ABSTRACT
Gay pride parades may queer streets, cities and nations, but not without a considerable amount of controversy. Part of the controversy is that ‘public’ opposition (and support) to this kind of activist/tourist event rests on an assumption that queer bodies should do ‘queer things’ in private spaces. Pride parades foreground the problematic – and sometimes eroticised – position of ‘private’ bodies in public places (see Johnston 1997). In this chapter I discuss the contested terrains of parades and argue that these embodied sites are contingent upon, and mediated through performative western hierarchical dualisms, such as mind/body, straight/queer, public/private. These binaries are central to western thought and have received much attention in geography (Berg 1994; Johnston 2005; Longhurst 1995, 2001a; McDowell 1991; Rose 1993b; Sayer 1989; Vaiou 1992).
