Commoning through queer socialisation, sex and nudity: the case of the gay beaches of Attica, Greece

The presentationaims to explore the embodied practices of commoning, through a qualitative analysis of the ephemeral community, which forms in urban cruising areas. It uses the cases of nudist beaches in the suburbs of Athens, which during the summertime become the epicentre of urban cruising. We suggest that within the greek context -where the beach seems to be surrendered to tourism, family spare time or commercialised activities for young people- the naked bodies disrupt this normative standardisation and the intensifying privatisation and commodification of the beach as public space. The commons offer an alternative to state and private property and a frame of belonging through resources with nonexclusive rights of access. We argue that the beach, as a space with nonexclusive rights of access, is transformed by the naked bodies of men who engage in a plethora of intersectional encounters and practices and where desire, sexuality, conversation, queer socialisation, and body fluids co-exist in these temporary spaces of freedom. The body is our most intimate geography (Simonsen 2003) and in a world where bodies are always limited and controlled, these cruising beaches are places where the naked bodies produce a common, which in the words of Hardt and Negri (2009: 282) means that it “exists on a different plane from the private and the public, and is fundamentally autonomous to both”. Through qualitative interviews, the research aims to define the nudist/cruising beach as a place, which is shaped by the active entanglement of bodies and practices (Lefebvre 1991) and to map the different practices, from the large scale movement from the city to the beach, the stroll among the bodies, to the formations that allow socialisation, sexual encounters, the crossing of gazes or discussions through apps and reveal that cultural topography of commoning through co-existence and symbiosis.