“Daddy Pence Come Dance”: Queer(ing) Space in the Suburbs

Abstract

Before Mike Pence’s inauguration as Vice-President, the LGBTQ activist group Werk for Peace threw a dance protest where over two hundred fiercely fashioned protesters queered Pence’s suburban neighborhood. Taking queer as a verb, queering space is a spatial performance, which makes a range of nonnormative enactments, rhythms, movements, and embodiments intelligible by disrupting assumptions that discipline space as binaristic, static, and normative. Outlining three rhetorical performances that queer space, I argue that through dance the Queer Dance Protest queers space by disrupting the heteronormative order, tapping into the space’s arena of possibility, and exposing space as open and heterogeneous.

Keywords:

• heteronormativity
• protest
• queer space
• queer worldmaking
• suburbs

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dr. Amy Johnson and the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful feedback and guidance throughout the revision process. I would also like to thank Dr. Katie Gibson and Dr. Greg Dickinson for their continued help and support while preparing this manuscript. Finally, I appreciate Hailey Otis, Emily Krebs, Kristin Slattery, and Hayley Blackburn for their helpful comments throughout the various stages of this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.