Cartographies of Desire: Mapping Queer Space in the Fiction of Samuel Delany and Darieck Scott

Abstract

Applying his knowledge of urban planning to the field of cultural theory, HaitianAmerican architect-artist Jean-Ulrick Desert invokes the concept of “queer space” in order to describe the complicated (yet valuable) nature of actual gay and lesbian communities and neighborhoods; these locations, he contends, simultaneously engage and transgress the social, architectural, and juridical meanings attributed to the areas that they occupy by means of the subversive bodies that collectively inhabit and pass through them. He goes on to characterize this concept in these terms: “queer space is in large part the function of wishful thinking or desires that become solidified: a seduction of the reading space where queerness, at a few brief points and for some fleeting moments, dominates the (heterocentric) norm, the dominant social narrative of the landscape” (21, emphasis added). 1 The term “queer space” is most often employed as a way to discuss and analyze the precarious positioning of gay, lesbian, and transgender social spaces and the politics of gentrification in regard to these locations. 2 However, I believe that Desert’s formulation reveals the potential of the lens of “queer space” to exceed its strictly geographical or architectural valence and provide a framework for theoretical and formal analysis within literary studies. In this paper, I use this theorizing of residential and social districts such as Greenwich Village in New York City, the Castro in San Francisco, or Dupont Circle in Washington, DC, as a conceptual framework to analyze the engagement and redefinition of public space in Samuel Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984) and Darieck Scott’s Traitor to the Race (1995). In other words, I use an idea developed by geographers and social commentators to elucidate thematic and formal choices made by novelists. My argument is not that the actual physical spaces function as the literary texts do, but rather that the framework used to describe and document these districts also has value for the analysis of art. I contend that these novels provide effective cartographies of desire that generate “queer space” within the generic parameters of the novel. In addition to exploring the affective dimensions and implications of the enacted queer spaces within the novels, my analysis will demonstrate (or map) how the impulses toward and attention to the “placemaking practices” that characterize queer space get reinterpreted and transmogrified into innovative aesthetic methodologies. 3