5. Queer Space, Trans Worlds

En Route to Queer Space

2022. The sun had set and the sky was dark, the stars shining with a surprising amount of clarity for a city. I loved this about Tucson. I was on my bike, headed a couple miles across town for a drag show in a courtyard that went by the name of Splinter Collective. I loved that ride at night: the streets quiet and empty, the stars overhead, the air possessing an indescribable quality. Moving through space felt like a quiet kind of freedom.

The ride was easy, almost a straight shot, though such a description obscured the particularity of the route and what was queer about it. I left my house, turning off a side street onto Tucson Boulevard and down to Third, which cut through campus and across town. I crossed Campbell into the empty campus and then through the bustling University Gate Square—full of generic college bars and undergrads. By the time I hit Sixth, it started to get quiet again.

This is where the magic began, the feeling of moving through a passage, on your way to somewhere hidden away. You just kept going down University, encountering little to no one, straight down the increasingly dark and bumpy street, navigating roundabouts and crossing signals. Once you hit Main—lined by seemingly abandoned storefronts and marking the edge of a warehouse/industrial area—you’d hit a sign that read “Dead End.” You’d have to ignore it—to find your way around this world as a queer person, you’d have to learn to ignore warnings of dead ends and impossible transits.

You keep going anyway, past a workshop surrounded by strange metal sculptures: queer landmarks. You’ll hit the railroad tracks, the road ending in a turnaround. To the right is an alley that cuts through two industrial lots dimly illuminated by security lights. At the end of the alley was an abandoned traffic sign—“Road Closed”—that sat there with unconvincing authority, its lights weakly blinking. It was another instruction you would have to disregard to find this space.

Now you just had to turn the corner, past some nondescript buildings, and you’d find the gate, marked with a big metal pole painted rainbow. Step inside and it was a queer space, another world.

A Different Space

Let me tell you about this other world. Maybe you will recognize it, this world of mine. Maybe it is your world too.

It is a network of queer spaces that knit together a social world. Art galleries, dance parties, social gatherings, strip shows, queer markets, bars, group chats, drag performances, dating apps, clothing swaps, workshops, affinity groups, zine swaps, poetry readings, activist spaces, living rooms, clinics, autonomous spaces. In this world, queer and trans people are everywhere.

These spaces participate in the physical, social, and affective infrastructure of queer and trans life, in queer and trans worlding. As physical spaces, some are fixed and others are fleeting, queer “constellations” (Gieseking 2020). They might be out of the way—down an alley, on the edge of town, in a basement—or unmarked as queer. Whatever the case, gender is not their ordering principle. Bathrooms are gender-neutral, mixed, or temporarily appropriated and genderfucked by a critical mass of people who don’t belong in either binary option and don’t care to.

These queer spaces are defined most by a kind of social infrastructure, a way of being together, a way of making space together, of building worlds together. Built into them is a mode of relation, a permissiveness, a curiosity. They are spaces of ease and unselfconscious expression, expression that is not contorted into the mandates of visibility, legibility, and respectability. They are spaces in which others seem to be able to sense who you are, who you are becoming—based half on the working, tacit knowledge of a complex typology of queer and trans identities and aesthetics and half on a spirit of mutual witnessing, recognition, and becoming. These are spaces where people give the gift of gendered recognition freely and automatically.

This social world is also an affective world—a space of feeling and sense-making. It holds together what Hil Malatino (2022) calls an “affective commons.” In Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad, he defines this affective commons as “a form of sociality, wherein the circulation, resonance, and amplification of negative affect between trans subjects makes living with such difficult-to-endure feelings more bearable” (9). Of course, this trans affective commons is not only a space of negativity but also a space of hope and possibility. It is also where the circulation, resonance, and amplification of positive affect—gender euphoria and a sense of possibility for one’s self and one’s world—is shared and cultivated between trans subjects held in mutual recognition. It is a space in which we can sense and feel and dream and become and hurt and fear and transform and witness and dance and desire together. This affective commons—a circuit of desiring—makes us all more possible, more actualized. It makes space, it builds worlds.

This world and its spaces were so different from the other ones I inhabited. What was the relation of this world to those other worlds? What was its relation to the straight, white, disembodied world of the academy? Did these worlds bleed into each other? Could they ever correspond, interweave? To what world did I belong?

Where, exactly, was this queer space to be found? Was this world at the fringes of a dominant world? Or was it secreted away, found in the gaps and fissures, alleyways and basements of a dominant one? Maybe these spaces were lying in wait in the fractures, the contradictions of dominant space, like seeds scattered and sleeping in the sidewalk’s cracks. Henri Lefebvre (1991, 52) envisions that abstract space “carries within itself the seeds of a new kind of space,” that abstract space “relates negatively to something which it carries within itself and which seeks to emerge from it: a differential space-time” (50). The contradictions and fissures of abstract space were waiting to be perceived, to be activated, like a seed waking up, bringing the whole of its embodied memory forth in a risky push toward expansion.

What was this differential space? Where was it? Maybe this queerness was always right under the surface, threatening an established order. It erupted and was territorialized in particular spaces, condensing like an atmosphere, crystallizing new forms. But maybe too it was everywhere, in the social and spatial contradictions that hovered around our queer bodies. Maybe this queer space clung to our bodies—a home carried on our backs—in transit between these worlds.

How could we activate the potentials that lived in this differential space—this queer space—in our bodies and collective lives? For Lefebvre (1991, 167), the reappropriation of the body, which was the reappropriation of space, is central to the possibility of revolution, of a different society. He imagines “a body which by putting up resistance inaugurates the project of a different space” (349). I wasn’t sure exactly what, in practical terms, he means, but I felt the words, the vision, begin to tug at the edges of my body, of my world. Perhaps sensing this possibility, feeling it, was enough. After all, in the final words of The Production of Space, Lefebvre warns that a theory such as his would yield no concrete proposals (419). Instead, he offers: “We are concerned with what might be called a ‘sense’: an organ that perceives, a direction that may be conceived, and a directly lived movement progressing toward the horizon” (423).

A horizon. Differential space, queer space, was a horizon, a potential, a world being born. The words of José Esteban Muñoz (2009, 1) came to mind: “Queerness is not yet here. . . . We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality.” Queerness was the horizon that might lead us to another world. For Muñoz, like Lefebvre, it is embodied resistance—in his words, a “great refusal”—that inaugurated the project of this utopian space, one made manifest through “the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world” (1).

This refusal is the work not of an individual alone but by bodies-in-relation. Once again, we find relationality—intersubjectivity—at stake. Muñoz (2009, 11) imagines queerness as collectivity, and David J. Getsy (2017, 254) reminds us “one cannot be queer alone.” Queer space is inaugurated by a collective movement, a collective refusal: the refusal to reproduce the social and spatial relations of cisheteronormativity that constrain our lives and possibility.

Relationality and Recognition

This queer refusal makes space. It makes space for a different kind of relationality, a mode of relating premised on forms of intersubjectivity that expand horizons, making other bodies, other lives, other worlds possible. Gender, after all, is a relational affair, a system of relations between bodies. It is never accomplished alone; it puts demands on the world and on others. Gender is relational in the sense that all social categories are: Gender emerges intersubjectively as shared meanings and practices. But it is also relational in the sense that it relies on forms of social recognition to be accomplished. As Kim Q. Hall (2022, 55) describes, “Gender and sexual identity are established in scenes of social recognition.” This need for recognition (and the broader fact of our intersubjective existence) places us in a relational field—at once social, material, symbolic, and political—in which gender emerges, is defined, felt, and lived.

While recognition is at work in the substantiation of all genders, trans people are uniquely positioned to understand this relational, intersubjective nature of gender. We can see the work of relationality at work most clearly in its violent and coercive moments. As Samuel Berlin and Sage Brice (2022, 4) describe, “The relationality of gender is perhaps most visible in the circulation of norms, in the moments of discipline and surveillance that threaten the work we do to pursue what makes our bodies and our lives livable.” We feel it most abruptly and viscerally when recognition fails or is denied, when our selves and meanings become contorted through acts of misrecognition. This is the misrecognition that Frantz Fanon (1967, 129) experiences as he is reduced to “a galaxy of erosive stereotypes.” It is the misrecognition that María Lugones (1987) feels when she is perceived as serious and joyless within dominant social worlds. It is the persistent forms of self-negation experienced by trans subjects in a dominant world of sense that is “constantly chipping away at [our] being” (Ahmed 2016, 31).

Yet is there something specific about trans embodiment in this regard? Perhaps so. As Cameron Awkward-Rich (2022, 127) describes, “While all social categories entail forms of misrecognition, trans is perhaps uniquely a social category defined by misrecognition.” Much of the trouble of being trans is due to the perceptions and responses of others, not an inherent problem with the inhabitation of the category itself. Accordingly, in the case of transgender, “a relation came to be understood as a condition” (7).

Rejecting the territorialization of this “condition” onto our bodies, we might reframe transness as relation to illuminate the intersubjective constitution of our worlds and the power dynamics that produce the conditions of embodied, social, and political life. Indeed, part of the work that trans accomplishes is making these relations apparent—affirming and reworking the terms of intersubjectivity that make all of our lives possible. Within phenomenological thought, this fact of intersubjectivity is read as the foundation of an ethics toward “the other,” but “in oppressive cultural systems it becomes a means of domination by which certain groups are denied control over their own subjectivity” (McCann 2018, 157). Accordingly, we can understand the violence of transphobia, racism, and other oppressive systems as a violence of intersubjectivity (Ngo 2017, 166). We have already seen the damaging effects of this crisis of intersubjectivity: It forecloses the possibilities embedded in the body, in space, in human life.

While this fact of our relationality produces immense existential, embodied, social, and political struggles for trans subjects, we cannot forget that it is also what makes life possible. As Berlin and Brice (2022, 11) put it, “The relational encounter produces much more than oppression and discongruence, but is a key locus for generating new vitalities.” Indeed, beyond the confines of dominant worlds—and in the cracks that exist within them—there are queer modes of relating that do not foreclose our lived horizons but are the condition of their possibility.

Muñoz (2009, 6) reminds us that there is “a vast lifeworld of queer relationality, an encrypted sociality, and a utopian possibility.” What is this queer relationality? Gust A. Yep (2017, 119–20) describes queer relationality as “modes of recognition, systems of intelligibility, cultural expressions, affective articulations, encrypted sociality, embodied relations, forms of belonging, community formations, and collective histories of oppression that circulate outside of regimes of heteronormativity—but frequently in relation to it—characterized by potentiality and becoming as individuals inhabiting intersectional cultural nonnormativities negotiate and navigate their social worlds.” Queer relationality names the forms of relating that take root in the gaps and contradictions of abstract space: of white space, of straight space, of any space that denies embodied difference through coercive embodied norms. It is a mode of being in relation to others that seeks to “critically dismantle the hierarchies, boundaries, and borders that impede, impact, and influence the ability to highlight diverse ways of knowing the world” (Yep et al. 2023, 14). Queer relationality is a remaking of selves, of bodies, and of spaces. It is the embodied, social infrastructure of differential space, a scaffolding to reach other worlds.

What spaces might emerge from this constellation of social relations? How might they be collectively built through mutual recognition, intimacy, and an affirmation of interdependence rather than the denial of self, desire, interconnectedness, and possibility that produces white, cisheteronormative space? How could gender be recognized and practiced as a collective accomplishment, an intersubjective ethic, a shared responsibility, a shared space of experimentation and becoming, one that erupts beyond the strictures of a colonial, white supremacist, cisheteronormative gender regime?

Queer Space, Trans Worlds

The politics of gendered recognition—and social recognition more broadly—point us toward a concept of space as a matrix of relationality, one that we inherit, inhabit, and embody. As trans geographer Sage Brice (2023, 3) puts it, “Taking trans experience seriously requires an entirely different conception of space,” one that locates subjectivity not in the body or mind but as the product of an “ongoing encounter within a shifting and always-negotiated field of possibilities and constraints.” Crip phenomenology points us in a similar direction: Thomas Abrams (2016, 1) reminds us that subjectivity is an “emergent product of a material and symbolic order,” not an inherent trait of an individualized body. Critical phenomenologies of minoritized experience return us, again and again, to the fundamental connections between (inter)subjectivity, embodiment, and space.

What this means is that space and our relations make us who we are (Massey 2005, 10). Space is an interval of relationality, a dimension through which we engage a lived, embodied social tradition, an organic history that encodes both constraint and possibility. If space is indeed a relational product, always in the making—one that differentially distributes recognition, resources, and possibility—how might we transform it to open up the possibilities of (gendered) embodiment? How might we “rework the assemblages amidst which gendered embodiments emerge in order to create safer, more agreeable conditions in which trans people can thrive,” thus establishing “new assemblages in which gender can become differently” (Berlin and Brice 2022, 12)? How can we transform the matrix of relations that is space toward racial, gendered, sexual, and crip liberation, toward other worlds?

For me, this is the central question of queer space and the spatial question of critical phenomenology as a knowledge project and a world-building praxis. It is fundamentally a question of intersubjectivity, of relationality, of how we are together, of how bodies gather and create space (Ahmed 2006, 167), how we recognize each other, how we make each other more possible, how we build worlds together. Queering space—queering the rules, norms, and practices that structure space—makes these other worlds possible, worlds in which “social practice would be governed by different conceptual determinations” (Lefebvre 1991, 419). Worlds where our bodies, our experience, our being, are not reduced to corrosive stereotypes and controlling images (Hill Collins 2020). Worlds where our bodies can flow into space and make it our own. Where our embodied horizons are not constrained by other people’s ideas of our bodies, what they are capable of, and where they belong. Worlds that open up to possibility rather than close down under the weight of histories of violence and the spaces they have left in their wake.

What queer imaginations of the future remind us is that these other worlds are never quite here—yet we find them, we feel them, we live in and through them anyway. As trans people—and minoritized people more generally—we live between worlds, we are world-travelers (Lugones 1987; Ortega 2016) that are inventing worlds. In dominant worlds of sense and their abstract spaces, we are disoriented, misrecognized, out of sorts, violated; in such worlds we are deemed impossible, our possibility and vitality withheld from us. Yet in our worlds, in their queer spaces, we are alive, becoming, creative, connected, known, recognized, possibility manifest. We live for—and too often die in defense of, in search of, for want of—trans worlds: worlds in which we might become differently, where we might live otherwise.

These worlds are made when we gather together at the edges, the edges of what is perceived as possible, what is perceived as recognizable, legible, permissible, natural, moral. By gathering together and heading toward the horizon. These edges are not marginal in the conventional sense: unremarkable, peripheral, out-of-the-way, lacking dynamism. They are busy edges—teeming with activity, potential, becoming—as we do the work of recognizing each other, making each other, fighting for justice, stitching care webs that hold our worlds together (Malatino 2020; Piepzna-Samarasinha 2018). As Perry Zurn (2025, 12) describes, together “we are busy making new spaces and shapes in the world. We are creatively making sense of our own flesh and blood. . . . We are cracking open our horizons, materially and conceptually.” This is the everyday, mundane practice of trans resistance, trans worldmaking, trans poetics. Here, transness is less an identity or a fact about a body than it is “an affective fabric between people,” a mode of being-in-relation (79).

Worlds begin from these relations and the spaces they make, from the flesh that limns our bodies and sets us into relation to everything else. In remaking relations, trans remakes space, opening up the possibility of being and doing otherwise. We already find ourselves in other spaces, in other worlds. Let us collectively lean in, questioning, putting pressure on the arbitrary constraints of the here and now, on a contrived politics of possibility, pushing out toward new horizons, realizing the possibilities that already live here, in this body.