Bodies that speak and the promises of queer: looking to two lesbian/queer bathhouses for a third way

Abstract

In utilizing my ethnographic research on two Canadian lesbian/queer bathhouses, Pussy Palace in Toronto and SheDogs in Halifax, I seek to show the centrality of queer and the concomitant promises of a queer project when it comes to bodily speech and sexual articulation. While many feminists have criticized queer as being regressive and ineffective, I explicate the ways in which the queering of space employed by the organizers of Pussy Palace and SheDogs enables the discursive and physical conditions for intelligibility among bathhouse patrons. The result is a body that speaks, a body that through its very specificity is recognized and affirmed.

Citizenship acts: queer migrants and the negotiation of identity and belonging at Toronto Pride Week 2009

“…This visibility constructs the community itself as "upper-class", "white", and "male". Because communities are sites for the reaffirmation or strengthening of precarious subjectivities (Pendleton Jimenez 2005;Ellis 2007;Leap 2007;Hammers 2008), the lack of visibility for racialized and/or transnational queer identities leaves these identities vulnerable to assimilation and relegates queer migrants and racialized queer identities to the margins of queer communities. Some queer scholars have argued that this positions queer identities and racialized or transnational identities as mutually exclusive, making membership in queer communities contingent upon the denial or suppression of racialized or transnational identities (Young 1986;Silvera 1990;Chang Hall1993;Manalansan 1997;Sullivan 2003;Pendleton Jimenez"2005;Kuntsman 2007).…”