Abstract | This paper contributes to expanding our understanding of queer mobilities, studying how LGBTQIA+ community members navigate fear and joy while walking and cycling through Barcelona’s still car-dominated streets. It is based on interviews with non-binary people and women (including cisgender, transgender, and intersex) identifying as lesbian, bisexual, or pansexual. The interview included drawing a Relief Map, inviting participants to consider how their multiple identities shape the dis/comfort they feel making different types of journeys. The resultant analysis maps emotional journeys of walking and biking as queer women, shaped by interlocking experiences of oppression, such as misogyny, lesbophobia, transphobia, and racism. It explores how participants (re)orient urban space to create routes of greater comfort, using strategies of resistance and care. These include spatially rendering invisible dissident identities or making themselves visible in spaces of perceived acceptance by publicly showing affection, for instance. While the paper, like others on this topic, uncovers experiences of queer disorientation and fear, it also highlights how participants may experience joyful and liberating experiences by disregarding ‘straight’ paths and creating alternative routes through time and space. Strategies of queer wayfinding and reorientation, rooted in performing gender and sexuality, are usually accompanied by practices of (self-)care and togetherness. They assert queer visibility and insist upon the right to feel comfort. The paper contributes to enriching queer geographies with an understanding of how queer people navigate cities, often by uncovering new paths and senses of belonging. It also explores imagined directions for a future of queer mobilities which caters for participants’ desires and wellbeing. |
---|