Geographies Of Sexualities Research Articles

Geographies of gender and sexuality II: Charting scholarship on health

Health has become a key focus for scholarship within the geographies of gender and sexualities. This progress report offers a schematic overview of the multiple ways in which the study of health (and especially disease and the lack of good health) has been studied in relation to such geographies. It explores the multiple ways in which an understanding of place has been operationalised, considers the potential importance still for large-scale quantitative studies, and highlights the importance of studies of health for broader debates and interests within the discipline. This progress report then concludes with some questions for future scholarship.

Almost 30 years later, silence is still here with us: introduction of the themed issue

Since the milestone publication of Mapping Desire in 1995, geographies of sexualities have found increasing legitimacy and visibility through, among others, publications, conferences and the successful careers of some scholars in the field. However, the materiality of sex and bodies remains overlooked, this making Jon Binnie’s critique (e.g. 1997) of the squeamishness of academic knowledge still timely and relevant. By reflecting on the limitations of current geographies of sexualities scholarship, in this introduction we present the aims, contents and contributions of the themed issue as a whole and the different papers composing it. We conclude by acknowledging that the ‘dirty work’ of sex research cannot be left to individuals (often occupying marginalized positions) but requires a collective effort from the entire human geography academic community.

Pivoting toward solidarity: Black studies, Black feminism, and performance in geographical scholarship on sexuality

In this commentary on Andrew Tucker's ( 2023 ) article, ‘A Sexuality Pivot,’ I discuss both the exciting possibilities and some caveats to consider as we engage critically in solidarity-oriented research. In the main, I am interested in what kinds of considerations we as researchers must engage if we are to effectively pivot toward solidarity. Here, I engage the rich history of solidarity from Abolitionist and Black feminist traditions to think through how contributions from Black studies, expansively defined, might enrich the conversation on solidarity as a research method. In particular, I examine the fruitful possibilities drawn from D. Soyini Madison, Audre Lorde, and the strategy of witnessing (developed from Frederick Douglass by way of Dwight Conquergood) as a way of thinking through contemporary solidaristic scholarship on the geographies of sexuality.

Geographies of queer economies

AbstractThis paper provides a critical overview of research in geography that has explored the economic lives of Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ+) individuals. I begin by considering how the consumption and production of mainstream commercial gaybourhoods is the primary approach through which geographies of sexuality, and queer geographies have engaged with economy. I then examine the ways in which digital spaces have blurred the boundaries of consumption and production, arguing that digital spaces are indicative of the much broader range of economic actions in which LGBTQ+ people take part. Finally, I turn to Gibson‐Graham's ‘diverse economies’, suggesting that this concept can attend to the existence of numerous multi‐scalar and overlapping queer economies. Developing a queer economies research agenda is crucial to turn attention beyond consumption and production in a narrow range of gaybourhoods, and to better portray the lives of those frequently excluded from mainstream commercial LGBTQ+ economies.

“It’s Just How Things Are Done”: Social Ecologies of Sexual Violence in Humanitarian Aid

Abstract Increasing research on the humanitarian sector examines how its organizational cultures affect both aid outcomes and humanitarian workers’ private lives. The #MeToo movement and several public scandals have brought to light patterns of sexual violence in crisis zones perpetrated by humanitarian aid workers; surveys suggest rates of sexual assault within the humanitarian community comparable to, if not higher than, those on US college campuses. How do the conditions that produce sexual violence persist in a sector governed by strong, mission-centric principles, professional codes of conduct, and oversight? This article uses participant observation in Iraq and Uganda, in-depth interviews, and textural analysis to examine the social origins of sexual violence in humanitarian communities. It builds on studies of aid organizations to argue that the humanitarian sector operates similarly to a “total institution” (Goffman 1961). Then, it draws upon recent work on sexual violence to demonstrate how within-sector social ecologies and informal socialization practices create the conditions of possibility for sexual violence. It identifies two key factors that constitute the emergency aid world—sexual scripts and projects, and sector-specific sexual geographies—and argues that they produce conditions that facilitate sexual violence while labeling them “just how things are done.”

Lesbutantes, Guerilla Queers, and Dyke Nights: Transgressing Heteronormative Borders and the Folklore of Queer Resistance

Abstract: Recent publications have lamented the death of lesbian bars and the absence of distinct urban gayborhoods. The Lesbian Bar Project points out that there are just fifteen lesbian bars left in the United States as of 2021. The rise of social-sexual mobile applications, the impact of gentrification, and a cultural shift in attitudes surrounding acceptance have all contributed to the decline of dedicated lesbian spaces. Comparing the popularity and availability of mobile applications and social-sexual outlets for gay men, such as Grindr, with those designed for queer women—as well as new and unique queer pop-up events, social media forums, and networking opportunities—reveals the ways queer women are subverting authority, resisting changes, and disrupting space through shared practices and experiences. New opportunities and sites for queer spatial resistance have emerged and mobile applications like Meetup facilitate the literal takeover of popular urban spaces. Though technology may have reterritorialized certain sexual geographies for the lesbian community, this essay shows how queer practices are now informing place in ways that assert a queer spatial justice.

Lesbutantes, Guerilla Queers, and Dyke Nights: Transgressing Heteronormative Borders and the Folklore of Queer Resistance

Abstract: Recent publications have lamented the death of lesbian bars and the absence of distinct urban gayborhoods. The Lesbian Bar Project points out that there are just fifteen lesbian bars left in the United States as of 2021. The rise of social-sexual mobile applications, the impact of gentrification, and a cultural shift in attitudes surrounding acceptance have all contributed to the decline of dedicated lesbian spaces. Comparing the popularity and availability of mobile applications and social-sexual outlets for gay men, such as Grindr, with those designed for queer women—as well as new and unique queer pop-up events, social media forums, and networking opportunities—reveals the ways queer women are subverting authority, resisting changes, and disrupting space through shared practices and experiences. New opportunities and sites for queer spatial resistance have emerged and mobile applications like Meetup facilitate the literal takeover of popular urban spaces. Though technology may have reterritorialized certain sexual geographies for the lesbian community, this essay shows how queer practices are now informing place in ways that assert a queer spatial justice.

Glenway Wescott's Narratives of Queer Drift

This essay argues that Glenway Wescott — an American author widely read in the early twentieth century but virtually unknown to literary scholars today — poses a problem for many of the narratives we tell ourselves about both queer identity and modernist literary history. On the one hand, the wandering, nonlinear plots of much of his fiction run counter to the narratives of urban migration, rural stasis, and ex-urban return that shape most scholarship on sexual geography. On the other, Wescott's tendency to borrow aesthetic practices from a wide range of literary schools and movements makes it difficult to locate him within the narrative of American literary history. Reading Wescott's writings — particularly those in his short story collection Good-Bye Wisconsin (1928) — as examples of what the essay terms queer drift, the author argues that Wescott's life and corpus destabilize the narratives we often use to make sense of both modern sexual identity and modernist literary aesthetics. In fact, this is why his work warrants more critical attention than it has traditionally received: it provides us with new ways of thinking about the relationship between queerness, geography, and narrative form.

Unpacking pervasive heteronormativity in sub-Saharan Africa: Opportunities to embrace multiplicity of sexualities

This article provides a critical review of research on geographies of sexuality and acknowledges how sexual identities are constructed through an intersection of multiple dimensions in the sub-Saharan Africa region. Although the region is experiencing a gradually changing landscape regarding the rights of queer people, ongoing discriminatory practices attached to heteronormativity suppress the expression of non-normative sexual identities. Upon exploration of queer theory and a review of literature on the challenges facing queer people, this article argues for reimagining an African society that embraces a multiplicity of sexualities. It also advocates for tackling hetero- and binary-defined norms by presenting counterarguments and scenarios that demonstrate the significance of deconstructive and non-binary approaches towards sexuality and space in sub-Saharan Africa.

Geographies of gender and sexuality I: Engaging the shift towards Southern urbanism

Geographers working on sexuality - and specifically of relevance to this report, scholars working on non-heternormative sexualities - have come to understand the need to engage with the urban South, culminating in acknowledgement of the benefits of engagements with Southern urbanism literature. I summarise how very recent sexualities scholarship is starting to signal direct connections with some of the broader interests of Southern urbanism. Such scholarship, I argue, has more in common with some of the empirical and theoretical interests of Southern urbanism than existing interests of the geographies of sexualities literature. I also consider how such emergent scholarship can potentially enrich interests of the geographies of sexualities literature in new and exciting ways.

Here, there, everywhere: The relational geographies of chemsex

AbstractIn recent years sexualised drug use, usually referred to as chemsex, has become the object of intense media health‐related panic and increasing academic scrutiny. Critical social scientists have challenged pathologising perspectives, analysing the socio‐cultural and political economy dimensions of chemsex. Against the silence of geographers in this emerging field, the paper develops a geographical relational analysis of chemsex, focusing on the experiences of gay men living with HIV in two Italian cities (Bologna; Milan) and Italian gay men living with HIV in three English cities (Leicester; London; Manchester). Demonstrating the constitutive role of place in the practice of chemsex, the paper frames place relationally, that is, as the encounter between here and there, the material and the virtual, imagined geographies and lived spaces. To emphasise the central role of place and geographical knowledge to understand chemsex, the paper builds on ‘weak theory’, as it conceives things as open, entangled, connected and in flux, while focusing on ordinary practices and heterogeneity in more‐than‐human worlds. Showing how chemsex represents an embodied, relational geographical encounter among different human and non‐human actors, places (both physical and digital), imaginations and desires, the paper highlights the role of sexual practices in the relational construction of place‐making, therefore calling for an increased engagement with sex itself within the field of geographies of sexualities.

A sexuality pivot: Thinking through solidarity, geographies of sexuality, and a world in transition

While work on solidarities forms a core element within geographical scholarship, especially as related to forms of shared connection to address forms of inequality, few studies from the geographies of sexualities literature have directly engaged with the concept. This article argues that there are two complementary logics as to why scholars working on sexuality may want to consider more forcibly the concept of solidarity. One of these logics suggests that a focus on solidarities can further pre-existing key interests within the geographies of sexualities literature, especially in parts of the world that have historically received relatively limited research attention. A second logic suggests that a focus on sexuality-based solidarities can help enable sexualities scholars to further critical engagement regarding broader discourses, and offer alternative framings, regarding a world in transition. This article presents a series of examples, drawn from across sub-Saharan Africa, related to both logics together with a series of potential future directions for research. Taken collectively, this article, by drawing on earlier work on solidarity from within the discipline of geography, contends that there are a number of key benefits for sexualities scholars to undertake a ‘pivot’ or choice to explore solidarity more directly in the current moment.

MAP-ping Queerness? Street Art in Philadelphia

This article reflects on how street art helps to “queer” the city of Philadelphia. America’s sixth largest city has come to be known as the “City of Murals” following the initiative started by Mural Arts Philadelphia’s (MAP) Executive Director Jane Golden in 1987. It has also in recent years been re-branded as a queer city. Firstly, I consider how street art represents queer communities, drawing on human geographer Felix Driver’s paradigm of image-centred or “imaginative geography.” Based on a non-representational model of geography, I also reflect on how street art allows the queer community to constitute spaces for LGBTQIA+ people of colour. Philadelphia’s street art enables individual self-determination, as well as congregation, contestation, and conversation among queer people of colour, and between the queer and wider communities, in Philadelphia today. Following recent work on digital geographies of sexuality, a number of examples considered in this article focus on the power of digital media to re-purpose MAP’s murals and Philadelphia’s street art for queer purposes.

Understanding processes of marginalizing geographies of sexualities inside, outside and a-side academia

Understanding processes of marginalizing geographies of sexualities inside, outside and a-side academia

Locating sex: regional geographies of sexual social media

Contributing to the field of the geographies of digital sexualities, this article explores the geosocial dimensions of digital sexual cultures by analyzing three regionally operating, linguistically specific social media platforms devoted to sexual expression. Drawing on case studies of an Estonian platform used primarily for group sex, a Swedish platform for kink and BDSM, and a Finnish platform for nude self-expression, we ask how these contribute to and shape sexual geographies in digital and physical registers. First, we focus on the platforms as tools for digital wayfinding and hooking up. Second, we consider how the platforms help to reimagine and sexualize physical locations as ones of play, and how this transforms the ways of inhabiting such spaces. Third, we analyze how the platforms operate as sexual places in their own right, designed to accommodate certain forms of display, relating, and belonging. We argue, in particular, that these platforms shape how users imagine and engage with location by negotiating notions of proximity and distance, risk and safety, making space for sexual sociability. We approach geographies of sexuality both through the regional and linguistic boundaries within which these platforms operate, as well as through our participants’ sense of comfort and investment in local spaces of sexual play. As sexual content is increasingly pushed out of large, U.S.-owned social media platforms, we argue that locally operating platforms provide a critical counterpoint, allowing for a vital re-platforming of sex on a regional level.

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

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.

Ageing, sexualities and place: Aligning the geographies of gerontology and sexualities

AbstractThe spatial studies of both sexualities and gerontology have been established as subfields within the discipline of geography, but there are few studies that combine both strands of literature and examine old age and sexualities from a spatial perspective. Our aim is to highlight the contribution geographers can make to this research, which is based on the assertion that experiences of both ageing and sexualities are intrinsically linked to place. We first outline the subfields of sexualities and gerontology within geography and then review the work that has drawn on both of those literatures–within and beyond geography–with a focus on LGBTIQ+ older adults. We then propose a number of spatial enquiries into ageing and sexualities that will enable a better understanding of the spatial uses, needs and preferences of the older LGBTIQ+ population. The proposed areas of research include: generational changes and relations with gay communities, spaces and neighbourhoods; retirement migration; aged‐care facilities and services; ageing‐in‐place and in‐home care; lesbians, queer women and ageing; trans* ageing; Indigeneity; intersectionality; and digital spaces. We argue that advancing this research will contribute to the establishment of a queer geographical gerontology that enhances our understanding of older LGBTIQ+ adults and their lifeworlds.

More than just sex, more than just friendship: understandings of sex life of nonheterosexual couples in Poland

The article demonstrates how the problematic socio-political situation of nonheterosexual communities in Poland and Polish traditionalism significantly impacts how nonheterosexual people develop their sexual stories and perceive their sexual practices. It aims to shift the discussion on sex life, primarily conducted in the Anglo-American context that often focuses on the frequency of sexual contact and heteronormative understanding of sexual practices, into a more critical one, attentive to the socio-political context. The article maps queer narratives on sex life and reconstructs the role of heteronormative and homophobic patterns, prejudices, and stereotypes. It demonstrates how public norms and discourses are mirrored, negotiated, and challenged in queer sexual stories. Finally, it shows how these negotiations deeply influence the positionality of nonheterosexual people in Poland and their sexual choices and practices. The article concludes by sharing future paths for research on queer sexual life inspired by geographies of gender and sexualities. The presented analysis draws on 53 individual in-depth narrative interviews and a monthly ethnographic study conducted with 21 nonheterosexual families done within the Families of Choice in Poland research project.

SPACE, PLACE AND LOCATION IN SEXUAL SOCIAL MEDIA

Contributing to the swiftly emerging field of the geographies of digital sexualities, this panel explores the geosocial and geopolitical dimensions of digital sexual cultures by zooming in on the connections between sexual practices, geographic imaginaries, and locally embedded social media platforms devoted to sexual expression. Building on case studies of an Estonian platform used primarily by those interested in group sex (LC, est. 2018), a Swedish platform preferred by BDSM practitioners (Darkside.se, est. 2003), and a Finnish platform for nude self-expression (Alastonsuomi.com, est. 2007) we show how these platforms contribute to and shape sexual geographies in digital and physical registers. On the one hand, these platforms operate as spatialized tools which put bodies in motion in the interest of hooking up. They function as digital compasses that allow for orientation of sexual desires in physical spaces. On the other hand, these platforms also assemble localized online places for flirtation, imagination, visibility, and appreciation, which interlink bodies with the visual pleasures and vulnerabilities of seeing and being seen. We approach questions of locatedness and place-making both through the regional and linguistic boundaries within which these platforms operate, as well as through our participants’ sense of comfort and investment in the local as a space of sexual play. As sexual content and communication are increasingly pushed out of large, U.S.-owned social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr, local and (to some extent) independent platforms where sexual expression is less regulated offer an interesting counterweight.

Tracks to gay elsewheres: cultural attachment and spatial imaginaries

This article considers how cultural narratives of queer migration to urban centres are understood through media and cultural references that mark specific non-urban places and times. Through an analysis of queer migration narratives in Smalltown Boy (1984), a song and music video by UK band Bronski Beat, and Boytown (2012), its suburban Sydney reimagining by artist Daniel Mudie Cunningham and DJ Stephen Allkins, I argue that the interconnections between visual, media and cultural artefacts are not merely an additive way to understand queer cultural geographies but rather signal intertwined geographic and aesthetic registers. In Boytown, the explicitly gay lyrics and imagery of Smalltown Boy are paired with other songs and music videos that connote queerness but also directly relate to suburban images of youthful alienation. The attachment to urban narratives and images is supplemented by this distinctly suburban attachment. In this article, I argue that conventional statistical figurations of changes to gay ghettoisation and now well-established critiques of queer urbanity are usefully combined and expanded by considering cultural attachment. This article demonstrates the generative intersection of creative geographies and geographies of sexualities attuned to the queer suburban.