To whom does cruising belong?

On Wednesday, 10 July, as a part of SpaceID Madrid program at Casino de la Reina I facilitated a workshop on cruising. My claim was that cruising as an everyday practice between men having sex with men is a spacial practice that gives a queer identity to public spaces where it is practised – cruising parks and beaches. Thus these spaces become places of communal discourse on sexuality where rules and codes are negotiated between the practitioners of cruising. Such sexuality is formed outside the political, religious and market systems so it becomes critical to the dominant forms of sexuality. This position makes the practice a queer practice. However, interest of workshop participants with bodies of different sexual and gender identities into cruising practices opened the question to whom cruising belongs, how open and inclusive it is. Challenging cruising as a practice exclusively for biologically male bodies the group of different bodies went to cruising area at Casa del Campo (and the day after to El Retiro) to explore other possibilities of the practice. Personal and intimate reflections from different points of view on cruising are coming soon on queerANarchive.