Architectures of ‘the Good Life’: Queer Assemblages and the Composition of Intimate Citizenship

Abstract

This paper examines how the practices and events of queer collectivity might encourage us to think differently about the relationship between sexuality, intimacy, and citizenship. Through the exposition and discussion of four ‘scenes’ based on ethnographic engagements with various LGBT collectives in Baltimore, MD, it attends to the visceral and more-than-human registers in which a fragile sense of community comes into being, subsequently developing an understanding of intimacy as a transversal sphere of mutual investment in which political and civic practices can be cultivated. This entails an analytical shift from understanding citizenship as a ‘practice of claims’ within a (supra)national legal framework to its conceptualization as a ‘practice of composition’, which brings into relief the civic nature of collective efforts towards the creation and maintenance of safe environments that foster marginalized expressions of sexuality, gender, and pleasure. These attempts to experiment with new forms of belonging and ‘the good life’ are animated by the intimate associations, practices, and events that traverse public and private space—times. Ultimately, then, it is argued that intimacy is itself a proper mode of citizenship, one of its ‘regimes of enunciation’ that is folded into many contiguous others, and that a concern for the composition of ‘civic intimacies’ productively augments and complicates established research on intimate/sexual citizenship.