Maps of Queer Space in Savannah, GA

The buildings we inhabit are generic: designed in a bygone time for people who don’t exist anymore. Similarly, in our work and in our leisure, we walk through malls, offices, and institutions which belong to nowhere in particular. We live among the debris of architectural ghosts. It is common, within the walls of such spaces, to feel displaced, detached from regionality and time period. Within these spaces our presence can be described as patient, consumer, male, female, married, single, passenger, resident. Our agency for self-identification is irrelevant. The body is assumed to be anonymous, productive, and standard. Most buildings are designed for this body, which, by default, is male, mobile, and five-foot-six-inches tall. As architectural objects are standardized by ISO 9000 and the International Manual of Building codes, they rely on repetition for their propagation. When designing these spaces, architects and engineers establish measurements for an average user: three foot wide doors, eleven inch stair treads, and seven foot tall ceilings. Following these guidelines, our homes are spatially organized for the nuclear family, with 1.93 children, a car, and a heterosexual marriage. What is cheapest to build under this system are structures of wood frame and foamy insulation, empty shells for our lives to occur somehow.

What has become more evident, in recent scholarship, is that most people are impossible to rationalize. We live in a world of immense diversity, a world which denies the existence of a single neurotypical brain, a normal reproductive body, and a fixed conception of gender. Queer people, minorities, and disabled folk who don’t fit into the numerical standards of normativity and who can’t afford to hire an architect to design a custom home for them, engage with spaces which are never designed for them. Like an oversized shoe or a tightened waistline, architecture produces spaces that enforce the dominant ideology and dislocate those who don’t conform.

Many of the expressions we use to speak about sexual minorities, are, in fact, spatial. When we speak about taking up space or “safe space”, we refer to the spatial conditions which liberate or constrain, conceal or reveal. When speaking about self repression, we use the expression “in the closet”. The built-in closet, in contrast with the free-standing armoire or clothing chest, emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century, as a tool for maintaining order in the bedroom. In this sense, the built-in closet conceals the disorder of clothing, as it conceals the entropic potential of queer identities. The private realm is a powerful medium for the implementation of normative architectural power. However, despite residing in spaces which are disjointed or even hostile, sexual minotirites have made, within the empty shells of faceless buildings, their own spaces to feel safety, love, and belonging. Throughout this presentation, I will explore the ways in which queer people make space through investigations of three homes in Savannah, Georgia. As an act of resistance, the spacemaking of queer people subverts architectures of the home, the family, and the neoliberal mode of production and living. Building collective utopias, queer spacemaking is a process which moves towards ownership and radical alternatives.

Queer theory emerges in the late 1990s, as an evolution of poststructuralist thought with the publication of the writings of Judith Butler, Teresa De Lauretis, and Monique Wittig. The field of queer theory in architecture is emerging as increasingly diverse voices contribute to architectural discourse, considering the ways in which architecture enforces gendered roles on the body.

To begin, what is queer space? Is it the spaces built by queer individuals? Or mererly the spaces inhabited by queer people? Attempting to find a definition of queer space is oxymoronic, as Christopher Reed describes, since queerness itself defies defintion (REED 65). Despite efforts to undermine their visibility, queer people have demarcated spaces symbolically throughout history. The emergence of queer neighborhoods in the urban metropolis, cruising grounds in public parks, and communicative street signage iilustrate queer placemaking in the urban fabric of the city. Reed compares queer space to the enclaves created by diasporic ethinic commmunitieis under capitalism, as delineated by their “symbolic markers” such as, grafitti, banners, unofficial monuments, announcements, and unique business to meet local demands (REED 66). These spaces are characterized by their coincidental collision of people from different backgrounds and cultures, appropriating space as their own through creative interventions. In Savannah, queer public space is both ephemeral and material. Some markers of queer space are coded monuments such as the “fork tree” in front of the Sentient Bean, an art installation created by Roberta, an elderly trans woman in the community, who has hung objects such as forks, ribbons, and small trinkets on the branches of the tree throughout the years. Along the same street of the “fork tree”, queer space is created through the maintenance of collective commons such as the little free library, where people leave food and books for those who might need them. Within the built environment, the queer landscape includes institutions such as the First City Pride Center, which provides psychological and health services, queer owned small businesses such as Starlandia which supplies second-hand art materials, and active nighclubs and bars downtown. Queer space is also the space of activism: as mututal aid organizatins such as Food Not Bombs bring queer people through collective food sharing.

As Gordon, Ingram, and Bouthillette write in “Queers in Space”, the queer appropriation space has created conditions that reflect the complexities of queer identities: their instability, inventivenss, and fluidity. For queer people, all that is private becomes public. However, as a spatial enclosure, architecture enforces boundaries and defines who stays in or who stays out. Therefore, the blurring of the public and the private creates an architectural contradiction. Queer people reside within this very contradiction, where nothing is fully private nor public (QUEERS in SpACE 296). In the enclaves where queers have constructed safe havens, public norms have been defied in order to allow for self expression and comfort. Without the formalities and decorum of heterosexual space, queer space shelters people from the oppressive policing of their dress, their relationships, and their cultural creations. By creating a private sanctuary within the public, the authors of “Queers in Space” write that queer space “transcends heternormative constraints”, by defining places where people can live freely within their on terms, whether it means transitioning genders, redefining the familial and monogamous institutions, or sharing labor (QUEERS in SpACE 296). Queer spaces, through their collaborative accumulative processes, their definace of consumerism through DIY, thrift, and repurpose, and their egalitarian ideals, have challenged the hegemony of architecture.

In most parts of the world, however, public exposure of queer identities can be life threatening. As a means of survival, queer relationships have often been secluded to the private realm, where they are protected from state and individual violence. Although private space is a safe space for queer people to live authentically, a “Room of One’s Own” has been a luxury for marginalized peoples throughout history. As we see in feminist theory, the private realm has also been a site for the maintenance of heteropatriarchy and the establishment of gendered roles (QUEER SPACE 373). The typology of house, whether it's a suburb, a condo, or a high density mid-rise apartment block, is individualized into cells for the nuclear family. In the development of the suburbs, in the ever growing scarcity of collective space within residential zones, and in the homogenized building methods that disregard regionality, architecture enforces the status quo and resists change. The queer home, which is always built for non-queer residents, must adapt the generic template of the house to accommodate multiplicities. As scholar Katie Goldberg asserts in her article, “Queer Homes in a Non-Queer World”, queer homes are inherently political (Goldstein 270). Through the territory of the domestic, queer people have found ways of resisting antagonism and biopolitical control. Although the construction of the house is not itself conducive to queer modes of living, the house has been queered through small yet significant interventions of minor architecture. Minor architecture, as defined by Jill Stoner in her book, Toward a Minor Architecture, houses itself within existing structures, appropriates common materials, and challenges expectations. By appropriating the mechanisms of oppression and subverting them, minor architecture disrupts the monopolies of power (Stoner 3). What does minor architecture look like? It might be guerrilla gardening in garbage bins, occupying vacant buildings for musical events, or setting up a hammock between two buildings. According to Stoner, minor architectures, “disassemble binary oppositions of inside and outside, public and private, sanctioned and subversive, large and small.” (Stoner 16). Queer acts of minor architecture might be crocheting a scarf around a tree, covering transphobic stickers, or as we shall see, simply adding a daybed to a living room to change the perception of space.

In the relatively affluent queer communities of Savannah, Georgia, I investigated three households within East, West, and Southside Savannah. Throughout my documentation of I identified three types of spacemaking:

1. Constructed collectives

2. Explorations of individuality

3. Alternative families

Bolton Street, 11:00 AM : Constructing Collectivity

The porch is peppered with dog hair and leaves. A thin subtraction to the house, the porch framed by mismatched hanging ferns and furnished by two woven lawn recliners and an office chair left neglected by its owner. They sit there in the afternoons, when the cat scurries by, scavenging a leftover nugget of food, the neighbors look through the sidelights of the door, vaguely concerned, and the group of bachelorettes return to their overcrowded airbnb. It’s the best place to people watch, my friends say. The house is a 19th century functional gingerbread, nested between the busy Montgomery avenue and the park. Like many buildings in the Victorian District, the house has been halved. Dissected and dismembered, the operation left arteries without the meat. In this sense, the house is pure circulation. Spine and limbs that radiate into an assembly line of rooms. The first room is a parlor converted into a sleeping chamber. It is speckled with rainbow light flares refracted from the windows and the diffuse shimmer of the jars of water where their plants propagate. The main feature of the bedrooms are their covered walls. The visual intrigue and color of the walls tracks an accumulation over time, as a documentation of the passage of time, a fossil record of life. There are notes scribbled with handwritten text, a silver pendant, stolen street signs, crumbled receipts, dried flowers, a ziploc bag with a lock of hair inside it. The heart of the house is the living room, where all evenings coalesce. The otherwise hard flooring of the room has been softened with pillows, blankets, and stuffed animals. While the bedrooms are individual projects, the living room is a collaborative collage of found furniture, second hand nick-nacks, and drawings. Beyond the fusion of wall and shelf decoration, the items in the common areas, the food, and the gadgets are used collectively. As an ever-evolving center of collaboration, the living room is constantly

Bolton Street, 11:00 AM : Constructing Collectivity

-bedrooms are fossil records of life

-collaborative projects throughout the house include the jar of transphobic stickers, fridge, drawings,

-day bed in living room with pushies where everyone can carve out their own space

-a space for all to coalesce

-rituals e.g. cooking, porch gatherings, etc

-sharing appliances, fidget basket, belongings on the shelf

Zach, East Savannah, 1:00 PM: Exploring Individuality

Zach’s single bedroom apartment is accessed through the alley.

-bedroom where the living room should be

- hanging objects on the wall for visibility

- individual decor

- plants and gardening

Ella and Zaria, Southside Savannah, 5:45 PM: Alternative Families

Ella and Zaria’s front door is always open. As the main organizers responsible for Food Not Bombs, their is a kitchen is choreography of people, vegetables, and donations which rotate throughout the week.

-kitchen becomes main social hub

-table of drawings

-polyamory within a single family house

-accommodates multiple relationships and a shifting sense of family

-various mismatched couches for separate social interactions while sharing the same space

-welcomes all that want to participate in fnb

-community building traditions include full moon parties