Women's safety issues in urban space has come to the forefront of new modes of governance of globalised metropolises. Drawing on a gender perspective that contributes to naturalise the position of women as passive vulnerable woman subject victim of the patriarchal system, these policies tend to elude gender power relations that frame spaces are un/safe for women and more broadly all people wo do not conform to heteronormative sexual and gender norms. Drawing on feminist geographies of gender and sexualities, I aim in this paper to shift the focus from women's safety policies to gender and sexual minorities' activist practices to think further about what a more inclusive and just city for all would be like (Young 1990).
This submission draws on an on-going ethnographic research on the claiming of queer space and citizenship in Geneva. I will present how women and trans and gender non-conforming people (Gieseking 2020) re-claim their place in the city in the context of neoliberal modes of governance that exclude or commodify them. In contrast to the institutional framing of the safe city, I will examine how women and tgncp join their forces altogether to create new caring and welcoming spaces that challenge the unilateral idea of safe space in itself and articulate the public-private dimension of space. Exploring the spatial practices of activism (Misgav 2015) beyond the opposition between radical and ordinary activism (Browne and Bakshi 2016), I will map out the spaces where women and tgncp in the city ground their senses of selves, as paradoxical spaces of belonging (Rose 1993). This will allow us to lay the groundwork for reflection on what could a feminist and queer right to the city would be like (Vacchelli and Kofman 2017).
Mots clés : spatial activism|sexual politics|safe space|feminist geography|queer right to the city
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