The paper is based on a study of the residential trajectory and current living situation of Val*, a 47-year-old cis lesbian woman who renovated a small farmhouse she bought in a state of ruin in a hamlet in the French Pyrenees. She settled after spending much of her life as a nomad, working as a sex worker and anarchist-feminist activist. Beyond being her domestic space, La Liura* is a tavern and an anarchist-feminist library open once or twice a week, where she offers meals at a pay-what-you-can, made from produce from her garden, as well as hosting concerts and meetings for LGBTI+ collectives and organizations.
While queer geography has extensively studied the city as a privileged space for queer emancipation (Chauncey, 1994)—both for the anonymity it provides and for its capacity to host spaces for LGBTI+ socialization, publicity, and politicization through businesses, associations, and pride marches – research focusing on rural areas often concentrates either on urban/rural mobility (Annes and Redlin, 2012), or on returning to the land and spaces of refuge (Sandilands, 2002), or more recently on marches and festivals (Lockett and Lewis, 2022). The hypothesis of this paper is that in rural areas, LGBTI+ social movements are partly publicized within the domestic sphere, thereby subverting the norms of binary distinctions between the private and the public, while at the same time challenging the categories of repertoires of action in the sociology of social movements.
The analysis will first be based on Val's life story, providing insight into how her residential trajectories and queer-feminist community socialization influenced her decision to live in this territory and how she constructs and inhabits the Liura space. This study will be conducted in dialogue with ethnographic work within La Liura and other community spaces in the area. The aim will be both to study the practices that make it possible to interweave the public and private spheres, and to understand how this place contributes to the construction of a policy of “queer rurality”, or “queer commoning” in this region, by bringing together people from a particularly broad spectrum of political views and identities.
