Deviant Space: Abjection, Failure, and Appropriation as Architectural Practice frames architecture as a fragile Symbolic construct, susceptible to appropriation, disruption, and reorientation by deviant bodies. Anchored in phenomenology and queer theory, it examines how spatial practices subvert architectural function, with particular focus on the tactics of men who have sex with men (MSM) in major North American cities during the AIDS epidemic.
The book offers a theoretical and contextual framework for reading architecture as both a mechanism of control and a site of resistance. Through the lenses of abjection and failure, borrowed from psychoanalytic and sociological theory, it outlines a methodology for analyzing spatial tactics like passing, outing, and flagging as examples of how deviant users navigate and respond to the built environment.
Its two-part structure—first philosophical, then historical—moves from broad, translatable phenomena to their tangible manifestations in context. The first offers architects and scholars of environmental design a reframing of the production of space, while the second offers theorists of phenomenology and queer studies new spatial dimensions for precedent theory. Deviant Space speaks to those invested in understanding architecture as mutable terrain: unstable, coded, and open to appropriation.
Table of Contents:
0. Trashcan Manifesto 1. Introduction 2. Thoughts on Abjection 3. Thoughts on Failure 4. Passing 5. Outing 6. Flagging 7. Bibliography
About the Author :
Adam Thibodeaux is an architect and educator whose teaching and research are centered on the uncovering, preservation, and reclamation of architecture that once sheltered populations marginalized by difference. His practice has focused primarily on buildings that once served as queer gathering spaces whose histories have been masked by a need to assimilate in urban conditions where they were once unwelcome. His work on this subject has included built works, public installations, writing, and grassroots activism. Adam is an NCARB-registered Architect and Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, holding a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Texas at Austin and a Post-Professional Master of Architecture from Yale University.
Review :
“Thoroughly researched and argued, Deviant Space forms an important consolidation and expansion of the body of thought on the relationship between difference, sex, identity, and place. Thibodeaux constructs a developed description of the queering of space through disuse and reuse, opening new possibilities for other body-based identities.”
Aaron Betsky, author of Queer Space and Building Sex.
