The simple fact that non-heterosexual or non-cisgender people are present in a given location does not in and of itself render it queer—rather the space becomes queered through action and negotiation.
A queer approach to space understands that we cannot be queer in any fixed sense, but rather that we are doing queer through acts of resistance. To move away from the notion of a queer space as immovable and settled is to position queer space as something rooted in the continuous breaking down of cis-heteropatriarchal, white supremacist, colonial, classist, and ableist structures. This shift makes necessary a sustained engagement with the histories and presents of a place and its evolving political context.
In Queer Phenomenology, Sara Ahmed undertakes an analysis of the physical orientation of a sexual orientation. “A queer phenomenology,” Ahmed proposes, “would involve an orientation toward queer, a way to inhabit the world that gives support to those whose lives and loves make them appear oblique, strange, and out of place” (2006, 179). Ahmed thus considers the ways in which the queer body is in relation to not only other bodies, but to objects, architectures, and social infrastructures that make themselves legible in particular ways when experienced through queer subjectivities.
To queer space is to point to the limits of current realities that do not adequately consider the safety and wellbeing of marginalized bodies across intersecting identities, and in doing so, points to other possibilities. These spaces of possibility are often ephemeral, and are produced through actions that negotiate and resist dominant power structures that labor for their eradication. It is not so much the space that is queer, but rather the actions that occur within it that render it as such.
In her essay “Queer OS”, media theorist Kara Keeling draws attention to the hegemonic force of ‘common sense’ as a logic that forecloses minoritarian structures of experience lest they articulate themselves within the parameters of what is deemed perceptible to a dominant public (Keeling 2014, 153). Queer as a system of operations, she argues, “offers a way of making perceptible presently uncommon senses in the interest of producing a/new commons and/or of a proliferating the sense of commons already in the making” (Keeling 2014, 153, emphasis my own).
LaRochelle, L. (2020). On designing digital queer space. In Queer Sites in Global Contexts (1st ed.). Routledge.