Queering the Public and Private Spheres During COVID-19: Olivier Vallerand Guest Blog Post

“Notions of private and public are omnipresent in discussions of architecture and cities. Far from being neutral, they are formulated through normative notions of gender – the very same notions that queer thinking seeks to question.” Olivier Vallerand, Unplanned Visitors

For many, being in quarantine has meant having to adjust and redefine our notions of public and private spaces. While offices, schools, and various public areas remain closed or inaccessible, our homes and private spheres have had to compromise and accommodate themselves to allow for these typically public functions so that we may continue our daily lives. While working remotely or home schooling may now appear to be the new normal, these changes also invite us to reevaluate the concept of the “home,” and our assumptions regarding the “private” and “public” spheres within which we typically interact and live.

This week we asked MQUP author Olivier Vallerand the question:

“The dichotomy of private and public spaces has never been sharper; when both areas take on an intensified experience or meaning, how has that reshaped or highlighted the importance of your area of study?”

His response illustrates how queer critiques of space can help us better understand these spaces, and sheds light on the potentially dangerous realities our normative notions and assumptions of these concepts can overlook or conceal.

In his new book Unplanned Visitors: Queering the Ethics and Aesthetics of Domestic Space Olivier Vallerand investigates how queer critiques, building on pioneering feminist work, question the relation between identity and architecture, and highlight normative constructs underlying domestic spaces. By reconstructing the foundation of queer critiques of space and by analyzing the representation of domesticity in contemporary art and architecture, Unplanned Visitors shows the blurring of private and public that can occur in any domestic space and explores the potential of queer theory for understanding, and designing, the built environment.

I started working on Unplanned Visitors: Queering the Ethics and Aesthetics of Domestic Space out of an interest in understanding how the emergence of queer theory had impacted – if at all – the study of architectural spaces. At first glance, queer space theory seems to be about the sexualized aspects of the built environment, with queer scholarship in architecture, planning, and design often focused on cruising spaces and bars or domestic spaces designed for queer people (and more particularly white gay males). However, upon closer observation, those spaces are all shaped by a rethinking of the boundaries between public and private, an attempt to reframe public environments as private intimate spaces in order to make them safer. There is thus common challenges and preoccupations between different environments and experiences, such as the use of public parks for cruising by gay men in context where homosexuality is illegal even in private domestic spaces, or the fights to eliminate gender-segregated public restrooms that provide a false sense of safety for some while simultaneously endangering trans people’s mental and physical health. When thinking about domestic spaces, these examples challenge the common assumption of the home as a safe haven that resonates with many people’s experience during the current COVID-19 crisis.

The project featured on the cover of Unplanned Visitors exemplifies the breadth of questions emerging from queer space theorists and practitioners’ approach to the domestic. In LIE – Bed Sheets (1997, photo by Christina Dimitriadis) and other installations from his Housewarming series, architect Jürgen Mayer H. explores how the domestic is connected to social networks. The temporary traces left by guests on the temperature sensitive print that covers the domestic furniture designed by the architect underline the interaction between “private” domestic environments and “public” social networks. Artists Elmgreen & Dragset, also discussed in my book, have similarly shown in their installations that the domestic is often used to build national and political representations, even if seldom discussed as such in comparison to public architecture. Furthermore, Mayer H. comments on the interconnectedness of private and public in domestic environments by using data-protection patterns – usually found on the inside of the envelopes used for letters from banks to protect confidential information while it travels in public spaces – but also underlines the relation between fear, society, and the domestic. Do we consciously try to hide things in our domestic environments? Why do we feel we need to hide such things if a home is an allegedly private space? Why do we fear our private lives becoming publicly known? Moreover, do we all fear this to the same level? While popular discourses often assume a feeling of protection when one is in their home, Mayer H. and others underline that this safety is a rare privilege and that most people, historically and today, cannot afford to assume that their home is safe from public intrusions. This is particularly true for minorities of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation or gender identity. When one’s personal identifications are criminalized, the assumed sanctuary of the home appears very fragile.

Jürgen Mayer. Housewarming: Guest Book, 1996, disappeared group show curated by John Paul Ricco, Randolph Street Gallery, Chicago.

So, while the prompt for this blog asked about how “the dichotomy of private and public spaces has never been sharper,” I would rather argue that the limits between private and public have never been as blurred. On a very basic level, and as widely acknowledged by numerous commentators, people are stuck working in homes that have not been designed to do so, spending all their time with family members while they usually spend most of their waking day with their coworkers, and sharing images of their domestic environments through videoconferencing even more widely than on social media networks that were already being targeted for their impact on privacy. Beyond this, the home also becomes unsafe in important ways because it is assumed to be safe. For example, it makes even more invisible domestic violence and limits opportunities to escape it, or it ignores the fact that many people do not have a home in which to “stay at home.” Going back to some of the critiques I discuss in Unplanned Visitors, the current situation also highlights some of the normative assumptions present in our understandings of domestic environments. Thinking about support networks, current stay-at-home orders also ignore non-traditional households: when you live alone, when your family is not biological or living in different spaces or geographies, how do you experience such a situation?

The emergence of queer space theory described in Unplanned Visitors is far from being over. Challenging and fascinating texts and projects keep appearing to transform how we think about the relation between the built environment and our self and collective identifications. While things have gotten better for a few people, many others are still experiencing challenging living conditions due to their sexual orientation or gender identity. The current crisis, unfortunately, is not softening those conditions, but highlights the need to rethink the way we design and understand domestic environments.

REPOhistory’s Queer Spaces Sign Project in New York

Olivier Vallerand is a community-engaged architect and assistant professor in The Design School, Arizona State University.

For more information on Unplanned Visitors: Queering the Ethics and Aesthetics of Domestic Space >