Sex in placemaking activism: lesbians’ and queer women’s sex-based sociality in Sydney, Australia

Abstract

Following calls to engage more directly with the materiality of sex in geographies of sexualities, we draw on our overlapping research to explore how sexual desire and social intimacy were entangled in the emergence and consolidation of lesbians’ and queer women’s social spaces from the 1980s onwards in Sydney, Australia. Though largely applied in the context of understanding the formation of gay male communities, the concept of sex-based sociality offers a unique framework for examining the intersections between the practice of sex and the social formation of identities that are critical to placemaking activism. Yet, lesbians and queer women lacked the commercial infrastructure available to gay men that facilitated sex in social spaces, such as bars, bathhouses and nightclubs. Instead, women’s pursuit of sex took place within more mobile, ephemeral geographies but in which the production of social pleasure and sexual wellbeing were equally emphasised. Following sex within and across these mobile sites – and indeed, across our own research trajectories – we reveal how lesbians and queer women were attuned to the possibilities of sex-based sociality in such provisional geographies. Moreover, by tracing these mobilities and attunements over time, we offer a counterpoint to histories of sexual politics that have focussed on gay men’s experiences, and in doing so, provide critical correctives to the tendency to overlook women’s sexual experiences within placemaking activism.