WHEN THE CHECKPOINT BECOMES A COUNTERPOINT: STASIS AS QUEER DISSENT

ABSTRACT This article was born out of a sense of discomfort with the privilege accorded to movement and mobility in critical scholarship in the social sciences and the humanities, including critical work on the relationship between language, sexuality and space. It is our contention in this article that stasis can be deployed as a radical practice of defiance, and therefore can be queer too. In order to argue that stillness can be a form of social action carrying the potential of forging a radical politics of dissent, we take as a case in point the checkpoint in the context of Israel/Palestine. Drawing upon Said’s (1984, 1994) notion of the counterpoint and Stroud’s (2018) theorisation of linguistic citizenship, we illustrate how the checkpoint can become a bodily, discursive and material counterpoint that activates the irreconcilable tensions between utopia and dystopia in the pursuit of “thorough resistance to regimes of the normal” (WARNER, 1993, p. xxvi).

Queer Pop–Ups: A Cultural Innovation in Urban Life

Research on sexuality and space emphasizes geographic and institutional forms that are stable, established, and fixed. By narrowing their analytic gaze on such places, which include gayborhoods and bars, scholars use observations about changing public opinions, residential integration, and the closure of nighttime venues to conclude that queer urban and institutional life is in decline. We use queer pop–up events to challenge these dominant arguments about urban sexualities and to advocate instead a “temporary turn” that analyzes the relationship between ephemerality and placemaking. Drawing on interviews with party promoters and participants in Vancouver, our findings show that ephemeral events can have enduring effects. Pop–ups refresh ideas about communal expression, belonging, safety, and the ownership of space among queer–identified people who feel excluded from the gayborhood and its bars. As a case, pop–ups compel scholars to broaden their focus from a preoccupation with permanent places to those which are fleeting, transient, short–lived, and experienced for a moment. Only when we see the city as a collection of temporary spaces can we appreciate how queer people convert creative cultural visions into spatial practices that enable them to express an oppositional ethos and to congregate with, and celebrate, their imagined communities.

Cultural Archipelagos: New Directions in the Study of Sexuality and Space

Research on sexuality and space makes assumptions about spatial singularity: Across the landscape of different neighborhoods in the city, there is one, and apparently only one, called the gayborhood. This assumption, rooted in an enclave epistemology and theoretical models that are based on immigrant migration patterns, creates blind spots in our knowledge about urban sexualities. I propose an alternative conceptual framework that emphasizes spatial plurality. Drawing on the location patterns of lesbians, transgender individuals, same–sex families with children, and people of color, I show that cities cultivate “cultural archipelagos” in response to the geo–sexual complexities that arise from within–group heterogeneity. Rather than inducing spatially singular or scholastic outcomes, as some scholarship predicts, subgroup variations produce diverse yet distinct types of queer spaces. The analytic frame of cultural archipelagos suggests more generally that we cannot categorize urban or social worlds using simple binaries such as “the gayborhood” versus all other undifferentiated straight spaces. Thinking in terms of plurality provides a more generative approach to advance the study of sexuality and space.

Fictions of Containment in the Spanish Female Picaresque

This study examines the interdependence of gender, sexuality and space in the early modern period, which saw the inception of architecture as a discipline and gave rise to the first custodial institutions for women, including convents for reformed prostitutes. Meanwhile, conduct manuals established prescriptive mandates for female use of space, concentrating especially on the liminal spaces of the home. This work traces literary prostitution in the Spanish Mediterranean through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from the rise of courtesan culture in several key areas through the shift from tolerance of prostitution toward repression. Kuffner’s analysis pairs canonical and noncanonical works of fiction with didactic writing, architectural treatises, and legal mandates, tying the literary practice of prostitution to increasing control over female sexuality during the Counter Reformation. By tracing erotic negotiations in the female picaresque novel from its origins through later manifestations, she demonstrates that even as societal attitudes towards prostitution shifted dramatically, a countervailing tendency to view prostitution as an essential part of the social fabric undergirds many representations of literary prostitutes. Kuffner’s analysis reveals that the semblance of domestic enclosure figures as a primary erotic strategy in female picaresque fiction, allowing readers to assess the variety of strategies used by authors to comment on the relationship between unruly female sexuality and social order.

Queering the Redneck Riviera

After World War II, increasing numbers of southerners began populating the beaches of North Florida thanks to expanding automobility, better roads, and the new civic virtue: leisure spending. This inaugurated fierce competition for tourist dollars as motels, amusements, and restaurants replaced sand dunes at an ever-increasing rate. The quest for tourists had dramatic impact inland as well, as county governments, state-level commissions, and politicians grappled with maintaining a favorable public image in the search for increased revenue. Conflicts over how best to capitalize on tourism and sell their slice of “The Sunshine State” erupted as municipalities sought to purge an ever-shifting array of undesirables, exemplified by the slogan changes from “Redneck Riviera” to the aspirational “Miracle Strip” or “Emerald Coast.” Gay men, lesbians, and the otherwise queer were an essential part of “The Sunshine State.” Placing them at the center of this story exposes the unique interactions of capitalism, tourism, sexuality, and space. More than just a story of repression, this work also seeks to illuminate the fun that could be had on what came to be known as “The USA’s Gay Riviera” by the early 1990s. Using oral histories, newspapers, and a variety of other sources, this work recovers stories of campy LGBT beach parties, forgotten gay bars, and friendship networks that spanned the South.

Time for Sex

This chapter examines attempts to standardize, internalize, and globalize sexual temporality—captured in the conceptualization of the body as clock—in the sexological advice offered to men and women in India in the early twentieth century. It first describes the constitution of “Hindu erotica” during the period and how these English translations gave rise to a set of foundational texts that would become the basis of global/Hindu sexology while filling them up with clock time. It then considers the ways that these texts attached life cycles to the chronological ordering of time by recasting brahmacharya—a prescription for a stage of life devoted to celibacy and learning—as an age-stratified organization of sexual behavior and a schema for sex education. By using the example of bodily temporality, the chapter addresses questions of sexuality and space in relation to globalization and transnational capitalism, colonialism and development.