Safety Framing: How LGBTQ+ Southerners Define Social Space as Safe or Unsafe

Based on life history interviews with 45 LGBTQ+ Southerners, I explore how LGBTQ+ people partake in a process I call safety framing, which I define as the process of using emotions to define social spaces (such as the home, the workplace, school, church) as safe or unsafe. Using an interactionist approach, I conceptualize how LGBTQ+ individuals use four emotion-based subprocesses of situational recollection, assessing in the moment, relativizing spatial safety, and reassessing safety frames to create schemas of social spaces as safe or unsafe for LGBTQ+ individuals. This analysis makes empirical contributions to how LGBTQ+ people perceive social spaces as affirming or hostile, and theoretical contributions to how LGBTQ+ individuals create geographies of safety using emotion-based frames of space.