Erotic Care: A Queer Feminist Bathhouse and the Power of Attentive Action

Abstract

How do queer feminist communities create sustainable spaces where alternative practices and experiences flourish? The easy answer is there are activists with vision and energy. But is this all it takes? Elsewhere, I have explored the part radicalized economic and sexual dynamics play in creating new kinds of places (Cooper, 2008). Here, I want to take a different angle on the question. I want to consider the contribution care can make. Conceiving care, somewhat counter-intuitively, as ‘weighted attentive action’, I want to ask: how does it shape the dynamic development of a new, queer, feminist space? Specifically, I’m interested in how such attentive action generates switch points, sheaths, transfers and intensifications of power, understanding power as the social energy through which things happen. This doesn’t mean rejecting an analysis of power relations. However, focusing exclusively on relations risks disregarding power’s actual character or force. So, from a post-Foucauldian perspective that conceptualizes power as the generation of effects, I explore how effects are affected by attentive action within the social and material context of a women and trans bathhouse in Toronto — a place, which since 1998, has been dedicated to creating and expressing new, queer sexualities.

I am indebted to Achala Chandani Abeysekara and Sarah Lamble for their early research assistance, to the AHRC Research Centre for Law, Gender and Sexuality for financial support, to Chanelle Gallant, Loralee Gillis, Corie Hammers, Adrian Maria Prattas, Carlyle Jansen and my anonymous interviewees for discussing the bathhouse with me, and to Margaret Davies, Emily Grabham, Didi Herman, Jon Goldberg-Hiller and Antu Sorainen for comments on earlier versions of this chapter.