Fragmented and narrated scales: (dis)ordering queer world-making through rhythms, encounters and infrastructures in Slovenia and beyond

By exploring queer world-making primarily in Slovenia, a European semi-periphery, this thesis reconceptualises spatial scale. Instead of understanding scale as a hierarchical narrative device with which to order spatio-temporalities, I argue that scales flicker and are materially sensed; sometimes stabilised through everyday practices and sometimes disrupting order. The thesis brings scalar theory into conversation with queer geography, a sub-discipline that has tended to focus on specificities, such as places, individual mobility practices, human bodies. Critical engagements with scale as a sensed materiality in queer geography has been limited. This thesis makes three interventions: it pragmatically approaches scales as both an ordering and disordering queer world-making force, overcoming its conventional use as a stable analytical frame. Second, the thesis develops an analytical triad: rhythms, encounters, and infrastructures, through which scales are produced and experienced. Third, the ethnographically informed theorisation happens with the semi-periphery: a small, post-socialist, polycentric context between East and West foregrounds hybrid scalar constellations. By engaging with over a year of ethnographic work, the analysis approaches three interrelated scales. Hometown scale (as a mutation of the local) materialises through rhythms that travel with queer subjects from smaller towns to the city, which is not imagined at the urban, but hometown scale. The urban scale is not tied to the city as a place but instead happens when mobility lines intersect in knots and encounters, temporary suspending a fixed sense of self, escaping durable rhythms. National and international scales are (re)produced through infrastructure that reveal uneven geopolitical dynamics, a sense of Western infrastructural superiority, and Slovenian and post-Yugoslav sense of inferiority. The post-Yugoslav region and scales are sometimes leveraged for alternative queer world-making, coordinating and affording rhythms and encounters. Methodologically, this thesis utilises a fragmented approach informed by neurodiverse modes of perception, which enables feeling and sensing scale through fragments.