Seguridad y Ambiente

To begin the chapter I turn to geographer Massey who best articulates an alternative way of understanding space that fits well with this research. Massey insists on the importance of engaging with space as a socio-political concept, especially when “space is on the agenda,” cited in writings from Berger through Jameson to Laclau and Foucault (“Politics” 65). At the center of discussion both inside and outside the discipline of geography, space has been mainly relegated to the fixed and the static and, along Foucault’s line of thought, “to the realm of the already- given” (Massey “Concepts” 17).18

In modernist discourses, Massey notes, the much-used term has been divided and tied down by ordered and distinctly bound places (“Politics” 66). Space is a discrete and motionless location, setting, site, spot—Pattaya is there, Canada is here, within this boundary on the map—and so there tends to be a sense of restrictedness and permanency to space. Massey goes on to summarize, and subsequently critique, Jameson and Laclau’s view of space, which decouples the concept from time and thus “deprives the spatial of any meaningful politics” (“Politics” 67). This conceptualization of space moves it to the realm of stasis, as a kind of closure, somehow operating as the backdrop to political action (Massey “Politics” 67). Time possesses a disruptive power associated with change, progress, and revolution, whereas space is considered the utter lack of movement, the “dimension without temporality (hence, the fixed and the dead)” (Massey “Concepts” 17; emphasis in original).

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What Massey’s theorizing does is rescue the spatial from its position as the negative dichotomous opposite of temporality (“Concepts” 17). To shake things up, Massey considers space, like time, as a living concept, a fluid and ever-changing entity that is dynamic and importantly, enables possibility (“Concepts” 17-8). Space is not simply a blank surface over which time happens, but instead has emergent powers that “can alter the future course of the very histories that have produced it” (Massey “Politics” 84). In fact, Massey insists on the

inseparability of space and time, by suggesting they jointly affect social phenomena and thus we might be better served by thinking in terms of space-time (“Politics” 84); namely, space flows together with time to shape present meaning and experience (Massey “Politics” 84). From there, Massey maps out other and new ways of thinking about spatiality; she offers a triad of

characteristics for a reconceptualisation of space that (1) is the product of relations; (2) allows for multiplicity and plurality; and (3) is always under construction (“Concepts” 17). I want to further unpack this reconceptualisation because it lays out a useful foundation from which to explore space in this research.

Central to Massey’s formulation is the emphasis on space as relational; that is, space is context-specific and hosts particular interactions between individuals (“For Space” 10-1). “Space,” Massey writes, “is a complexity of networks, links, exchanges, connections from the intimate level of our daily lives (think of spatial relations within the home for example) to the global level of financial corporations” (“Concepts” 16-7). In this way, spaces are more than physical surfaces, indeed they are “products of relation-between, relations which are necessarily embedded material practices” (Massey “For Space” 9). Space is therefore constantly being produced—in no fixed direction—through our actions and interactions (or refusal of interaction) with one another across social conditions, identities, differences, and histories (Massey

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“Concepts” 17). For Massey, space is constantly being made in its role as the ongoing product of relationships and exchanges (“Concepts” 18). Massey explains:

[Space] is always under construction [...] There are always relations which are still to be made, or unmade, or re-made. In this sense, space is a product of our on-going world. And in this sense it is also always open to the future. And, in consequence, it is always open also to the political. The production of space is a social and political task. If it is conceptualised in this manner, the dimension of space enters, necessarily, into the political (for if the future were not open there would be no possibility of changing it and thus no possibility of politics). (“Concepts” 17)

It follows that interactions or encounters in space are not neutral, but rather imbued with power relations that impact our movements through, and occupations of, space—what Massey calls ‘power-geometries’ (“Concepts” 19-20). As Massey suggests, power-geometries can be a tool used to draw attention to social inequalities but also “to imagine, and maybe to begin to build, more equal and democratic societies” (“Concepts” 19). As such, relational and ever-becoming space reminds us of our responsibilities to one another, and the challenges and pleasures of co- existing—Massey asks “how are we going to live together?” (“Concepts” 18); this question haunts the spaces of schooling where students and school professionals—with unique and varying needs, interests, opportunities, and abilities—are brushing up against each other.

In the final part of For Space, Massey writes about an imagining of space as “the simultaneity of stories so far” to capture its multiplicity, interconnectedness, and vitality as the here and now (142); to understand space as the simultaneity of peoples’ very different stories is not to equate space with narrative, but to recognize space as an intersection of trajectories, a kind of contact zone of unfinished and never closed stories. In conceiving of space in such a way, Massey is able to shift space from associations with stasis and closure to associations of

openness and possibility—indeed space establishes the possibility for a host of different stories to run alongside one another. For Massey, space is not fixed, space becomes. Space is created

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and being constantly recreated. Space changes depending on interactions in, and ownership of, space, and who moves in and through space. Spaces do things; and yet, to mark space as ‘safe’ implies its fixity and stillness—safe spaces are predictable and protected, right? Following Massey, however, there is no certainty to space; its fixity and/or stillness can never be

guaranteed because space is constantly fluctuating according to the bodies and time (context) with which it interacts (“Concepts” 16-7). Entering with this multiple, unstable, and always in flux sense of space allows this research to unsettle normative arrangements of space, and pose difficult questions such as what and who is valued? I also draw on Massey’s formulation to challenge the idea that space is a static surface upon which safety smoothly and evenly operates. To elaborate on this point, I bring in Butler’s ethics of vulnerability as a theoretical entryway for making sense of space as it relates to safeness and schooling.

The Butlerian ethics of vulnerability suggests that humans—embodied and necessarily orientated in the world—live in a general state of fragility and vulnerability (“Precarious Life” 147-8). We are affected by, and at the mercy of, others in all kinds of ways, even in our daily lives—with hospital visits, car accidents, school shootings, and wars (Butler “Precarious Life” 150; Stauffer “Interview”). As such, vulnerability lends itself to spatial analysis because it is the anchor to which we are all attached during our movements through, and encounters in, social space. What Butler’s theorizing illustrates is that we are products of particular spaces, which, as I have shown, are situated, contradictory, unpredictable, and messy, and so it follows that every person is always already a permeable and penetrable being (“Precarious Life” 145-6). Jen Gilbert agrees, and extends this dialogue in Sexuality in School: The Limits of Education to student life, underlining “the ordinary fragility of the LGBTQ subject [...] always already compromised” (xxv). Much of the education policy on safe space assumes that safe space can be fully realized.

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Does safe space rhetoric, then, rely on the vulnerability of certain individuals? Is safe space a constant working towards? These sorts of questions underscore my theoretical framework.

Our social world, as Butler indicates, is so quick to foreclose moments of vulnerability (i.e. grieving and loss) in favour of an alternative stance, which seeks to establish impermeability through control of the environment (“Precarious Life” 147; Stauffer “Interview”). As mentioned previously, efforts to foster safe space in schools—via security and control—arise out of a moral panic to ‘protect’ students who, perhaps, cannot be entirely protected, precisely because, along Butler’s line of thought, we are all always vulnerable (Butler “Precarious Life” 147; Short “Don’t Be So Gay!” 31); and, by extension, no amount of security and control of the school environment can make school spaces completely safe because space is imperfect—and thus penetrable—and, drawing on Massey, changeable and relational (“For Space” 10-1). I am of the same view as Butler who suggests that if we live from the standpoint of recognizing our shared vulnerability, by embracing our vulnerability to others and susceptibility to being wounded, then we may be better able to connect with and to support one another across differences (Stauffer “Interview”; Kelly “Module Six Part 1”). Above all, Butler’s ethics of vulnerability enables me to bring a fresh analysis to the phenomenon of safe space. In the subsequent parts of this chapter, I turn to geographies of sexualities and trans- geographies to further engage with space.