Queering Safe Spaces

When safe spaces are no longer safe enough, what does it take to be brave? Marginalized voices from the intersections of gender, sexuality, and race provide some insights, tips, and tricks for facilitation of and participation in diverse courageous spaces.

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The Safety Trap: Why We Need Diverse and Brave Spaces explains how the histories and currency of safe spaces are determined by those with privilege and power; those who choose to invite us in or leave us out. Whether we encounter boundaries at national borders, bathrooms, or birth certificates, our personal safety and wellbeing is at stake. Gender-diverse and queer non-binary people, have bodies, brains, and hearts that challenge traditional ways of being male, female, gay, straight, Black, white, good, and bad. These practitioners—at the interfaces of government policy, architecture, queer art curation, group work, sex work, and tattooing—explore cancel culture and free speech, considering what it takes to be brave. In our current times of global conflict and binary oppositions, they address the urgent need for accessible and inclusive spaces everywhere. To listen and speak across the ideological voids that divide us, we must understand the differences that underpin our feelings of safety and discomfort.