Behind the bushes: queer sexual encounters in the liminal cruising spaces of Geneva

This article examines cruising parks and toilets in Geneva, Switzerland, conceptualizing these sites as double liminal spaces whose sexual potentials are often accessed through moments of spatial and sexual disorientation. Drawing on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork, the article shows that public cruising continues to shape how sexual encounters are experienced and negotiated within urban environments. Bringing scholarship on queer space and cruising into dialogue with literature on liminality, I argue that cruising sites function as layered liminal formations. They blur the public–private divide by enabling sexual practices conventionally associated with private space to occur in public, and they unsettle the heterosexual–homosexual binary by facilitating same-sex encounters that do not require stable identity claims. Building on this spatial analysis, the article advances a further argument: access to these liminal formations often depends on processes of disorientation. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s work on disorientation (2006), I show how drifting, lingering, and moments of spatial deviation allow familiar public spaces to become sexually legible, producing spontaneous encounters that emerge through affective and material relations rather than intentional pursuit. At the same time, the article examines how racialized imaginaries, respectability politics, and moral regulation shape who can comfortably inhabit liminality and disorientation, and who is rendered out of place, complicating celebratory accounts of queer space.