almost got an isolating effect to it.
Wow. I'm going to be wandering around thinking about that now, thanks. Great post!