Unpacking Commoning Practices: Spaces of (Re-)Figuration in Queer Berlin

This article explores the (re-)figuration of the queer landscape in Berlin. Beginning with the role of the Schwules Museum (SMU) in Berlin as a space where queer subjectivities are both represented and contested, we broaden our perspective by drawing on interviews and round-table discussions with key members of Berlin’s LGBTQIA+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and asexual) community conducted in 2023 and 2024. We examine the tensions that have emerged over the past two decades between former gay and lesbian groups and increasingly pluralized subgroups within the queer community. Based on empirical materials, we demonstrate how spaces are refigured to maintain the openness of institutionalized queer spaces through volunteering and commoning practices, amid internal and external contestations. This case exemplifies the broader struggle faced by bottom-up, community-driven cultural institutions that have initiated permeable and flexible spaces for a growing queer community. At the same time, to establish their cultural, social and political institutionalization process, such institutions have created fixed, territorialized spaces – such as archives and museums – to assert their societal and political relevance over time. By shedding light on the (re-)figuration processes in the queer context of Berlin, we show how social relations both produce and contest new subjectivities, particularly through commoning practices. These refiguring dynamics create new agonistic tensions that we aim to unpack. While the museum seeks to provide a stable, safe space for queer identity and community building, its institutionalized stability often clashes with the fluidity of queer subjectivities, which resist fixed definitions.