CONFERENCE PAPER:

“Queer and Sensual Geographies of Urban Spaces: Manchester, United Kingdom” 

Performance Studies International Annual Conference, 2008

abstract:

This paper takes an autoethnographic and multi-sensory—or what I refer to as “sensual”—approach to examining the commercialized queer and racialized urban space in Manchester, England. Of interest is considering how a sensual visual analysis can help reveal how subjects (in particular, myself) might break free from the homonormativty (or whiteness) of Canal Street, the epicenter of the city’s Gay Village, and how subjects become enfolded into the heteronormativity of Curry Mile, an area so named for its many South Asian restaurants. I will draw on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of smooth and striated spaces as well as Foucault’s “heterotopia.”