NON-PEER-REVIEWED
https://doi.org/10.51897/interalia/USCY5413
Fragments of a Cuir Cartography
Luis Barraza Cárdenas
Abstract
Fragments of a Cuir Cartography is a hybrid of theory and embodied narrative, exploring how cuir bodies move through, resist, and reconfigure space. This text fractures and rewrites the map—offering a dérive through memory, cities, and architectures of surveillance that shape cuir existence. By examining embodied geographies, it reveals how the closet operates not just as metaphor but as a spatial infrastructure of control, a system that dictates who moves freely, who must justify their presence, and where desire is allowed to exist. It interrogates how cuir bodies navigate the interstices of the city, from locker rooms and darkrooms to digital spaces and neon-lit streets, inhabiting the threshold between visibility and disappearance. This work engages with critical theories of power, space, and queer embodiment, using them not just as references but as tools for dismantling the normative grammars of urbanism, mobility, and desire. It moves beyond categorization, embracing fragments, contradictions, and the tension between resistance and surrender—challenging the idea that cuir existence must always be either legible or oppositional. If traditional cartography seeks to fix territory, this essay shatters it. If theory seeks to contain desire, here, desire overflows theory. There is no map for what comes next—only scars as coordinates of survival. Cuir is not a place, nor a body, but a movement, a glitch, a way—multiple ways—of moving through the world.
Keywords: queer space, queer phenomenology, theory-fiction, spatial politics, queer embodiment
