Safe Spaces, Queer Spaces & Public Spaces

This post is part of a series of reflections on the interdisciplinary winter seminar, “Mumbai At Home and in the World: Gender, Sexuality and the Postcolonial City.” BCRW Associate Director Catherine Sameh introduced the seminar in part 1, and BCRW Research Assistant Nicci Yin reflected on occupying space in an urban environment in part 2.

Growing up in Washington, DC and then moving to New York for college, I’ve been surrounded by “open-minded” and “accepting” people my whole life, the types of people who wear rainbow pins and have HRC bumper stickers because they’re “allies.” Of course this kind of liberal support is important for the queer community, but it also means I’ve been conditioned to perform queerness in public urban spaces in a specific way, especially as a femme-lesbian who is rarely read as queer. While not a revolutionary notion, my trip to Mumbai forced me to rethink queerness, and how queerness is embodied and embedded in different spaces. Perhaps because I’m a queer woman living in New York City, whenever I see two men or two women holding hands or snuggling in public I assume they’re a romantic couple – not “just” friends. Yet walking around Mumbai constantly challenged me to rethink my notions of public affection, public space, friendships and romance. Mumbai is a city much like New York, where the streets are almost theatrical in their variety of people and activities. Every time I stepped outside my apartment in Mumbai, I saw a different set of women holding hands while crossing the street, or men sitting in each other’s laps on a park bench.

This constant and seemingly banal performance of affection caught me off guard at first. Yet Mumbai’s notions of platonic affection – which in the US is rarely so publicly physical – eventually became normalized for me. When talking to the two women from Lady Shri Ram College about public affection – both romantic and platonic – they were surprised to hear my interest in the culture of platonic public affection. They didn’t give a second thought to these couples, just as most New Yorkers probably wouldn’t to a man and a woman holding hands on the subway. To them, it was part of the white noise of the city and they struggled to articulate why people hold their friends’ hands. In turn, when asked why it was commonplace and accepted to hold your partners’ hand in New York I stumbled over my own explanation. When, why and where is public affection acceptable?Continue reading →