hal-05601947 Lesbotopia : A Conceptual Proposition for a Feminist Geography of Lesbian Spatialities

This working paper introduces lesbotopia as a conceptual tool for analysing the production of lesbian and queer spatialities. Drawing on immersive ethnographic fieldwork conducted since 2022 at the QueerRanch Festival in Skala Eresos (Lesbos, Greece) — combining participant observation, field notebooks, and semi-structured interviews — lesbotopia designates a spatial, corporeal, and political assemblage in which the lesbian/queer subject experiences a shift in the normative centre of gravity of the space: the phenomenological threshold at which queerness ceases to be the deviation and becomes the organising principle. The paper provides a critical engagement with Foucault's six principles of heterotopia, identifying four structural limitations (gender blindness, heteronormative resonance, configurationist bias, disembodiment). It constructs lesbotopia on three theoretical pillars — territorialisation (Deleuze and Guattari), situated queer utopia (Muñoz), and queer phenomenology (Ahmed) — and deploys four original conceptual operators: the lesbian spatial trajectory, the infrastructure of friendship, the suspension of hypervigilance, and lesbotopian temporality. A systematic review of the literature on lesbian geographies confirms that the six conceptual propositions developed here are original contributions not pre-empted in existing scholarship. This paper constitutes the first systematic English-language formulation of lesbotopia, building on a communication at the Colloque Solidarités Lesbo-Queers (Montréal, March 2026).