Feelings, Safe Space, and LGBTQ of Color Community Arts Organizing

ABSTRACT

This article examines safe space as a site of community practice. I focus specifically on safe space as it is used among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) of color community arts organizers. I argue that although safe space operates as a site of refuge against oppression, its implementation can also serve as a barrier for community arts workers who seek to engage with mainstream arts institutions. This limitation encourages community practitioners to recognize safe space as one kind of intervention that is most effectively used in tandem with other tools of community practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Safe space
• community organizing
• LGBTQ of color
• Canada

Acknowledgments

This research was supported in part by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies, University of Michigan.

Notes

^1. hooks’s scholarship precedes more current work that, for instance, proposed brave spaces as a viable alternative to calls for safety (Arao & Clemens, 2013).

^2. Although community organizing initiatives may make use of group work to secure community wellbeing (Jacobson & Rugeley, 2007), it is important to point out the specificity of group work as a method of practice in and of itself (Drumm, 2006) and to recognize that it can be carried out in ways that are not explicitly directed toward community change.

^3. For instance, during one community feedback session, participants spoke about the challenges that they faced with safe space organizing in greater detail than I had witnessed in fieldwork or that they shared in interviews. This new data required a more complex analysis of community conflict than I had previously constructed .

^4. In this article, I use a mix of real names and pseudonyms. Before the data collection process, the project was formulated so that participation in the research would be confidential and anonymous. The study was approved by the University of Michigan Institutional Review Board (U-M IRB). During the process of data collection, however, some participants wanted to have the option of having their real names used as they wanted to receive recognition for their work. I successfully submitted a revision of the informed consent process to the U-M IRB so that research participants could decide how they would be identified in the project.

^5. Eshan uses the pronoun they to describe themselves because they do not identify with either he or she. It is common for people to use pronouns like they/them/their” as a way to demonstrate their disassociation with male/female gender binaries.

^6. By creating a venue in which individuals like KarenJo can work through their feelings around fat stigma, ILL NANA/DCDC’s work resonates with a queer politics that opposes the devaluation and pathologization of fatness and fat bodies (Levy-Navarro, 2009; Pausé & Wykes, 2016; Sykes, 2011; White, 2014).