Mobile Places, Relational Spaces: Conceptualizing Change in Sydney's LGBTQ Neighborhoods

Abstract

Since the 1950s neighborhoods associated with lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) subjects and communities have become part of the urban landscape in many cities of the Global North. In Australia this is evident in Sydney, where particular inner-city suburbs are bracketed with ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’, and ‘queer’ sexualities. These sexual-spatial relations are multiple and changing, with current fears about the decline of ‘traditional’ gay village spaces coinciding with the emergence of alternative LGBTQ neighborhoods. This paper reinterprets these transformations, departing from notions of the ‘demise’ of gay spaces, (re)conceptualizing Sydney's LGBTQ neighborhoods as mobile and relational moorings that are not fixed and immutable but repeatedly reconstructed and regrounded from flows of people, knowledge, and capital. Moreover, such mobile practices and representations connect places, symbolically and materially constructing them in relation to each other. Consequently, rather than reading through narratives of ‘demise’ and ‘emergence’, we suggest Sydney's LGBTQ landscapes are embedded in, and (re)constituted through, a ‘politics of mobility’. We examine the physical displacement, representations of mobility, and embodied mobile practices underpinning these changes in inner-city Sydney. In doing so, our purpose is to make conceptual and practical connections between the significance of ‘place making’ and ‘mobility’ to LGBTQ lives, communities, and politics. This discussion encourages geographers of sexualities to consider the multiplicity of LGBTQ mobilities, and equally prompts mobilities scholars to be cognizant of sexual and gender politics in processes and outcomes of mobilities.