Roundtable

Queer Refusal

Queer people have often forged love and revolution in unmapped places. Donning invisibility has sometimes saved lives, but lives deserve to be whole – their memories bursting with stories, histories, monuments, landmarks, folklore, music, loss, victories, sacrifice and style. And yet queer lives have never been so visible and vulnerable as they are now.

Introduction Aastha D (with thanks to Rohit Rajak)

While mainstream acceptance may have arrived in some places (primarily in the Global North), this has brought with it a new set of pitfalls and a retracing of old prejudices. Some of us may now add our preferred pronouns to our bios and email signatures, but conservatism has undergone a resurgence with a vengeance. As we find and create a vocabulary to articulate our identities and desires, new laws are being passed to prohibit them. Queerness remains a site of disobedience.

Disobedience is a universal response to architecture: from using the kitchen table as a work desk, sleeping on a public bench, drinking on the steps of a university, to having sex inside a telephone booth. To speak of disobedience is to speak to the rules: to examine where they came from, who wrote them, who is policed by them, and what would happen if one was to defy them. Heteropatriarchy makes rules that queerness disobeys, and defiance of architectural programme is a place where culture is created and vitality thrives. Some bodies’ disobedience is simply compliance with their innate desires. As a response to their precarity, these bodies are continuously creating and transforming spaces.

Queer Spaces (2022), edited by Adam Nathaniel Furman and Joshua Mardell, is an atlas of LGBTQIA+ places and stories published by RIBA Books. Beyond creating an archive that traces histories of queer spaces across the world and cultures, the book reminds us of what is not included – and what could not be included. We still live in a world where parts of it continue to prosecute and kill bodies that “deviate”, and where not even anonymity offers protection.

To discuss these issues further, Disegno brought together voices from the community to speak about queer spaces and disobedience as practice. The panel consists of scholars, writers, artists, technocrats, performers, designers and educators. As an extension to the book, the following is a record of the discussion that speaks of the qualities of queerness and queer survival.

The panel is:

Adam Nathaniel Furman (they/them) is an artist and designer, and the co-author of Queer Spaces. Dhiren Borisa (he/him/they) is a poet, activist and queer urban sexual geographer. Gabriel Maher (they/them) is an industrial designer and co-author of Contentious Cities, Design and the Gendered Production of Space. Kareem Khubchandani (any pronouns) is a researcher, performance artist and organiser, and author of Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife. Katarina Bonnevier (she/her) is a co-founder of architecture studio Mycket and author of Behind Straight Curtains: Towards a Queer Feminist Theory of Architecture. KNeo Mokgopa (they/them) is an artist, writer and manager of narrative development at the Nelson Mandela Foundation. Vikramaditya Sahai (they/them) is an academic, activist and artist.

Some bodies’ disobedience is simply compliance with their innate desires.

Finella in Cambridge, England. The Pinks, 1929.

Hotel Gondolín in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Hotel Gondolín.

Aastha D An architecture programme is assigned by either the architect, client or municipality. Its defiance is where the magic happens; authenticity finds agency and culture is created. Disobedience is a highly revelatory, exciting and universal response to architecture! To speak of architecture is to speak of bodies: where they come from, how they perform, how they look, what stories they hold, how they navigate spaces, who they are, who they want to be, how big or small they get to be. Taking cues from the title of the book, what then is a queer space? What makes a space queer? Is “queer” an adjective describing a space’s occupants or programme, or is it a verb? If so, what is the queering of space? Kareem Khubchandani Your question makes me think about my first time in a New York gay bar called G Lounge, with a space shaped like a lowercase g. I was under 21, so my friends took me there for happy-hour drinks at four o’clock before they were carding – there was a navigation of age and propriety just to get in. When the bar was full, the only way to get to the bathroom was to pass a lot of people. This space was teaching me how to cruise, how to navigate bodies pressed against the wall and against each other. It also performed this very particular kind of masculinity, asking you to pose in certain ways. I remember a Latinx trans woman who became my instructor in that space being like, “I know you see masculinity in the way that this cruising is happening, but these are all butch queens.” I didn’t understand the term then, but she was trying to tell me that the performances I was seeing – that the space was asking you to do – didn’t necessarily reveal who folks in that space were. People were performing to be in this space so as to match the atmosphere and shirtless bartenders. Space choreographs the body to perform dissenting desires. KNeo Mokgopa I came to terms with my queerness at university in Cape Town as this tiny, scrawny kid who was really afraid. Queerness captured by commercial brands and capitalism means nightclubs, it means music, being extroverted and free, and it means expressing yourself. Unfortunately, these were things that terrified me. I was afraid of not being read as queer enough; as not presenting in an outwardly readable way and being rejected from the space. At the same time, ironically, I was also afraid of being queer, as in strange. Queerness has been commodified into almost a gender of its own, with particular markers and customs and costumes and diets. Engaging in architecture and this notion of a programme was something that I read as an imposition and not an invitation. At the borders of a community defining us is also a definition of who is not us. Katarina Bonnevier I came at it from a slightly different perspective. I’d been studying architecture, but that field never really meant anything to me. I could recognise a nice building but I didn’t have the tools to understand it. When I started to read [Judith] Butler, and I got into the performativity [of gender] and queer theory, I started to look at architecture with those powerful tools for interpretation. Suddenly, I started to understand architecture. I have a theatrical background and I have always liked things that have a narrative. When I found queer theory, it connected me to myself and the way I inhabit the world. I started to understand how any space could be a queer space, which is where disobedience comes in. Of course, any space can also be a straight space or a normative space,

“Engaging in achitecture and this notion of a programme was something that I read as an imposition and not an invitation.”

—KNeo Mokgopa

which makes me feel I am wearing a costume. I know what I’m supposed to do there, but that doesn’t mean that that’s the only thing I can do there. This idea of queering is a powerful tool to inhabit or take on spaces. Gabriel Maher I approach this question from an analytical perspective. First, what is space itself? It’s the material, embodied and conceptual spaces, it’s the territories, it’s the entry points, the thresholds. How is space produced? It’s just as complicated as queering or queerness, if we think about queer and space as mutually informed or mutually produced in a social-spatial relationship. Queerness and space produce themselves through this complex layering [that] is constantly creating emergence. I find that incredibly powerful to try to grapple with if I break myself down as a body and an identity moving through space. Recently, at Berlin Pride, I had an incredible queer spatial experience in Berghain. There’s a very interesting threshold moment at the point of entry to Berghain, where you’re judged for permission to enter the space – it can be harsh. I had this moment where I [asked myself], “Am I coded queer enough? Is my body going to be read this way?” Once in, though, what I found despite it being an incredibly intense experience – electro, drugs, dark rooms – was that it was one of the safest spaces I’ve been in because of its intentionality. Dhiren Borisa I study queer spaces, that’s my discipline, and I’m supposed to be able to speak about it. I teach a course on “Sex in the City” where we talk about it, day in, day out. But I want to start with the way I came to terms with the feeling of being queer. I grew up in a small town, in a neighbourhood that was caste-coded: a neighbourhood that was defined through its relationship with other places. The neighbourhood and the home itself were queer in relation to the system of power within which they were located. To escape this form of a queer relationship of marginality to another form of relationship of marginality, I say that the city is my sexuality. But the city has also made me feel I don’t belong in most of its spaces. I came to the city for education. I am a first-generation learner, which meant that the first time I fell in love was in school, because it was there that I met the kinds of people we were taught we could fall in love with – the boys with the bodies that are supposed to be desired. Bodies that are seen as aspirational, that are upper caste, that are rich. One of the boys I was in love with told me he could take me home, because I did not look Dalit. I felt that my entry into his home was a queer practice, based on its fragility of being revealed – what if his parents knew what I was? My performance of that space was building on the fact that everybody assumed I was upper caste. It’s those practices that, in those ephemeral, small windows, make any space queer, and allow for a possibility to survive. Even in this big city, in big universities, you feel that you do not belong and you feel that you have to continuously perform in order to make yourself believe that you belong. In everyday moments, we are creating this niche of spaces that are queer because they help hold us together. Queerness for me is those ephemeral moments of realisation that it’s fragile, but it will give you hope and resilience. Vikramaditya Sahai i don’t really know how to enter this conversation because i am against the idea of a personal story, given that some of us have to

“Queerness and space produce themselves through layering that is constantly creating

emergence.” —Gabriel Maher

constantly perform it. Part of my inhabiting a world that is beside the normative has been to refuse some of this. Practices of disobedience, or defiance, or subversion inhabit a space in relation to the law. Even if it’s a “no”, the sovereignty of the rule or the space is still accepted. i’m far more interested in refusal. Refusal is dream work. It’s work that does not accept the question asked. That’s from my relationship to transness, more than queerness. What is the relation of trans to queer? Maybe it is that of Frankenstein to the monster: it names it, it offers it its legacy and also its deadliness. Transness too is something that grapples with space. To be trans is a provincial identity or personhood, not simply in terms of its relation to national boundaries, but also provincial as it moves from the clinic to the club to the street. More abstractly, in architecture, trans is what is outside. The discipline is constantly defined by the exclusion of transness – whether it is in the public/private conversation, the national and the domestic, the exterior and the interior, space and depth, foundation and height, the basement and the penthouse. All of these binaries rely on sex, which is built on the exclusion of transness. Transness is that constitutive outside. Adam Nathaniel Furman My answer has been catalysed by the work I’ve done on the book. Hearing people’s stories, something coalesced in my mind. Within this broad coalition of extreme difference and infinite intersectionalities, queer people all over the world are born into nonqueer families in non-queer societies. Queer people don’t have a culture we’re born into. We don’t have a family that can teach us how to be queer. We have to find that. The most common experience throughout my life has been a profound sense of loneliness. I found that’s common within people born into the rainbow coalition. We’re like turtles hatched on a beach in the dark. Some of us go off in the wrong direction and end up in the forest where we’re eaten by an alligator; some of the lucky ones make it out to sea, and swim to the big city and find other queer people. That experience of being born different and having to discover that and find other people is something that unifies these spaces. The book has been criticised heavily for not defining what a queer space is – for not being about queer architecture. But whether it’s just a space where people have found each other, to buildings built by queer oligarchs or royalty, there’s this desire to get away from loneliness, and there’s a desire to forge a sense of togetherness, history, and belonging. They’re places where people create alternative modes of family, made in the interstices of everyone else’s programme. It’s about that defiance of isolation and loneliness, and the search for a sense of belonging – whether that’s through the construction of history, objects, interiors, spaces; or the occupation of spaces; or the temporary transformation of spaces through bodily activity or dancing; or just by having a cup of coffee in a little book club for lesbians in a back street of Bangkok. It’s about finding each other and not being alone. Sadly, lots of people die before they get to realise that they’re not alone. Just to exist: there’s an inherent disobedience there with all the boundaries and binaries. Kareem A lot of these examples are about departure as the act of entering queer space: leaving home, leaving a small town, entering a nightclub,

New Sazae in Tokyo, Japan: The late owner, behind the bar, surrounded by cassettes and CDs.

New Sazae.

how we’re not born into queer space. I’m actually quite dissatisfied by what queer space has offered me, queer being LGBTQ+. These parties and safe spaces and centres are often also spaces of exclusion, and sometimes they’re just very boring. I want pleasure and fun and joy. Sometimes queer spaces are invested in removing those things and moving only towards critique, darkness and depression. I think about my mom and the neighbourhood aunties, sitting around in a space they had made for each other to gossip. The loud laughter of 15 women in the living room, eating for hours and gossiping about how awful their husbands are. Using laughter as an act of survival is something I aspire to as much as I aspire to being lost in the beat in a nightclub. Sometimes we find ways to revel in queerness inside of the homes we were born into. Those can be as productive as acts of departure and entry into new spaces as well. Vikramaditya Kareem has touched a nerve – i mean that both as disturbance and invitation. i inherited the queerness of a broken home. i came from a genealogy of abusive domestic spaces that eventually broke apart. The word “queerness” in that way offered me entry into the loneliness at the heart of heteronormativity. i know no one more lonely. It’s ridiculous how lonely married people with children are, but their forms of abandonment have no language or grammar. They feel greater shame speaking about it than any of us do talking about our sexcapades, dirty fantasies or broken hearts. To further the conversation that Adam started, those of us who do find other queer people develop a grammar around our abandonment. We develop forms of living and surviving together. Queer spaces like clubs have never interested me – i find them really boring. It’s like the expectation of a parent, but from queer elders, that i’m supposed to participate in something i find no revelry in. i have tried to build other kinds of queer spaces because i understood loneliness from the get-go. The loneliness that we are gifted when we are born into these non-queer spaces is a beautiful thing. It has a wayward grammar. It’s unsureness. It’s uncertainty. It’s tentativeness. Maybe what Dhiren called “fragility” is actually an invitation. The doubleness is what makes it interesting. What one calls loneliness and abandonment are things that are prized about queer world-making, rather than residues we must overcome. That’s the difference between an LGBTQ-ness that draws on Pride, versus queer world-making that draws on refusal and loneliness. That gap is a productive gap. Most masc, attractive gay men don’t feel like they belong in the clubs either. If we all fit in, then i am going to join the next movement. i have said that i will stop being trans the day the great prime minister of this country wears a sari. i will stop wearing one, because inclusion is of no interest to me at all. At 35, i’m approaching a life that – wow, i’ve entered the personal – is not built around coupledom. A world making that denies the capaciousness of loneliness is not livable to me. Aastha If we talk about the grammar and the syntax of normative mapping, we know that queer or trans spaces escape those. If we speak of the objective or intent of mapping, queer spaces need to escape those for their survival, or exist in interstitial, hard-to-map spaces. Would it be useful to come up with an alternative grammar or rules: a cartographic

Category is Books in Glasgow, Scotland, with founders Charlotte and Fin Duffy-Scott.

syntax for spaces that we are calling queer? Or is the constant subversion, challenging and constant refusal, of those rules and syntax where we thrive? Dhiren I love dancing, and I want to embrace some of these spaces that make me feel anxious and lonely. There are times that I go to one of them and stand in a corner watching everybody, or dancing on my own. It comes with a double bind. Entering queer spaces we are prescribed a certain script, the grammar to perform: to be queer, to be flamboyant, to be fabulous. At times, I want to refuse that, but I tend to want to embrace it. I also want to relish loneliness when I can. But sometimes that loneliness comes to you as a trap. You know the space is fragile, it is anxiety inducing, but you do not stop going to these parties. You do not stop hoping that somewhere you might be able to renegotiate, claim it, rename it and make it your own in queer forms. KNeo I am taken by this notion of queerness and fragility. Coming back to the question around grammars, I’m not sure if someone can be absolutely queer in the sense that they’re nothing other than queer. In that context, there are ways in which we can bring resources and strategies from the different communities that we also come from into queering spaces. Recently, I was talking about [Steve] Biko [a South African anti-apartheid activist, ed.], freedom, Afro-pessimism and Black consciousness. And it occurs to me that Afro-pessimism and conversations around queerness have been very similar in their grammars. Afro-pessimism describes the absolute social death [where] your Blackness means you’re nobody, but your suffering is special and maintains civility in the Western world – in many ways, that’s how we understand queerness. We see queerness as defined by its suffering, its out-of-sightedness, its otherness. Biko died as though he were an Afro-pessimist, even though he was one of the authors of Black consciousness and his teachings of Black consciousness were beautiful and the opposite of Afro-pessimism. He teaches us, in moments and states of oppression, to reject the thing that’s rejected you. As Vikramaditya said, this is not about disobedience: it’s about refusal. Biko never demanded anything from the state, because to demand is to acknowledge and acquiesce to the sovereignty of the structure of power. Biko says that Blackness is not about skin pigmentation – it’s a frame of mind. It’s a political consciousness and orientation, which is really powerful in the context of a hyper-regimented environment that overdetermined people’s identities. He wasn’t asking for representation, he wasn’t asking to be included. He was saying that the means by which we define identity in this space are useless and pointless. He rejects them. In doing that he builds a porous community. Many of us have described a kind of queerness that has been promulgated against us: how we don’t recognise it, it’s too regimented, too strict and binary, it reproduces these grammars of an identity being solid. But this idea of a porous community is really exciting. Vikramaditya Dionne Brand reminds us that with map-making come people who can read it and therefore a deep relation to mastery. That is the fault-line of inventing a lexicology, a grammar or a dictionary of queer things: the quiet ways mastery interrupts the process. That’s where, to borrow from Brand again, cartography becomes about description rather than journeys. On refusal, the question we need to ask is how to write

Caminito Verde in Mexico City, Mexico: a landscape that houses hidden same-sex intercourse.

Comparsa drag in Buenos Aire: a queer crowd taking over a street corner after meeting at Silvio Lang and Endi Ruiz’s workshop on drag performance.

about and draw queerness as an invitation, rather than a description. To choreograph a refusal, rather than say, “This is what it is.” That cannot happen with the master’s tools. Any time universities or clinics or our queer elders who organise Pride events sit down to develop this lexicology, they are being masters. How does one think of a map that refuses mastery? As soon as mastery enters, what we’ll see unfold is the question of entry, as Gabriel said, or a betrayal or disappointment. The question of mapmaking has to sidestep the developmentalist imagination of queerness as “X”. We must realise that it is the masters who are asking for the map, not those inventing into existence. Katarina When you talk about mastery and the Audre Lorde quote about the master’s tools, I always liked the continuation of that by Lilian Robinson, who wrote that of course you use the master’s tools if those are the only things you can get your hands on. We’re moving between metaphor and materiality with our bodies in these queer spaces. All these spaces that we talk about pretend to be static, but the permanence of spaces is a big lie. No spaces are really there all the time. Architecture is, at the same time, almost always a prison, but never a prison. We can make a hole in the wall with the tools – even if it’s the master’s tools, you can still use them. That’s a way of both being defined and defying how they want to frame us – pushing through that wall that pretends to be static. If I’m stuck in theoretical reasoning, as soon as I return to the craft, to the tools that I can use, it becomes possible for us to meet across differences. As you enter into helping someone, say, fix their hair, you can actually meet, even though we are so immensely different. I mean, look at this group of people – there are so many things that you have talked about that I don’t know anything about, but what I have found is that across the actual making of space, or the remaking or unmaking, there is a kind of possibility for us to meet and care for each other. Kareem This conversation has me thinking about that critique of Adam’s work that it doesn’t land on what queer architecture is. It has me thinking about queer, not as identity or structure, but as a way of looking. This gets to what Vikramaditya was saying about loneliness as a site of epistemology. Some of my favourite queer studies texts aren’t pointing out what people are doing, but naming how hegemonic structures work. They’re peeling that back and saying, “Here’s how to read this map. Here’s why this map was created this way.” Some of the most exciting queer work is from that position, and then it lets people take whatever routes they want to “queer” it – where queer becomes the doing. Here’s how to look at a map to know how these things have come to be, that there’s a history to their structural form – that’s really exciting queer work that doesn’t require sex and desire and pleasure and joy, but is actually quite institutional. It becomes useful to queer life and survival. As you asked about new cartographies, Christina Hanhardt’s book Safe Space comes to mind. She documents this moment in the 2000s where the New York City-based organisation Fierce’s young, queer, working-class activists were asked to draw their dream city. In the dream city, they included a welfare office and a space for safe sex work to happen. When I teach this chapter, my students are like, “Why does the dream city still require sex work?” What I love about this is that it’s an

Taormina in Sicily, Italy: Wilhelm von Gloeden, Flowering Almonds, c 1890-1914.

alternate cartography, but it’s not one that doesn’t imagine their own lives and bodies as living in the present conditions. They’re reimagining space and strict structure, but they’re also still maintaining the rules that they live inside of and enjoy and inhabit. Adam I was obsessed with maps as a child. Any map that I could get my hands on, I would pore over. The world in maps was much more amenable than the real world outside. Maps provided this strange, abstract framework, within which I could imbue my imagination and longing. I was constantly drawing maps of desire. I would populate these whole worlds with all the things I hoped for, the friends that I wished I had, the cultures I felt I was missing a connection to. Maps, cartography and legends were tools of Western inscription on the world and division. There’s the Sykes-Picot Agreement [the 1916 secret treaty between France and Great Britain that carved up swathes of the Middle East by drawing arbitrary lines on a map, ed.] and horrible examples all over the world. But at the same time, the framework of them was liberating for a lonely child. Josh and I approached the book in a similar spirit. A lot of the conversations we had implied that – at least within the world of architecture – there were designers and practitioners who were missing a sense of belonging to a history or narrative: queer designers looking for that story couldn’t find it. The reason that we called it an atlas was to do the inverse of a normal atlas, which is all about the unambiguous division of the world into units that are calculable and comparable across space and time. We tried to create a sense of belonging across space, time, and cultures. It brings things together in a sense of community and family. It has maps driven by desire, and hope, and longing. It’s not one language, one master descriptor, one unit of metres or miles that will divide the whole world, but a plethora of descriptions and a panorama of different voices, who each have their own way of describing it. It’s in the absorbing of all of those together that one starts to get a feel for the overall community. Gabriel I feel terrible following this with a very technocratic approach, but there is a very urgent thing to unpack. It is one of the master’s tools and it’s a map I’m working on deconstructing. It’s called Geographic Information Systems/Science mapping, or GIS. We’re talking about the map as a digital cartographic environment, it’s completely pervasive, and it’s a real power/knowledge tool: it has a significant impact on our identities and bodies, but it’s seemingly invisible. GIS is built on a violent geographic history. It’s software that started out as a military tool for surveillance, but which is now used by urban planners, landscape designers, and architects. What’s urgent from a spatial justice perspective is to be able to intervene or object to what GIS is putting forward, because it’s working on all of the stuff that we’ve been talking about: the heteropatriarchy, the gendered nature of infrastructure, the Cartesian space-time grid. All the things we were talking about in terms of architecture and how we’re aligning or coming out of alignment, or orienting and disorienting, are now being produced and reproduced on an exponential scale. It’s this dangerous monster. We are now data points being aggregated. GIS uses Big Data and AI to algorithmically programme a city, or predict behavioural patterns and movements.

Pop-Up Queer Spaces in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

It’s using huge capacities of data and aligning our movements from the gyroscopes on our mobile phones. We need to figure out strategies for resisting that capture. World-building is becoming a digital, AI, Big Data phenomenon, and what implications does that have for the production and reproduction of gender, sexual orientation and queerness in terms of the map? I’m really interested in what Vikramaditya is talking about around the reparative programmatic with a system like this, which is adopting de-corporealised, universal ways of thinking about the body. How the body occurs in this programme is as a point and a line for movement – it’s flattening and capitalist. This is an important terrain to deconstruct, to queer, but first we need to pull it apart and understand its impact. How can a citizen be a part of that process, even in terms of understanding the logics that are informing our movement in space? To destabilise that and think about modes of intervention within something that is this massive is a question of resisting. Dhiren I am a geographer by training. I was taught map-making in my department, which was obsessed with conventional tools, scales, putting everything on the grid, GIS technology. But what do queer cartographies of desire look like? Mapped dating apps are very interesting ways in which you can understand queerness. I drew maps of six different parts of Delhi based on data from Grindr in order to see what Gabriel is talking about – how we have been reduced to points, but also about the ways in which technology, the mobility that smartphones [facilitate], allows you to move through different geographies, dimensions that people are not otherwise [able to access]. Through your movement you are redrawing some of these maps on those grids. It’s not so much about the dots, but the story that each person is there: that spatial narrative of negotiation, of movement, of aspiration not limited by the geographies into which they have been born. The idea of the queer is not fixed, it is shifting as we get co-opted within systems of power. Who is queer right now is totally different than who was queer in the 1980s and 90s. I want to think about maps not as a fixed place, because every time you go to a party it’s a different script that you embody, there’s no narrative that you can reproduce. The map is shifting, the map is dynamic, it is populated by different kinds of bodies that it did not imagine previously. Every time that difference enters into that map, it reshuffles. To think about cartography through those narratives of hope and resilience might be much more beautiful. Vikramaditya One of the things we must speak to is that merely having a map does not give us access. It’s not simply about readability. We noticed [this] from the first maps we were introduced to as children – those political maps of the world, defined by national territories. Movement on this map and outside this map rely on regimes of security and territory, including access to the right kind of identification and documents. The modern world created mobility. As Toni Morrison reminds us, the slave was the first modern – the quintessential modern – experience of alienation and uprooting. Morrison tells us that [the modern] is disenfranchisement, it is enfleshment and it is deeply violent. In India, the digital and national is combining to disenfranchise large pockets of this country through the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CCA) [passed in 2019, it excluded Muslim