“I had my first date with my boyfriend here. Our first common interest was yellow Gatorade. He makes me love this school more than anything in the world.”

“I was gendered correctly for the first time ever here.”

“you're not alone-- there's more of us here than you think.”

Each of these messages were left as pinned remarks on Queering The Map, a community-generated digital archive that maps queer experiences onto physical places. Every anonymous note extends our understanding of what Lefebvre calls “lived spaces” (1991). According to Lefebvre, social spaces are categorized as a triad: conceived, perceived, and lived spaces. Conceived spaces, also known as representations of space, are abstractly conceptualized by individuals. We may think of conceived spaces as the description of a space to a broader audience, for example, through an online description of the space on a public website. Comparatively, perceived spaces are thought to be the “space of spatial practice”, or “where movement and interaction take place”. Perceived spaces might be thought of as how individuals are more routinely using the space. Finally, the last piece of the triad is the lived space, which is the “unconscious, non-verbal direct relation of humans to space”, or representational space. In reviewing Queering the Map, these lived spaces represent stories of hope, fear, love, and violence as experienced by the users of the website. In the posts I selected, these messages were left around my university campus – a place that was once conceived as a public institution of higher learning, and is perceived as a place for learning, community building, and “cult-like” traditions. These messages also show the lived experiences of students finding love, acceptance, and familiarity in their queer identities. 

While every space can be analysed through these different dimensions, I argue that this archive makes visible the queer rhetorical hauntings of each place. In her 2021 article, Miriam L. Fernandez argues that rhetorical haunting is an “action, one that incorporates communal practices of knowledge-conserving and knowledge-transmitting”. She blurs the lines between the haunted and haunter, by claiming that the individuals who experienced trauma can “transmit memories…onto the public sphere in a quest for change and justice”. The practice of recalling memories lends itself to knowledge conservation, while the “haunting back” becomes a form of knowledge transmission. There are two defining characteristics of rhetorical haunting: critical memory and embodied memory. Critical memory is defined as the “purposeful recollection of past events or people with the intent of challenging dominant institutions that suppress the histories of marginalized groups”. While embodied memory favors embodied knowledge over recorded or archived information. These two forms of memory come together in an effort to give marginalized communities an opportunity to “transmit their hauntings…onto those institutions of power that attempt to bury the past”.

Too often, representations of queer individuals will heavily focus on the violence they have endured, with fewer stories highlighting queer domesticity, joy, and potentiality (Beck, 2021). These stories are typically also created by individuals who do not identify as queer or being within the broader LGBTQIA+ community (Beck, 2014). And when they are, they might lack other marginalized identities. For these reasons, there has been a greater push from within the broader queer community for diverse queer voices and storytelling (Cram, 2019). While there is fear in making a private identity more public, there are moments where crossing that threshold becomes increasingly more salient. As anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation and sentiment become more common nationwide, growing visibility of queerness can help create safety for others to come out and reclaim their own identity. However, each individual is tasked with deciding whether they are safe enough to do so.

Queering the Map allows queer individuals to share their stories in a way that is simultaneously both public and private, providing assurance to users that queer community exists in each place, even if members are less open about their identity as a form of protection. They are still able to connect and commiserate through these anonymous posts and share their experiences with others.

References

About. (2026). Queering the Map. https://www.queeringthemap.com/

Beck, S. L. (2021). “Doing It” in the Kitchen: Rhetorical Field Methods, Arts/Practice-Based 

Research, and Queer Archives. Cultural Studies↔ Critical Methodologies, 21(1), 16-26.

Beck, S. L. (2014). Reel Queer: Emergent Discourses and Contexts of Queer Youth Identity

Constructions and Experiences in Digital Video Projects.

Fernandez, M. L. (2021). La Llorona and Rhetorical Haunting in Mexico’s Public Sphere. 

Journal for the History of Rhetoric (Taylor & Francis Ltd), 24(1), 54–68. https://doi.org/10.1080/26878003.2021.1881310

Lefebvre, H. (1992). The production of space. Wiley.