This article written by Jean Makhlouta, a postdoctoral student at Géographie-cités and lecturer at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, aims to understand how sexual and gender minorities negotiate their presence in Beirut by appropriating the space-time of the car during their nighttime mobilities.
Drawing from ethnographic research, the study is based on semi-structured interviews and mobile participant observations conducted as part of a PhD dissertation on queer spatial strategies in Beirut.
Despite the significant social and legal constraints in Lebanon, the queer subjectivities and social interactions occurring within the car demonstrate the agency of this minority population in challenging established sexual and gender norms. This defiance is facilitated by a knowledge of the city’s urban structure that enables individuals to navigate and circumvent its restrictive spatialities. Given its ephemeral and dual spatio-temporal characteristics, encompassing both the interior and the exterior, the private and the public, the space-time of the mobile car evokes an “in-between-places” which provides a presence in the city while maintaining a certain degree of safety.
The in-between nature of the car thus offers a glimpse into a safe yet fluid space within urban space. Consequently, the in-between characteristics of the car suggest an access to the city through mobility, prompting a reconsideration of binary and static understandings of spaces, particularly those related to the concept of “safe spaces” within the geography of gender and sexualities.
