In Strangers to Ourselves, Julia Kristeva writes that a foreigner’s space is the train in movement. It is a place always going somewhere, always leaving somewhere else, never belonging. In transit, always becoming (1991:7)
In ‘Fragments for a Queer City’ from Pleasure Zones, David Bell quotes Henning Bech that a train station is the space for the queer, as somewhere that is a travel space, ‘of chronic transit from one place to another’ (97).
The similarities of these two comments is not coincidental. People both queer and foreign are outside of the normal, outside of the accepted, outside of the known. Spaces do have important meaning for people, in constituting an identity that is comfortable or not within a particular space, in allowing people to access the(ir) world through movement and physical connection. How does the body react?
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