Queering safety? An introduction

Concepts and ideas about the construction of safe(r) spaces have been around for decades; the labor of creating social space as a safe space within queer communities is a task of great importance (Hanhardt 2013). This special issue of borderlands offers an interdisciplinary investigation of the ongoing discussion on queer safe spaces, seeing them as a contemporary and radical understanding and practice. The idea for this special issue developed as a result of the III Geographies of Sexualities Conference in Rome, in which we held a triple session on queer safe spaces in the summer of 2015. These sessions enabled an academic discussion on the topic, highlighting and starting to fill in the gaps in theorization and the numerous dilemmas it raises—both in academic and activist arenas. This special issue presents a collection of papers that aim to improve our understanding of the construction of safety within queer spaces, discourses, and realms, and the challenges such spaces face. This introduction presents a general theoretical framework of queer safe spaces, focusing on two dimensions: first, the logics that are produced through discourses of queer safe space and second, the practices that produce spaces as safe.