Negotiating Difference through Everyday Encounters: The Case of Sexual Orientation and Religion and Belief

Abstract: This paper argues for geographers to be more attentive to the potentially competing values, interests, and rights of the equality strands (race, gender, disability, religion and belief, sexual orientation, age). We focus on two that are most commonly assumed to experience tensions: religion/belief and sexual orientation. Drawing on focus groups with heterosexual Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Hindus and lesbian and gay people of faith we explore the attitudes of heterosexual people of faith towards homosexuality. These findings suggest that tensions should be emerging between these groups in public space. However, we then demonstrate that these anticipated conflicts are not emerging because of the strategies people employ for separating their beliefs from their everyday conduct. In such ways, our findings demonstrate how the “what is” (ie personal experience) for both heterosexual and lesbian and gay people of faith is prioritised over theological or institutional perspectives of “what ought to be”.     

Heteronormative Citizenship: The Howard Government's Views on Gay and Lesbian Issues

This article analyses recent federal debates regarding gay and lesbian issues, focusing on the Howard government, and drawing attention to the arguably heteronormative nature of many politicians' views. Policy issues analysed include assisted reproductive technology, superannuation rights and censorship. Reference is also made to the Justice Kirby controversy. The article explores the way in which heteronormative arguments not only construct heterosexual citizens as the norm but are also used to discount arguments that discrimination against gay and lesbian citizens is taking place.     

Homemaking in New Zealand: thinking through the mutually constitutive relationship between domestic material objects,heterosexuality and home

This article explores the homemaking practices of heterosexual couples who live in Hamilton, Aotearoa New Zealand. Specifically, it examines the role of domestic material objects in the mutual production of heterosexuality and home. The article draws on data collected from joint and individual semi-structured interviews and self-directed photography with 14 heterosexual couples living in monogamous co-residential relationships. It offers an analysis of the ways in which heterosexual couples use ordinary household objects to constitute, consolidate and sometimes undermine their gendered and sexed subjectivities and interpersonal relationships. A focus on domestic material objects offers an opportunity for challenging normative assumptions about the relationship between heterosexuality and domestic space.     

‘What I Used to Do … On My Mother's Settee’: spatial and emotional aspects of heterosexuality in England

Using data from an ongoing project which investigates continuities and changes in the institution of heterosexuality across the twentieth century, this article brings a spatialised perspective to bear on the contradictions implicit within family‐based models of hegemonic heterosexuality. In this context we contribute to the growing focus by geographers on theorising the spatial and emotional aspects of heterosexuality. Via interviews with women and men from three generations in 20 families from East Yorkshire, England, we discover the difficulties experienced by individuals seeking to bring together their sexual and family lives. Focusing on two areas, the transmission of sexual knowledge between the members of different generations and between heterosexual partners and the use of space within the performance of gendered identities, the article shows how individuals both experience constraint and discover scope for agency in managing such contradictions. Via empirical data we therefore begin to identify the ways in which heterosexuality, as an institution, has provided an implicit organising principle through which materially‐grounded links between self, the emotions, other, body, home and the public sphere have been produced and/or negotiated over the last 80 years.     

Queering Beirut,the ‘Paris of the Middle East’: fractal Orientalism and essentialized masculinities in contemporary gay travelogues

In this article, I analyse discourses that have been circulating in a number of Euro-American journalistic articles, gay travelogues and an international gay tour guide since 2005, which present Beirut as a new gay tourist destination. Since representations in gay travelogues often trade in imagined ‘sexual utopias’, promise encounters and the ‘discovery’ of unfamiliar and ‘exotic’ settings with other non-heterosexual men, I explore how both Beirut and the Lebanese are represented and made intelligible. I argue that even though these representations depart from a binary distinction between East/West and Self/Other, they are still premised on Orientalist depictions of both place and people. However, these depictions are complex as they rely on and produce what I call ‘fractal Orientalism’, or ‘Orientalisms within the Orient’, and essentialized, yet relational, understandings of both ‘tourists’ and ‘locals’. Hybridity and liminality become central, whereby Beirut is presented as safe but dangerous, and glamorous but war-torn, and the non-heterosexual Lebanese are racialized and represented as sexually available (in private) but discreet (in public). These representations rely heavily on linear narratives of progress, where progress is assessed in terms of ‘tolerant’ attitudes towards homosexuality, the presence of a Western-constituted ‘gay identity’, gay-friendly spaces and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer organizations. Finally, I argue that these depictions, despite attempting to make Beirut and non-heterosexual Lebanese men intelligible, produce monolithic and essentialist understandings of both, which fail to take into account the complexities and intersections of gender, race, class and sexualities.     

Gay and lesbian emotional geographies of clubbing: reflections from Paris and Turin

Urban nighttime entertainment spaces, including bars, pubs, and clubs, are a crucial space for the performance of gendered social relations and the experience of sexual identities. This article investigates the emotional spaces of commercial gay and lesbian recreation in two different settings: lesbian nights in Paris, France, and gay clubs in Turin, Italy. This research was carried out through direct observation and auto-ethnographic fieldwork. Drawing on the literature from emotional geographies, the article proposes an alternative take on the geography of gay and lesbian clubbing by applying the metaphors of the island and the archipelago from cultural geography to the gay and lesbian scene. The island and archipelago are presented as metaphors that imply emotions, performance, materiality, spatiality, strategy, and imagination in the performance of the gay and lesbian playscape. The article argues that the club, intended as a type of gay and lesbian island, does not necessarily imply a condition of insulation. Rather, the island implies both metaphor and materiality, and movement may also be considered an emotional strategy for gays and lesbians in the heteronormative urban space.     

Courting Actresses and Exploring Love in Early Republican China

This article focuses on the early Republican theater as a popular site of experiments with love and discusses the significance of pengjue courtship between actresses and male patrons. It argues that while the literati still played a role in shaping theater patronage culture, employing the discourse of qing and the scholar-beauty romance, the popularization of pengjue enabled a more flirtatious mode of love that combined male homosociability and heterosexual desire. Male patrons’ courtship of actresses was marked by frivolity and performativity, as well as economic calculations. It deviated from the traditional ideal of qing and the New Culture notion of romantic love and thus aroused intense criticism from conservatives and reformists alike. However, this article argues that the practice of pengjue created an alternative affective sphere for performing gender, contesting social norms, and exploring new forms of love in the public space of commercial theater and in everyday life.     

Straight subjectivities in homonormative spaces: moving towards a new, ‘dynamic’ heteronormativity?

Although scholars have explored geographies of heterosexuality for a relatively long time, experiences of heterosexual subjects have been under-researched. Contributing to the discussions around how homo/straight spaces are negotiated, this study analyses how heterosexuals experience and define both homonormative and heteronormative spaces in Seattle. Through a series of interviews and focus groups with self-identified heterosexuals, I explore how these subjects interact with spaces that they recognize as being either straight or gay, and how they negotiate their own identities in relation to those spaces. I also describe how, while refusing to reject heterosexuality, the vast majority of participants expressed discomfort at being defined as someone with a fixed, stable sexual identity, and how they assumed gayness to be non-transgressive and fixed. The results show a paradoxical, complex picture, in which gayness is described as stable and normative, and heterosexuality is depicted as fluid and dynamic. The study illustrates an instance in which homo/straight binaries still shape people’s imagination, while also offering an example of the messy interaction between homonormativity and heteronormativity. What is also suggested is that, experiencing homonormative spaces and performing ‘dynamic’ identities, the respondents renegotiate what being heterosexual means for them reinforcing, however, heterosexual dominance through the definition of a new ‘dynamic’ heteronormativity.     

“非正常”的文化标签下“同志”社会空间的生产——以广州市X公园“同志渔场”为例

性少数群体对于城市空间的利用是城市研究中的新兴话题。这类研究主要探讨"非主流"的社会身份如何通过对特定的社会空间的利用,引发空间意义的生产及社会关系的建构。本文以广州市X公园的"同志渔场"为案例,研究男同性恋者对于城市公共空间的利用与体验。研究认为,X公园的"同志渔场"不仅给性少数群体提供了性身份暂时解放的空间,亦是其不断体验自身"非正常"的身份标签的空间。同志的空间实践体现的不是对于主流的社会规范的抵抗。相反,他们的空间实践是明显地处在"非正常"这一身份标签的作用之下的。     

All hyped up and no place to go

In this paper we think about the performance of sexual identities in space, and try to explore the notions of transgression and parody implicit in recent queer theory, particularly in the work of Judith Butler. To do this, we take a long hard look at two current dissident sexual identities—the hypermasculine ‘gay skinhead’ and the hyperfeminine ‘lipstick lesbian’. We describe their evolution as sexual‐outlaw styles of the 1990s, and assess the effects of their performance in spaces which are, we argue, actively constructed as heterosexual. Although we are ultimately unsure and unable to agree about what kinds of trouble these identities cause, and for whom, and where, we want to share our unease, our questions, our own troubles.     

‘We or them,’ ‘you and I,’ and ‘I’: spaces of intimacy and (not so) public displays of affection in Hanoi

Through an exploratory study of romantic heterosexual couples in a public park situated in Hanoi’s outskirts, this article offers a conceptual rethinking of a western understanding of the park’s public/private dichotomy which can then be used to better appreciate how these categories are evolving in western urbanizing societies and their impacts on gender relations. By developing a relational, spatialized understanding of how young romantic couples justify their ‘transgressive’ displays of sexual intimacy in public spaces in contemporary urban Vietnam, this article focuses on how couples, especially women, manage their visibility. This analysis confronts the public civilizational discourse on Vietnamese sexual restraint by analyzing how young couples justify their romantic displays by creating an intimate space within a public environment. This space of visible intimacy is justified through their commitment to marriage. For the individuals involved in these romantic couples, visibility is justified, particularly for young women, through the enjoyment of a newly gained sexual autonomy as they migrate to the city.     

Adolescent Latina Bodyspaces: Making Homegirls, Homebodies and Homeplaces

This essay examines the local, everyday practices of heteropatriarchal power—dominating and resisting power, through which young Latina women negotiate teenage, sexual and gender subjectivity and spatial ordering of young heterosexual bodies. Their negotiations are shaped by and give shape to the material, discursive and representational social spaces of Los Angeles, worsening "landscapes of neglect" attributable to the changing geographies of private and public investment. Their narratives convey and construct a visceral experience of being tied, materially and discursively, to homely spaces as young carers, and their struggle to untie their competencies to the private, domestic sphere, or "inside," and their vulnerabilities to the public sphere, or "outside." In their struggle, the young Latinas variously reproduce, rework and resist the dominant norms and materiality of local places and their dispositionality in bodily terms.     

Liberty for All? Contested spaces of women's basketball

The Women's National Basketball Association is a professional women's basketball league that is notable for constructing a heteronormative ‘family friendly’ self-image while maintaining a sizable following of lesbian fans. This article examines this apparent contradiction through two case studies: a kiss-in protest by a group of New York WNBA fans, Lesbians for Liberty, and experiences by Minnesota Lynx lesbian fans of the marketing tactics and daily practices that regulate WNBA game spaces. By highlighting the socio-spatiality of the WNBA venue, it becomes clear how heteronormativity is naturalized, as well as accepted and resisted by lesbian fans in both New York and Minnesota. An overt act of resistance, however, failed to encourage the WNBA to reconsider its policies: the Liberty kiss-in, by situating lesbians as a counterpublic, foreclosed the range of attitudes held by lesbian fans. Moreover, as Minnesota Lynx fans demonstrate, WNBA spaces feel ‘safe enough’ to many lesbian fans. As a result, there remains a contest over the meanings and practices that define WNBA landscapes. To date, however, normative heterosexuality has contained the presence and visibility of the lesbian fan.     

Lesbian collaborative web mapping: disrupting heteronormativity in Portugal

Public spaces are constructed around hidden, subtle, non-verbalized and implicit codes of behaviour. These hidden and implicit codes of behaviour are pervasive heteronormative expressions that inscribe socio-spatial landscapes. As a consequence, same-sex public displays of affection are modified, or entirely absent. In the Portuguese sociocultural context public displays of heterosexual and familial affection are common, which prompted us to research how lesbians and bisexual women negotiate same-sex displays of affection in public spaces. The article begins by examining: the co-production of space, gender and sexualities; the pervasive invisibility of lesbian sexualities in public spaces; and the potentialities of participatory geospatial web that connects geographic location to photographs, text and other media shared online. The second half of the article presents the research project ‘Creating Landscapes’. It is argued that a collaboratively created web map by lesbians with positive public space experiences may promote agency and empowerment for lesbian and bisexual women. The article concludes by arguing that creating and sharing collaborative web maps of positive experiences of same-sex public displays of affection can disrupt heteronormativity and create public spaces that are empowering for lesbians and bisexual women.     

Engendering space: Ballroom culture and the spatial practice of possibility in Detroit

This article examines the ways in which Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) members of the Ballroom community create black queer space to contend with their spatial exclusion from and marginalization within public and private space in urban Detroit, Michigan. Existing in most urban centers throughout North America, Ballroom culture is a community and network of Black and Latina/o LGBT people. In this ethnography, I delineate the multiple functions of two mutually constitutive domains of Ballroom culture, kinship (the houses) and ritualized performance (the ball events). I use queer theories of geography and draw from Sonjah Stanley Niaah's notion of performance geography to examine the generative socio-spatial practices that Ballroom members deploy to forge alternative possibilities for Black LGBT life in Detroit. In many ways, members of the Ballroom community work to challenge and undo the alienating and oppressive realities of built environments in urban centers by undertaking the necessary social and performance labor that allow its members to revise and reconfigure exclusionary and oppressive spatial forms.     

New Xenaland: Lesbian place making,the Xenaverse,and Aotearoa New Zealand

This article explores the relationship between unmappable lesbian space, the Xenaverse, which is a complex discursive space generated out of the syndicated television show Xena: Warrior Princess, and the national space of Aotearoa New Zealand. The article argues that the Xenaverse is an imaginary space which is also a lesbian space and that it is partially pulled into material national space by its links to Aotearoa New Zealand. It is therefore an excellent example of the complex and recursive process of lesbian place making. The role of distance as a significant factor for dominant national discourses, the Xenaverse, and lesbian possibility is discussed to partially account for the materialisation of the Xenaverse in Aotearoa New Zealand. The article suggests that unmappable lesbian spaces such as the Xenaverse can be examined using three analytic filters: ephemeral space; queered lesbian space; and neo-colonial processes.     

Alternative Trajectories: A comment on Miguel Vale de Almeida in this issue (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

This is a comment on the narrative by Miguel Vale de Almeida in this issue. It points at difficulties of escaping from the dominant Anglo‐Saxon narrative on gay and lesbian experiences faced by those who undertake the issue of gay rights in countries outside the Anglo‐vernacular world. It also indicates the entanglement of the ‘gay rights’ discourse in spatial representations underpinned by the tendency to exercise the ‘othering’ and based on the secularist approach.     

‘The greatest loss was a loss of our history’: natural disasters,marginalised identities and sites of memory

This paper examines intersections between space, materiality, memory and identity in relation to lesbian and gay experiences of recent disasters in Australia. Drawing on interviews with lesbians and gay men in two disaster sites, the paper argues that disaster impacts may include the loss of sites of memory that inform and underpin the formation and maintenance of marginalised identities. We explore the ways in which social marginality is experienced by sexual minorities during disasters as a result of threats to sites of lesbian and gay memory. The paper contributes to scholarship in geographies of memory by investigating the impacts of disasters on how memory is spatially located and experienced.     

Ethnonationalism and attitudes towards gay and lesbian rights in Northern Ireland

Disputes over gay and lesbian rights occupy a central place on both national and international agendas in recent years. This is also the case in societies emerging from chronic ethnonational conflict where debates over gay and lesbian rights vs. ethnic‐based rights predominate. While much scholarly work focuses on the influence of socio‐demographic factors in determining attitudes toward gay and lesbian rights in postconflict societies, to date, the role of political influences, such as ethnonationalism, is noticeably under‐researched. It is with this omission in mind that this paper focuses on the influence of ethnonationalism, or congruency in religious, national and communal identity, on attitudes towards gay and lesbian rights issues. Using nationally representative data from Northern Ireland, the results suggest that while ethnonationalism is a key predictor of attitudes among Protestants, it is socio‐demographic factors, such as gender, age and educational attainment, that are the primary determinants of Catholic views.     

Marriage as a Marker of Secular Inclusion? Oral History and Lesbian and Gay Narratives on Marriage in Contemporary Australia

Same‐sex marriage has been one of the most widely discussed social issues in contemporary Australia for some time. In late 2017, after holding a contentious national postal survey that year, the Australia government introduced legislation allowing same‐sex couples to marry. This article draws on a major national lesbian and gay oral history project conducted in partnership with the National Library of Australia between 2012 and 2015, when discussions of same‐sex marriage were becoming increasingly widespread. It investigates the way interview subjects incorporated marriage into their narratives. In doing so, it highlights how understandings of marriage — both amongst lesbian and gay people and heterosexual people — have shifted and evolved over time. While some subjects saw marriage as a somewhat outdated, religious, and patriarchal concept, many others invested personal significance in the institution, arguing that allowing gay men and lesbians access to marriage would be a strong symbol of social progress and equality in a secular society. We conclude with one young interviewee who had managed to reconcile his faith with his sexuality and desire for marriage equality.