Slut Politics in Queer Spaces: Slut Shaming and Solidarity in U of I's Queer Culture

This ethnographic project investigates how the comfort zones at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's LGBT Resource Center (aka "the Center") and at Thursgays (Murphy's Pub on Thursday nights) are able to exist precisely because of this diverse exclusivity. While the Center in particular is promoted by staff, students, and the university administration as an inclusive and diverse space, many of those that frequent the Center or the ostensibly queer-friendly Thursgays "notice the exclusivity," to use one participant's words. I argue that these comfort zones are enabled by the privileging of a "Queer-First" subjectivity that all people with queer desires supposedly embody, and that this spatial privileging of a normative subject fosters a segregated comfort zone hostile to those that fail to fully invest in Queer-First subjectivity.unpublishednot peer reviewe