Staging dyke cruising encounters in 1980s and 1990s London

This article examines how dykes in London in the 1980s and 1990s conceived of cruising practices and erotic subjectivity in and through public spaces. It employs the notion of counterpublic to explore dyke cruising, both as a practice and as staged fantasies in the photographs of artists Tessa Boffin, Jill Posener, Ingrid Pollard, and Del LaGrace Volcano. The article examines why cruising – the search for intimacy, sex and belonging in public and a mode of producing space – became important to London dykes at this particular moment, when references to cruising appear in multiple lesbian anthologies, magazines and, more broadly, in visual culture. The photographs analysed here open a discussion about how different forms of public space (hypervisible, secluded, generic and semi-public spaces) impact on erotic desire. They illustrate that to intervene in public spaces, for example, around London landmarks and urban cemeteries, also involves intervening in the popular historical narratives of these sites. Counterpublics emerge here not only through the practice of cruising, but also by experimenting with popular historical narratives (by reimagining the tourist guide, statues and monuments and memory of the dead). The article argues that these experiments with history and fantasy contextualise cruising without overemphasising its liberatory potential. By creating a link between fantasy and reality, the staged encounters explore how we come to know and be a part of different types of public space. They also raise the question of what makes an imaginary, sexual or political, possible in a particular historical moment.