Queer Commoning: Embodied Cartographies and Spatial Politics in the Urban South

This paper conceptualizes voguing as an embodied modality of queer commoning and spatial resistance that unsettles dominant urban epistemologies rooted in heteronormativity, racial capitalism, and coloniality. Originating within Afro-Latinx ballroom culture, voguing is theorized here not solely as performative expression, but as a corporeal technology of place-making and insurgent visibility. Drawing on ethnographic research and performative observation conducted in Naples, the study engages voguing as a subversive spatial tactic that engenders counter-hegemonic urban imaginaries from the Souths—understood both cartographically and epistemologically. The analysis mobilizes feminist and queer geographies, postcolonial urban studies, and critical theories of the body to examine how voguing acts as a situated form of resistance. In doing so, it foregrounds the genealogies of queer commoning and positions commoning as a process of relational subjectivation, where embodied and collective practices co-produce space and identity beyond normative frameworks. Building upon Marlon M. Bailey’s theorization of ballroom culture as a “spatial practice of possibility” and Halberstam’s notion of queer temporality, the paper conceptualizes theatres, ballrooms, and temporary spaces as practices of commoning— transient infrastructures of kinship and publicness. Cultural texts such as Paris Is Burning, POSE, and Kokomo City are mobilized as visual archives of affective resistance, documenting the spatial agency of bodies that challenge exclusionary urban grammars. Key to this inquiry are the concepts of nomadic subjectivity, cuerpo-territorio, and queer commoning, which inform an understanding of voguing as a form of embodied cartography—through which urban space is queered, inhabited, and re-signified. This perspective emphasizes situated knowledges and embodied practices as political modes of spatial production, drawing directly from the observation of voguing as both performance and spatial resistance. Voguing, as analyzed here, enacts a redefinition of public space through the body, articulating a practice of resistance and agency grounded in corporeality and affect. The city emerges as a cyborg ecology of friction and multiplicity, in which corporeal insurgencies constitute vital geographies. By foregrounding embodied and relational spatial practices, this paper contributes to ongoing efforts to decenter urban theory, proposing a transfeminist and decolonial geographic framework attentive to the micropolitics of visibility, movement, and affective spatial production in the urban Souths.