Intersectional Identities and Claims to Public Space
by Shahinaz Geneid
With the increasing privatization of urban spaces and discrimination against identity groups, the fight over who has rights to public space has turned into a conflict of great significance. While I have touched upon this issue in previous writing on anti-gentrification movements, the personal, rather than the economic, is another critical lens through which to understand rights to public space.
This debate has been especially crucial as it relates to the LGBTQ+ community, who “reflect on the state of their movement every June, on the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots of 1969” throughout Pride month. They host increasingly large parades and marches to celebrate the right to command public space without hiding one’s identities for fear of retaliation or violence.
However, the conversation within such communities has shifted recently, as individuals begin to speak out against in-group cleavages, feeling that they are not fully accepted in the spaces traditionally created for members of their identity group (whether LGBTQ spaces or others) and search for or create their own spaces where they can explore multiple facets of their identity simultaneously.
An interesting example of this redefinition of community spaces and, ultimately, of how one can conceptualize the interaction between identity groups as part of the broader fabric of a city presents itself in the mixture of queer, Middle Eastern, and Muslim identity in Berlin. The case is particularly noteworthy due to the sheer number of spaces in the city that have been created to explore, celebrate, or encourage interaction between these previously disparate social spheres, demonstrating how the groups have come to occupy a significant space in the urban.
Historically, Rolf Goebel describes the thriving of queer culture in Berlin as the product of “tabula rasa for their own lifestyles and as a projection screen for new biographies and ideas.” As such, queer communities have been able to use this new dynamic attitude of the city to their advantage to lay claim to urban space and legitimize different lifestyles in the city. However, Goebel unfortunately also finds that these original dynamic attitudes of embracing change have linked themselves not just to ideologies of growth and cosmopolitanism, but also often to the destructive mentality that migrant cultures, such as Turkish and Arab cultures (whose members are subconsciously assumed, incorrectly or not, to identify as Muslim), are inherently at odds with queerness. As such, individuals lying at the intersections of these identities — being queer and Turkish, queer and Arab, queer and Muslim — face a double-exclusion due to both their sexuality or gender identity, as well as their racial, ethnic, and religious identities.
It is at this intersection of identity that a new set of intersectional urban spaces has arisen, studied extensively by researcher Jennifer Petzen. In one of many papers on the topic, “Home or Homelike?: Turkish Queers Manage Space in Berlin,” Petzen delves into the roots of the social exclusion experienced specifically by individuals identifying both as part of the LGBTQ+ and Turkish immigrant communities, and the ways in which the growing group of individuals at this intersection has begun to claim spaces specifically for themselves.
Similarly to Goebel, she traces the need for these spaces historically, describing how originally the designation of Turkish migrants as “Fremde” or “Auslander” (foreign or foreigners) who would “eventually leave” resulted in a “lack of status for long-term residents and poor planning for long-term integration projects,” excluding Turks from urban space on one level and, consequently, from engaging with broader German culture. In response to this ambiguous social status and exclusion, the Turkish community began to form “cultural associations along ethnic and religious lines,” thereby reclaiming urban space and creating a sense of place and community. However, just as there was little room for migrants in queer spaces in Berlin, these migrant associations too “did not have a goal of creating queer-friendly space,” so there was simultaneosly little room for LGBTQ-identifying individuals in these migrant spaces.
Coming to the same conclusion of the existence of a double-exclusion from social life for these individuals, Petzen then finds that “queer Turks employ strategies of space management that resist fixed ideas of identities and bounded cultures that multiculturalist discourses and the media might otherwise enforce,” and that “in place of fixed identity politics based on ethnicity and national belonging, there are, instead, spatial management strategies at work that create homelike spaces” for members of these communities. As such, the character of queer migrant spaces is distinctly different than that of queer-only spaces that are exclusionary of “non-white” migrants or migrant-only spaces that fail to be queer-friendly. Within these spaces, queer migrants are not only reclaiming representation and a reflection of themselves, but at the very fundamental level, a home.
Petzen links this longing to a persistent feeling of exile and a desire for a safe “home” or home-like space. She states that, “queers everywhere have some idea what exile is like, even as they live among family, go to school, and work; there is always a sense of never quite belonging,” and that for Turkish queers in her example, this experience is doubly present. She concludes in question that perhaps this “experience of exile as the flipside of bittersweet release into queer space is what drives Turkish queers to demarcate and claim homelike space in Berlin.”
Today, this decades-long struggle to become a visible and accepted part of the urban fabric has resulted in LGBTQ-friendly mosques in Turkish nieghborhoods, “post-migrant’ theater spaces that present the multifaceted reality of Middle Eastern migrants in the city and present content in Turkish, Arabic, and German (the most notable of which being the large, state-sponsored Maxim Gorki Theater, which developed out of the Ballhaus Theater, a small independent theater based in the historically migrant neighborhood of Kreuzberg), and even nightclubs such as SO36, also in Kreuzberg, whose regular Gayhane event is explicitly geared towards LGBTQ-identified individuals from Middle Eastern, North African, and South Asian backgrounds (with the inclusion of South Asian cultures as this migrant group has also begun to grow in the city).
