The Gay Body as a Sensitive Cartographer of the City: Art, Urban In-Between Spaces, and the Production of Place
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22409/arte.lugar.cidade.v3i1.70428Keywords:
queer art, urban in-between spaces, production of place, gay body, public spaceAbstract
This article analyzes how queer art produces place within the in-between spaces of the city. It takes as its point of departure the argument that the gay body, when activated through artistic practices in public space, operates as a sensitive agent capable of challenging regimes of circulation, visibility, and urban memory. Drawing on a dialogue between performance studies, geographies of sexualities, and the political philosophy of aesthetics, the text examines how such interventions establish sensitive economies of the gaze, transforming functional displacements into aesthetic-political events and reconfiguring the distribution of the sensible in the city. The article argues that place does not precede the artwork but rather emerges from the sensitive exchange between art, body, and public, generating experiences that challenge normative protocols of appearance. It further contends that these practices produce non-monumental memories, capable of reinscribing dissident presences in territories conceived for transience. The conclusion suggests that queer art does not occupy the city but sensibly reprograms it, making the gay body a vector for the rewriting of the urban common.
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