Dr. David Tenorio

Queer Nightscapes: Sensorial Engagements and Intimacy in the Dark

I consider how the shifts and moves of queer cruising inside Mexico City’s subway infrastructures assemble what I call choreographies of touch, expressly, a set of unscripted, unrehearsed and improvised set of playful cues making bodies, feelings, and places stick together to circumvent a neoliberal logic of efficient re/production, as well as a Euro-American sexual paradigm of queer- and transness. By indexing sensorial modes of queer play, I engage with Maya Goded’s documentary Plaza de la Soledad (Plaza of Solitude, 2016), to trace the affective encounters taking place during and after nighttime. While attending to how queer encounters shape the formation of underground spaces vividly portrayed by the camera, I trace the varied forms of intimacy in the dark, that is, underground zones of queer contact existing

out of touch with the neoliberal logics of hetero- and homonormativity. Hidden within the dark contours of a marginal cityscape, feelings of love, care, loss, and hope emerge from the everynight encounters between queer women and urban infrastructures. And lastly, by engaging a playful method of queer analysis, I situate a transfeminist praxis embedded in popular, working-class, and ordinary forms of queer/trans contact, shaping ambiences, or what I refer to as queer nightscapes, to sense nightlife otherwise amid the global flows of neoliberal capitalism not only in Mexico, but also in contexts where economic violence has restricted access to spaces of fun, play, and pleasure.