💖 Petitioning for More Third Spaces: Where We Exist, Resist, and Rebuild

 💖 Petitioning for More Third Spaces: Where We Exist, Resist, and Rebuild

📝 Words by someone who’s lifted heavy with Tamil music in her ears and felt seen in a queer theatre crowd

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🌈 “I’ve experienced gender euphoria at two of these four feminist third spaces — the gym and the trans theatre festival. The camaraderie, the cackling, the freedom to just be — I want more of this. I want this for everyone who’s been told to shrink.”

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🚪What Are Third Spaces — and Why Don’t We Have More?

Sociologist Edward Soja defines thirdspace as not just a location, but a living, breathing site of memory, resistance, and identity.

• First space: The measurable world — roads, rooms, real estate.

• Second space: Controlled by governments, urban planners, developers.

• Third space: Ours. Where we gather, feel safe, and feel seen.

But in India, queer people, women, and gender-diverse folks often don't access these third spaces.

Why? Because they weren’t made for us.

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⚙️ So What Does a Third Space Look Like?

✨ It looks like Ladies Club, Chennai, where women from 16 to 65 deadlift 125 kgs to the tune of romantic Tamil music. No mirrors. No scales. Just strength.

✨ It looks like the Dayamma Theatre Festival, where queer and trans people don’t have to whisper, censor, or translate — they perform, laugh, record dance, and breathe.

✨ It looks like a play by Aruvi, a trans teacher and actor, who stands on stage and narrates her pain and power using the language of Frankenstein and freedom.

✨ It looks like a Koodiyattam performance, where centuries of male-centered art are challenged by Kapila Venu playing a powerful, independent female lead.

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❗But Third Spaces Are Shrinking

📉 Cinema halls, tea shops, addas — once cultural lifelines — have become either commercialised, online, or hostile.

📉 Women and queer folk from marginalised communities are still told: "Only in the daytime. And only if you're quiet."

📉 A 2021 Ipsos survey shows 4 in 10 urban Indians report feeling lonely and friendless most of the time.

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🧠 New Vocabulary, Old Problems

🔍 Mankeeping:

The emotional labour women do to support men who've lost their social bonds.

🛑 It’s unpaid, unacknowledged, and exhausting.

🛑 We shouldn’t have to build the world and then shrink ourselves inside it.

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📚 Your Toolkit for Third Space Imagination

📘 Super Gay Poems by Stephanie Burt

“Visibility is not a threat. It is life. We won’t go back.”

🎭 Body/Boundaries by Aruvi, adapted from Susan Stryker

“The trans body as Frankenstein’s monster — not a horror, but a reawakening.”

💪 Ladies Club, Chennai

No weight loss talk. Just power. No judgment. Just sweat.

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📣 A CALL TO COSIGNERS

Let’s call for:

• 🏳️‍🌈 More inclusive, no-barrier entry events

• 🧠 Community-funded third spaces — gyms, libraries, cultural spots

• 🎤 Free performance venues for marginalised voices

• 📚 Grants for feminist and queer creators, curators, educators

Let’s build:

• 🪩 Rooms where gender euphoria is normal

• 🪑 Benches where no one gets stared at

• 🗣️ Addas where silence isn’t survival