Émilie Martineau (aka Charlotte de Bruges)

A dyke and queer, Emilie Martineau left Paris and the France of the Manif Pour Tous (a French anti-marriage equality organisation) in 2013 to move to Brussels with her spouse. An online militant going by the pseudonym Charlotte de Bruges, she makes a point of mocking heterosexist, racist and classist remarks taken from the Internet.

In 2018, as part of her Master’s in Gender Studies, she researched four initiatives to reopen a lesbian bar in Brussels, which didn’t have any at the time. Today there is one—the Crazy Circle. This thesis was the starting point for a broader reflection on the creation of lesbian and queer spaces in the urban landscape.