6/21 Queer Agenda: 2022 Pride Edition Part II
On bodies, safety, agency, responsibility, and bodies (again)
Part I examined the meanings and nuances of queer pride, what it means to ally oneself, and the potentials of being in community. Part II (below) links queer pride to architecture + design.
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Recently, I’ve been asked by several different people whether I believe architecture can make a difference in society. My responses have been vague and non-committal, ending up asking a different question back: what counts as “making a difference in society”? Architecture as a product of shapes, forms, styles, and spaces reflects culture; how much agency does the profession or the discipline have to change the society it reflects? In short, my answer was “no, but maybe”—if we reframe the meanings and processes of architecture, and expand the definition of and participation in architecture, perhaps we have a chance at affecting change.
Here is my attempt to reconcile a way for architecture to wide into issues of queerness, reaching beyond aesthetic critique to wade into solidarity and political action—loose arguments for queering architecture.
Let’s start with a noncontroversial statement: you have a body. I have a body. This is the starting place of Sonya Renee Taylor’s book The Body Is Not an Apology, and this is where Part II of Queer Agenda: 2022 Pride Edition is situated: in the agreed-upon reality that human beings have bodies. Our bodies are diverse at many scales, from macro-level physical features like hair texture, skin color, and body odor, to microscopic infrastructures like nervous system activation, food sensitivities, and mitochondrial profiles.
You cannot choose the body you are born into, or that you grow into. And while you also cannot choose how your body is perceived by others, you can influence that perception through making choices about how you present your body to the world, through modifications by clothing, makeup, perfume, exercise, plastic surgery, and the like. Others may perceive your body in certain ways, but your body is yours to be perceived by you. In order to live life in this dimension, in this reality, you have to have a body, and no one should be able to take it away from you without taking away your life.
How your body is perceived and defined is always in relation to other people’s bodies. Through individual experiences with yourself, as well as collective experiences within communities, you may feel aligned with certain identities and come to explain yourself using the language that describes them. This is how identities are not divorced from the real, the physical. This is how “identity politics” and the “transgender debate” are grounded in the reality of bodies.
Architecture is, in a sense, all about the body. The structures we build called “housing” are fundamentally meant to shelter the body from the elements, to ensure that the body can continue to live. Building codes that prescribe light and air, accessibility, fire-rated walls, roof slope—all of that is to build architecture that supports living bodies. The same can be said of office or commercial buildings, where people go to work in sheltered spaces.
Existing theories on architecture and the body tend to focus on individual experiences—that is, the body's physical, psychological, and spiritual needs and pleasures—and how architecture responds to them. I have not done a proper literature review beyond a deep-ish Google search, but it seems that most scholarship frame architecture as figurative or abstract representation of the human body. Feelings of depth, continuity, containment, and familiarity have been examined in relation to spatial design. Or, architecture is analyzed as a physical representation of society’s attitudes and cultures.
But what about architecture as it exists—not as a symbol or a sign or a representation of something, but as a necessary part of human life and physical reality? What about the actual thing? Is there a different way to theorize about architecture in service of bodies?
On June 11, 2022, five men associated with the far-right extremist group Proud Boys stormed a drag queen story time at the San Lorenzo Public Library. The men entered the library yelling anti-trans and anti-gay slurs just as Panda Dulce, a founding member of the Drag Queen Story Hour events that now take place at libraries in multiple states, led children and their parents in a wholesome welcome song. Dulce had to be led away for her safety, and Sheriff's deputies were called to de-escalate the situation.
This invasion of Drag Queen Story Hour—a safe space for children, no less—is a very literal example of queerphobic violence. The Proud Boys, an American, neo-fascist, exclusively male organization that sprang up in 2016, threatened Dulce and her audience’s safety using violent language meant to shame and negate the existence of gay, transgender, and gender non-conforming people. Targeting an event where children were in attendance makes such hateful language even more inappropriate and damaging.
A more everyday queerphobic violence has been happening in the public streets of major cities across the country. Police forces have been breaking up encampments built by homeless people in the name of cleanliness and safety. But whose safety is prioritized in these sweeps? In New York City, 733 “cleanups” were performed across the five boroughs in the six weeks between March 18 and May 1 this year. In San Francisco, where ~30% of the homeless people identify as queer, the city enacts sweeps all year long, and residents can call, text, email, or tweet 311 to dispatch cops to harass homeless people. Cities are dealing with the presence of poverty on their streets by sweeping members of a certain economic class away from the public sphere, despite providing legal protections for LGBTQIA+ workers.
Both types of “invasions” are attempts to police what is “normal.” At Drag Queer Story Hour, Proud Boys were policing the boundaries of “normal” gender roles and presentations, making clear through violent language that queerness and nonconforming bodily expressions are wrong and should not exist. Sweeps of encampments built by homeless people polices where people, especially queer people, can and cannot exist. The public streets are swept to become “normal,” clean, and safe again. All that do not conform are banished.
Both are spatial issues. Drag Queer Story Hour is a safe place for queer children and their families to exist and affirm each other. Lack of non-market-rate housing is a systemic spatial issue, a reflection of cities’ priorities for land use.
And both are bodily issues. Because some of our bodies (and minds) can survive the violence, but at what cost? And what of the people who do not, have not, or will not survive?
What, then, is the role of architecture and design? Hark back to the question I have been asked recently: how can architecture make a difference in society?
Architecture—as a discipline that is, in some ways, all about bodies—has the responsibility to recognize and serve multiple bodies through design. This means designing actually accessible spaces to push back against a rigid, narrow definition of “normal” that excludes the existence of many people. To do that, the discipline needs to reconcile its current complicity in systems that violently police what is “normal.” As professionals, architects need to listen to the communities they serve and act in solidarity with them. Spatial designers many need to change “normal” processes in order to reframe the community as client, making room for multiple “normals” to coexist.
Ultimately, an architecture profession that is allied with queer communities redistributes the power of design and decision-making to those who have experienced violence and powerlessness. If power is the freedom to act, then providing agency to choose the design of one’s environment is a method of shifting power.
Power redistribution through spatial design won’t stop Proud Boys from storming into safe spaces, or make market rate housing suddenly rent-controlled. But the common denominator is the body: the ability to choose the environment in which your body will inhabit. A queer architecture in service of bodies affirms that everyone’s bodies are infinitely unique in their own ways, and everybody experiences their bodies differently. A queer architecture in service of bodies recognizes that there does not exist a “normal” way to express gender or sexuality, that nonconformity does not legitimize violence against people’s bodies. A queer architecture takes pride in not contorting to the demands of cis-hetero society.
So, you tell me: can architecture make a difference in society?
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I hope these words inspire you in some way, shape, or form.
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Thank you for reading.
Until next time 🦄,
A.L.