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Paper short abstract

The memory of past urban spaces offers insight into how polarisation is spatially assembled and de-assembled. This paper considers how queer desire enabled transgressions of polarised urban space during the Northern Ireland Conflict amid ethnonational and state violence.

Paper long abstract

Urban space during the Northern Ireland Conflict, otherwise known as the Troubles, was characterised by (para)militant and ethnonational segregation, and state securitisation, hindering mobility and reproducing violence. Urban segregation in the Northern Irish context was premised on inherited psychic geographies of safety and danger, constituting a cityscape polarised through territoriality, danger, and risk. This paper explores how queer desire facilitated the subversion of ethnonational boundaries through the mobilisation of material and discursive spatial practices. How this spatial polarisation was traversed through queer desire is traced, drawing on ethnographic data composed of 45 life story interviews with individuals who experienced same-sex desire during the period of the Northern Ireland Conflict, from the late 1960s to the early 2000s. Participants describe creative strategies of seeking out queer desire in cities, Belfast and Derry, that traverse segregation, yet also mobilise infrastructures of violence to facilitate queer experience. These mobilities both challenge and repurpose systems of polarisation in an otherwise fractured urban contexts. How participants recall these spatial practices indicates queer desire is temporally and spatially positioned through its relationship to the assembling and de-assembling of conflict and resolution in urban contexts. Consequently, the relationship between transgression, spatial practice, and polarisation produces assemblages of queer being and becoming, and illustrates that the malleability of polarisation is contingent on the capacity to subvert it.