Paper short abstract:

Cruising spaces are composed of a constellation of embodied sensorial experiences, one that anthropologists and interlocutors share. By accompanying cruising pathways in Basel (CH) the visual sensory apparatus was selected to understand the imagetic construction of race in such liminal places.

Paper long abstract:

The eyes receive the refracted light and the brain process the information transforming electromagnetic waves into images. The light enters the eyes and even in low amounts is perceived by the rods, slowly adapting the "night" vision. A greyscale of some sort, that as a response forges different kinds of spaces. This proposal is based on a work that analyzed the construction of race and racism in space within a Swiss context through electing the visual sensorial apparatus. For such a comparative study three LGBTQIA+ spaces in Basel (CH) were selected, a bar, a park, and a dating mobile app. Here I plan to focus on the park as a place of alternative queer spatialities, one that claims a profuse sensorial understanding. The construction of the park is based on the juxtaposition of shadows and darkness, of what is visible and what is not. Entangling bodies that many times have no clear features, in exploring the visual sense one can hope to comprehend one of the many interlaced sensorial aspects of the spatial constitution. Through space and the different processes of racialization an imperative connection is created, one that responds to a gap in queer migration, and urban studies. What is promoted here - the places or the spaces of interaction, and what they represent, as it relates to blackness and people of color - is in the sense that focusing on visuality allows an understanding of a facet of the racialization process that composes space itself.