Bodies that speak and the promises of queer: looking to two lesbian/queer bathhouses for a third way

Abstract

In utilizing my ethnographic research on two Canadian lesbian/queer bathhouses, Pussy Palace in Toronto and SheDogs in Halifax, I seek to show the centrality of queer and the concomitant promises of a queer project when it comes to bodily speech and sexual articulation. While many feminists have criticized queer as being regressive and ineffective, I explicate the ways in which the queering of space employed by the organizers of Pussy Palace and SheDogs enables the discursive and physical conditions for intelligibility among bathhouse patrons. The result is a body that speaks, a body that through its very specificity is recognized and affirmed.