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  • queeringperspectives
    • Sep 25, 2023
    • 5 min read

#40 - Exploring Safe Spaces: Lessons for the Queer Community

In collaboration with SafeSpaceBTB

This week we continue our conversation with members of SafeSpaceBTB in Battambang, Cambodia. By listening to the importance this space has had in Sonik and Somphor's lives, we thought it might be helpful to explore a bit deeper what safe spaces are and the impact they have on queer communities globally.

A safe space is defined in contrast to the lack of safety in public spaces. Feeling unsafe in social settings can mean different things to different people, but in general it arises from the experience of physical or psychological threats to one's identity. This experience is not necessarily personal, as it can be extrapolated from witnessing violence against people who share the same identity.

In this sense, it is better to understand the non-safety of public space as a systematic, structural violence built into the fabric of cis-heteronormative, patriarchal, racist, classist and ableist societies. This renders all aspects of social interaction potentially threatening, making the fear of violence a constant struggle for members of an oppressed or discriminated community.

Safe spaces are not necessarily enclosed physical places, but are primarily a relational space where people can freely express themselves and be recognized as such without fear of repercussions. In this sense, safety is not only measured in terms of protection from physical violence, but also includes emotional, social, and political safety.

Accordingly, underground spaces for marginalized communities have existed as long as identity-based discrimination has necessitated the existence of clandestine encounters away from the policing eyes of mainstream society. In fact, it can be argued that a safe space can even be a place where liberation and recognition is done by oneself. Thus, safe spaces are not only bars and community spaces, but can include anything from a simple mirror to a public cruising spot.

Historically, the shift toward safe spaces as we understand them today appears within the women's movements in the West during the 20th century. Feminist activists began to create communal spaces where they could discuss their common struggles free from patriarchal influences. In this context, safe spaces begin to advocate for the visibility and political recognition of these identities, rather than remaining a secret, underground place.

The main feature of this understanding of safe spaces is the creation of barriers to entry, where identities are checked at the border to select on the basis of identity who belongs inside as the main method of protection.

For example, in the 1970s, lesbian radical feminists started creating "womyn's lands", separatist communities in remote locations where no contact with men was allowed. Some didn't even keep male animals.

As such, safe spaces emerge with identity politics in the West, sustained by the development of characteristics that define a community by its difference from the norm.

Safe spaces have been key to the protection and political organizing of marginalized communities. Finding common ground to talk about and reflect on shared struggles has helped to strengthen dissident identities and deconstruct the social norms that make those identities invisible.

This has been especially important for queer youth. There is nothing more life-threatening than the sense of isolation and self-harm that comes from internalizing a system of violence that tells a young person in their formative years that their existence is wrong and unwanted by society.

Safe spaces are then particularly important in communities where even talking about queer identities is taboo. Psychological and even physical abuse often starts in family settings, so the only other spaces a young queer person has access to, like school and communal gathering places, must create safe spaces for the appropriate emotional and social development of queer youth.

However, because safe spaces are so heavily identity-based, there are several issues that need to be addressed to ensure the lifelong sustainability of this practice. First, the fact that safe spaces allow for membership based on a shared identity creates the problem of obscuring differences among those identities. For example, women's safe spaces in the early feminist movement were heavily criticized for being primarily white spaces where the specific struggles of women of color were routinely overlooked.

Second, the implicit separatism that arises when a private space divides itself from the public by restricting and controlling access only to people who belong to a certain category creates its own set of problems. On the one hand, mainstream culture can use the existence of these separate safe spaces to further marginalize a particular community by accepting this separation as the natural order of things, increasing distance from this spaces instead of working towards acceptance. On the other hand, separatism can lead to the rejection of members who would benefit from access to the space, but who do not fit so neatly with the identities that are allowed in.

These issues are clearly illustrated by the continued marginalization of trans* and fluid gender identities from women-only and gay spaces. The "protection" of safe spaces for women is one of the main arguments used by trans exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), gender-critical and conservative sectors of society to exclude trans women from women-only spaces such as sports and gendered bathrooms. By policing the definition of 'woman', they can also control access to spaces that base membership on this identity in the name of 'safety'.

Furthermore, despite trans* people having championed the queer rights movements and the creation of the first visible queer safe spaces, those places are usually appropriated by cis-normative people, particularly gay men. Using their socioeconomic privilege, their internalized (trans)misogyny goes unchecked, and what is supposed to be a safe space for all queer people is occupied by a single type of identity, which in turn makes the space unwelcoming to those who do not conform to the more 'palatable' version of queerness that cis gay men tend to defend , also in the name of "safety". Similar examples can be found with other intersecting axes of oppression in queer spaces, like race, ethnicity, class, or ability.

As queer people, we can easily attest to how important safe spaces have been to our own journeys of self-discovery and the building of our communities, especially when we were younger or when we find ourselves in places where walking down the street feels like a life-threatening situation. But just as Western politics is built on ideals of individualism and the division of people into neat identity categories, so are our safe spaces and the methods we use to protect them.

For this reason, in order to continue their mission of providing protection and support, safe spaces need to be mindful of the fluid and ever-evolving nature of human reality, rather than being so fixated on issues of identity.

A safe space must take into account the intersectionality of oppression that inhabits each individual, or it risks fragmenting the space into smaller and smaller subcategories.

In the end, a safe space is not so much about separating ourselves from all possible dangers. That is impossible. A safe space is where we practice the importance of respecting, celebrating, and feeling safe in our difference.


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