‘We’re in Asia’: Worlding LGBTQI+ activism otherwise in Sydney

Derek Ruez

doi:10.1177/0042098020966448

Abstract

Building on recent work in postcolonial urban studies that has developed more genuinely plural approaches to urban theorising, this article poses the problem of ‘worlding’ in relation to urban LGBTQI+ activism in Sydney, Australia. Specifically, the article examines how Sydney is variously worlded as or against ‘Asia’ in public debate around LGBTQI+ politics and in the imaginaries of activists living in Sydney. These worldings are shown to be an important aspect of queer activisms and urbanisms in Sydney, and I argue that attention to this worlding can productively complement a renewed focus on place and specificity in queer urban literatures. While imagining Sydney or Australia as part of Asia is itself no guarantee of productive politics or of decentring epistemologies, the article argues that some of these worldings do provide an occasion and a provocation to think elsewhere and otherwise in ways that are responsive to the specific character of White Australia’s colonial pasts and presents, while also generatively (dis)locating Sydney beyond the ‘West’.

Highlights

Urban studies scholarship has been transformed in recent years by engagements with southern, majority and postcolonial urbanisms (Derickson, 2015; Lawhon and Truelove, 2020; Robinson, 2006; Roy, 2009; Simone and Pieterse, 2017)
This article seeks to make explicit the potential connections between analyses of place specificity and worlding, and I argue that more attention to worlding, a multifaceted concept that is approached here through situated practices that imaginatively and materially relate some places, and times, to others, can shed important light on the places of urban LGBTQI+ activisms, wherever they occur, and contribute to intellectually productive practices of dislocation and provincialisation in queer urban studies
This conception of worlding is shaped by Said’s (1989: 218) writing on the ‘philosophical and imaginative processes at work in the production as well as the acquisition, subordination, and settlement of space’, and I focus on the geographical imaginaries that situate, relate and contextualise places as they emerge in political discourse of LGBTQI+ activisms in Sydney

Summary

Introduction

Urban studies scholarship has been transformed in recent years by engagements with southern, majority and postcolonial urbanisms (Derickson, 2015; Lawhon and Truelove, 2020; Robinson, 2006; Roy, 2009; Simone and Pieterse, 2017). This article relies on an understanding of worlding practices from Roy and Ong (2011) that foregrounds the ‘constitutive, spatializing, and signifying gestures that variously conjure up worlds beyond current conditions of urban living’ (Ong, 2011: 13) This conception of worlding is shaped by Said’s (1989: 218) writing on the ‘philosophical and imaginative processes at work in the production as well as the acquisition, subordination, and settlement of space’, and I focus on the geographical imaginaries that situate, relate and contextualise places as they emerge in political discourse of LGBTQI+ activisms in Sydney. This understanding of how Australia and Asia have been worlded as part of the colonial project, in Caluya’s account, becomes an opportunity to consider how other worlds might be constructed that, for example, call into question scholarly and political divisions between East and West Asia – divisions that often extend to diasporic communities in Australia – and open up the potential for decolonial solidarities between Asian and Indigenous Australians (see Perera, 2009)

Methods and analysis

Conclusion