Caring for Sex and the Power of Attentive Action: Governance, Drama, and Conflict in Building a Queer Feminist Bathhouse

Abstract

Abstract This article considers the deployment of care as a modality of power that works to augment and sustain the autonomy of a counterhegemonic space. Focusing on a women’s bathhouse, a space intended for casual, experimental sex, the article maps the exercise of care—reframed nonnormatively, and thus in contrast to the prevailing approach in feminist care ethics—as weighted attentiveness. Care’s power is manifested in various ways within a bathhouse site. This article focuses on organizers’ governmental exercise of care in pursuit of an alternative sexual democracy and public, and on the civil interactions of participants that both mirrored and contested the bathhouse project. It argues that the dynamic interaction between governmental and civil deployments of weighted attentiveness exemplifies care’s power in establishing not only the distinctiveness but also the heterogeneous and evolving character of an otherwise marginal site.