An urgent and intimate meditation on what it means to feel—and to be—safe. 

In Safe Space, Raphaëlle Red traces the physiological toll of insecurity on marginalized lives across literature, film, music, and political discourse. In conversation with artists and thinkers such as James Baldwin, Nina Simone, June Jordan, Ja’Tovia Gary, and Leslie Feinberg, she maps the genealogy of “safe spaces,” from their radical origins to their contested place in today’s public debates. Rather than dismissing or defending the concept, Red asks what we might recover if we redefined safety not as fragility or withdrawal, but as self-determination, collective defense, and the right to opacity. She explores the tension between feeling and reality, protection and powerlessness, the language of safety, and the politics it sustains. Along the way, she grounds her reflections in personal narrative, European and North American contexts, and contemporary movements of resistance. At once theoretical and deeply personal, Safe Space refuses easy answers. Instead, it imagines safe space as temporary, regenerative, and insurgent—a practice of care and solidarity that unsettles hierarchies rather than reproducing them. A book for anyone wrestling with fear, vulnerability, and the fragile promise of collective liberation.

Raphaëlle Red, born in Paris in 1997 and raised in Berlin, is an author and researcher working across languages and disciplines. Trained in the social sciences in France before turning to literature, she writes in French, English, and German. Most recently, she taught and conducted research on contemporary literature of the African diaspora at Freie Universität Berlin. She is also the author of a novel in French.

1.Introductions
2.Constructing ‘Safety’: Meanings of Safety in Dominant Discourse
3.To Dance, To Speak, To Not Be Crazy: Some Genealogies
4.A State of Constant Alarm: On Bodily Stress and Role Play
5.Bad Rep: The Institutionalisation of Safe Spaces
6.Becoming a Menace: To Claim Safety as Accepting to Be Scared and Scary
7.Halfway Through Fall: On Danger, Love, and Making a Home Where You Have Inherited No Space
8.Plotting, Loving, Pondering: Towards Assessing Our Positions in, Rather than Identifying with, Space
9.Loving You to Safety: Epilogue
10.Works Cited