Event overview
Dotan Brom & Yoav Zaritsky - "Not when you are looking for something": Spatial, social, narrative and political cruising through Haifa's city-space
IHR History of Sexuality Seminar
In his essay "Walking in the City", the French scholar, Michel De Certeau, presents the act of walking as creative and subversive tactics: the walker subverts the strategies set by the city planners, reinterprets the city-space and generates new meanings to streets, parks and squares. Cruising is a similar activity: it expropriates the public garden from the use set by its planners and from its purpose for the general society, subverts them and grants the garden a new meaning for a new community that is created around it.
This paper juxtaposes De Certeau's ideas with queer life stories that were collected through the Haifa Queer History Project. This two-years-old oral history project documents and researches the history of queer lives and communities in the city of Haifa, Israel's third largest city and home to mixed communities of Jews and Arabs from various religious and ethnic backgrounds.
The paper focuses on Haifa's public gardens as urban spaces of marginality and ambiguity, which echoes marginal and ambiguous experiences of those cruising in them. It further presents a trilateral connection between spaces that lend themselves to cruising, i.e. allow a subversive and generative use of them; "Cruising identities", that cruise through gender and sexuality norms; and the narratives in which these queer lives are narrated. Instead of the conventional dichotomy, in which the hetero-norm can be either internalised or opposed, a close reading of the life stories mentioned above brings up the possibility of a third option, which this paper calls a "cruising stance" and depicts its contours.
The IHR History of Sexuality Seminar is in solidarity with the IWGB boycott of central University of London facilities including Senate House in support of outsourced workers. More information available at: https://iwgb.org.uk/en/boycottsenatehouse. We have therefore decided to hold this IHR History of Sexuality Seminar at Goldsmiths. All welcome.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 22 Jan 2019 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
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