Tuesday 12 January 2016

Skateboarding as a Liminal Space

I have spent most of my life in the boundary between the places whose rigid definitions I've failed to fit. It’s lonely growing up not knowing who or what you are. As you grow older you begin to unpick meanings and realise that the threshold is as much a real place as the ones either side of it. I began to accrete labels - dyke, lesbian, queer, trans, ace - and started meeting those fellow travellers in the void between the things society tells you are true, and it became less empty, but I’ve always existed between. The world refuses to make a space for me, so I made my own.

Skateboarding in its purest sense is one of these liminal spaces, balanced on a knife edge, trying to figure out whether it’s a sport or a calling. To those of us already living on the threshold between places, it offers the seductive ability to belong by not belonging - and no matter how corporate and sanctioned it becomes - it will, at some level, always speak to those of us looking for a way translate the spaces we exist in.


The simple act of seeing the potential for a spot - maybe doing any DIY that’s needed - creates the spot, carving out a space that is uniquely ours where before there was nothing. This is why that, no matter how toxic the masculinity that permeates the corporate skate world is, I’m drawn to skateboarding, because it reflects what it’s like to live in the world as a queer, non-binary grrrl. The space I have to be me, is the one I created in order to be me.

I doubt there will ever be a space for me in the corporate behemoth that skateboarding has become, I’m a non-man whose body is too queer for the men who built it and now run it, but I don’t care. I’ve found my space and you’ll never take it away from me.

*walks off humming the Firefly theme music*