Safe spaces that matter: Material semiotics, affective bodies and queer readings of clinical spaces in Winnipeg, Canada

Abstract

Communities that claim “2SLGBTQ+” (Two Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Queer plus) identities experience profound inequities within healthcare settings. In response, scholars and advocates have engaged in conversations about creating “safe space,” for them. These “safe spaces” are said to be produced through the display of objects such as pride flag stickers and queer inclusive posters, as well as through “queer friendly” staff trained to meet the healthcare needs associated with 2SLGBTQ ​+ ​people. Such literature, however, often underplays the dynamic heteronormative spacialities of the clinic, and in particular the ways in which gender and/or sexual nonconforming patients negotiate feelings of safety within unequal social fields that assemble an array of human and non-human actors that present in medical space. Drawing on a qualitative study with 42 people identifying as queer and lesbian women and non-binary people living in a mid-sized Canadian city, we employ material semiotics to think through the networked effects of human and non-human entanglements that participants narrate as “safe” or “unsafe.” We argue that current understandings of “safe space” flatten the complex and textured interactions and affective dispositions emergent between queer patients and the clinical environment, and develop the concept of safe spaces that matter – sites of complex bodily and spatial engagements which are highly productive in rendering multiple accounts of the body as either legible in its (hetero)normativity or pathological in its alterity and unreadability. As such, a more spatially embodied and contingent picture of “clinical care” comes into view which, we maintain, is necessary in creating spaces that are truly open to the multiplicity of nonconforming embodiments which present themselves daily in medical space.