Queer/Body/Architecture
MIT Keller Gallery
2012
Role: Co-curator and organizer with JD Sassaman, with student group QUBE
Transient and marginal, queer space dissolves mainstream binaries and counters alienation while providing a misfit haven. An enduring narrative of resistance has developed from queer identities, one with historical ties to socialism, feminism, prison abolition, environmentalism and anti-racism. Queer space describes a moment in which certain freedoms of gender identity and sexuality exist between norms and before tags of Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender take hold and remap the space.
Emerging from six months of conversation among members of Queers in the Built Environment (QuBE), this exhibit conceptualizes Queer Space as a moment of rupture from the normative through subverting forms, co-opting spaces, dissolving categorical assumptions, and exhibiting attitudes and behaviors that express new freedoms of identity. We begin to challenge the limits of history by positioning snapshots of queer activity against and within architectural paradigms. The promenade and its inherent objectification; the metaphorical fortress, or closet, which may be just as public as the promenade; and the superhomo, the exaggerated identity formation exemplified by mainstream gay popular culture, reveal multiple paradoxes in constructing space and identity. We examine the queer(ing) of space, the predicament of multiple and shifting identities that undermine both heteronormativity and homonormativity. In proposing a desiring historical narrative, we prompt a re-reading of recognizable spaces and typologies to expose incongruence, the ‘ghosts in the machine.’