As I first looked at the map of MSU and tried to think how I could “queerify” it, I came to the conclusion that it would be best to simply look at the map and think of unique characteristics of some of the places on campus. Certain buildings were the first things that stood out. Fee Hall, on the East side of campus contains a morgue, for example. This building, as it relates to embodiment, reverses the separation between live bodies and dead ones as students often walk by doctors in scrubs wheeling corpses if they happen to have a class in the building. This was one of the strongest examples of queer buildings on campus.
Other buildings I circled were Van Hoosen and Yakeley Halls, for being all-gril dorms; the IM sports buildings, for the strange aggressive vibe within them that results from people being places made for physical exertion; the MSU surplus store was circled because it sells things that are deemed to be no longer useful, and I thought this related to queerness in that it is a store that sells “rejections.” The incinerator was circled for the same reason, it utterly destroys whatever it is that the university decides to put in it. I circled the psychology building because the façade at its entrance displays carvings relating to physics and astronomy, and I believe that this incongruence between its name and its aesthetics is queer.
Buildings were not the only queer thing on campus, of course. There is a strange, abstract sculpture called “The Funambulist” which was recently put in behind Snyder Hall. This steel, black and red sculpture does not really fit in with the aesthetics of the collegiate brick dorms around it. As we discussed in class, many of the bridges around campus display graffiti, and this subversion makes them queer. A bit North of Brody Complex on campus is a teepee with an orange traffic cone in it that someone built in the woods. There are buildings on Michigan Ave. that have been unused since I was a freshman that are marked as “future redevelopment sites.” The ways in which all these structures exist, whether it has deviated from its original purpose and exists in limbo, or sticks out like a sore thumb among the structures around it, this abnormality makes them queer.
I titled my map after I marked it up. The title I came up with was “Concentrations of Queerness at MSU.” It fit because it related to the process by which I marked up my map, looking for spots on it that contained something that was unique, or didn’t fit in some way. These spots are concentrations of queerness, they have to be concentrated because they are queer due to the majority of “normalcy” that surrounds them.
-Ziev
I am going waaay back in commenting, sorry Ziev. I really had meant to do this earlier on in the course, but such is life.
ReplyDeleteI love that you bring up gyms in this post, because they're a really queer space to me. There's this really persistent air of "oh, everyone's looking at me" that happens at gyms when normally you wouldn't notice or mind that people might be paying attention to you. I'm not sure how to describe that. (Other than "awkward," I mean.) It's like people are hyper-aware of others' gazes, and we perform in particular ways as a result of that (e.g. I will admit to running at least a little faster than I normally do when I'm running at a gym/IM East as opposed to on a treadmill in my basement).
I also feel like the gym is not somewhere most people enjoy being, even if they're big on physical activity. Friends I run with get nervous because they assume people are judging them (interestingly, friends who, outside the gym, dress in ways that definitely attract attention, which doesn't bother them in the slightest). At the very least, plenty of people at a gym just want to get their time there over with. I think that counts as a queer space; somewhere probably half the people physically in the building would rather not be.
I think I'm exaggerating a little, as the IMs on campus have, say, racquetball, and that's a little more private. Maybe that's what bothers me about gyms; exercise involves the private space of one's body, but the exertion and use of this private space in public repositions it as more of a public space. There's probably a lot to be said about that last bit and team sports.