Coexistence and vigilance: cruising and production of public space

We deal here with how public space publicity is produced and understood, and how such production and understanding have a normative and performative impact on the users of that space. The approach we have chosen intends to co-ordinate these aspects with the help of the ethnographies that have been carried out in recent times on cruising, as this activity, which implies a furtive appropriation of certain public spaces for the development of anonymous sexual activities among men, offers a privileged observatory of the gap between public space as a performative device and agents, which are not always merely molded by such devices. We find in this practice an optimal window for the analysis of the way in which the public and the private are construed spatially and conceptually in the dialectic between moral frameworks and subjective practices.