A queer autoethnography through epiphanies in/of/from ruin

This article asks how the lived memory of a queer body can reshape what we know about ruins and spatial justice. The article stages theory through embodied scenes, to trace how exclusion and small acts of refusal unfold in everyday spatial practices. I argue that spatial justice emerges in cracks and gestures, and that personal disorientation can be a source of knowledge. Here, I queer autoethnography with a methodology I call ruinous autoethnography; writing that emerges from ruin as its ontological condition. I develop this by using mnemohistory and autotheory to stitch life and theory, and by treating images and their absences as sites of inquiry (engaged ekphrasis v.2). Together, these moves offer a toolkit for reading spatial justice through the memory of queer bodies and ruins. Drawing on theory-stitched life-texts and epiphanies from Fikirtepe (Istanbul/Turkiye) and Volissos (Chios/Greece), I show how memory, space and body meet in moments of epiphany and make space thinkable anew. From these encounters I propose three spatio-temporal concepts -outlined conceptually, but left implicit in the epiphanies-: mnemonic space (a swinging door within the present that opens to what has been), epimnemonic projection (collisions where once-was spaces re-form the happening), and epiphenomenal space (a queer in-between that is temporally entangled)