The stage: a space for queer subjectification in contemporary Turkey

This article focuses on the role of the stage in complex modes of gender performativity in the work of three Turkish performers: Zeki Müren (1931–1996), Bülent Ersoy (b. 1952), and Seyfi Dursuno?lu (b. 1932) a.k.a. Huysuz Virjin [Cranky Virgin]. These three, I suggest, are the pioneers of contemporary Turkish queer performance. Their performances – both on- and off-stage – are validated through a reiterative absence of queerness in their everyday lives and stand in the midst of various negotiations between queers and the secular Islamic nation-state in Turkey. In the works of Müren, Ersoy, and Huysuz, the stage is suggestive of a space where queerness can be managed. It is a contested space that does at least allow for the communication of queer ideas to a wider audience. I discuss the works of these three performers as three variations of queerness in Turkey in relation to different eras and different political climates that are directly related to the nation-state's desire to perform modernity. While explicating complicated modes of gender performativity, I consider the stage as the primary space for a queer body to exist. Through this discussion, I aim to activate debates both within and against the context of secular Islam, on gendered political space, and on those overlooked sexualized spaces in which the nation-state produces powerful yet unstable values to manage queer subjectivity in contemporary Turkey.     

Coloured Cabinets: A Reflection on Material Culture as a Marker of Coloured Identity in Cloetesville,South Africa

In coloured neighbourhoods of the Western Cape in South Africa, there are objects in people's homes that live in a unique historical and cultural moment. This article reports on an examination, in the neighbourhood of Cloetesville, Stellenbosch, of how these objects inside residents’ homes tell a story of a creolised people and the locations in which they are situated. In the case of Cloetesville, as in many neighbourhoods that arose from a history of forced removals, many people experience various social and economic problems. Coloured people's identities are commonly thought to rest in these problems. This article, however, seeks to suggest an alternative way of exploring coloured identity through looking at objects in households and broader living environments. Thus, I hope to provide insight into different yet distinct experiences by contributing new perspectives through looking at nostalgic and ordentlike (respectable) sentiments of belonging. Specifically cabinets in living rooms are conceptualised as repositories of such sentiments in the home, and how the objects residing in the home have the power/ability to symbolically ground their owners in the neighbourhood of Cloetesville.     

Twentysomethings and twentagers: subjectivities,spaces and young men at home

This article examines young men's (aged 18–25 years) meanings of home and practices of homemaking, comprising material and social relations. The discussion contributes to three areas of geographical interest: home, masculinities and youth. Both geographies of home and masculinities have begun to consider men's experiences and meanings of home, but young men's domestic practices remain largely unexamined. Geographical work on youth has examined housing transitions, but the gendered experiences of young men need further interrogation. To provide insight into young men's homemaking, this article presents qualitative case studies drawn from fieldwork that investigated relations between masculinities and domesticities in Sydney, Australia. Young men are arguably out-of-place at home in conventional discourses of gender and space, but homes are nevertheless crucial sites for shaping masculine subjectivities. Masculinities and homes are co-constituted through domestic practices, generating diverse intersectional subjectivities and spaces. In this article, three subjectivity-space, or masculine-domestic, relations are discussed, which also counter the centring of heterosexual couple family homes in domestic imaginaries: young men in parental homes, share-housing and ‘alternative’ family homes. I examine similarities and differences across and within these masculine domesticities. This multiplicity of ‘youthful masculine domesticities’ offers a set of qualitative examples for use in public rhetoric that seeks to redress uneven gender dynamics in contemporary domestic life.     

Being(s) in relation at home: socio-natures of patio ‘gardens’ in Managua,Nicaragua

Human–nature relations of home have been gaining more attention in geography, especially in the study of gardens. This article contributes to this growing literature, but in contrast to much research, it examines human–nature relations in the patios (garden) of homes in a marginalized barrio (slum) of Managua, Nicaragua. I suggest that the human–nature relations in these patios need to be understood differently than those in North American and European gardens. Based on research carried out in Managua, I argue that such relations are at the centre of everyday domestic activities and are critical in producing home as a liveable space in the city. The article draws on feminist geographic understandings of home and current work around human–environment relations, and identifies three different sets of socio-ecological relations: corporeal, aesthetic and economic. It argues that these three different relations between humans and the plants and trees in their patios are critical in the imaginaries around home and in the production of habitable spaces in cities, as well as to our understanding of urban natures.     

Exploring subject positions and multiple temporalities through an Iranian migrant mother's family photograph albums

In this article, I draw on a research study of one Iranian migrant mother's generation of selves through her material configuration of her personal photograph albums and through our verbal reading of her photographs. The research engages in a visual-material feminist ethnographic approach, and is informed by the work of Gillian Rose and the understanding that family photographs are a means by which women negotiate subject positions. In this article, I discuss an unexpected finding of my research, the significance of multiple temporalities in a migrant mother's production of selves. The photo album practices of the participant mother of this study, ‘Parvin’, depart from the common social convention of mothers arranging their photograph albums to chart family growth following the model of milestones occurring over linear developmental time. Parvin does not limit herself to linear developmental time, but rather she mixes up photographs in her post-migration family albums to generate multiple temporalities woven together by an enveloping ‘mixed’ time. Drawing on both Julia Kristeva and Homi Bhaba's theories of temporality and the subject, I suggest that Parvin produces subject positions for self and family through a continual interweaving of a multitude of pasts into the present and through a subsuming of milestones within cyclical family time. Further, I suggest that through her generation of multiple temporalities, Parvin produces the subject position of ‘accommodating mother’. Finally, I highlight the potential afforded by considering the temporal and the spatial together in studies of migrant identity.     

Researching ‘gay Cape Town’ finding value-added queerness

An initiative to market Cape Town as a premier gay and lesbian tourist destination has steadily gathered steam over the last decade. I set out to study this phenomenon thereby adding to conversations about the normalization and globalization of queerness. Rather than straightforwardly presenting my findings, however, this paper considers queer theorizing as an inductive process by detailing the answers I did not find in the field and the questions I did. Based on my close readings of queer theory, I went looking for resistance and therefore queerness in the normalized space of ‘gay Cape Town’. I was disappointed. But I did not instead find outright capitulation. Rather, in this process of queer's commodification, I found anxieties, cracks and fissures beneath a veneer of assured mainstreaming. I found an undetermined process that did not represent either ‘un-African-ness’ or ‘global queer homogeneity’ or ‘African-ness’ and ‘local queer heterogeneity’. I found not an un-queering through commodification, but a queer commodity struggling to gain a foothold in a nation in which the terrain for gay and lesbian politics has drastically changed in such a way that the market cannot be ignored. To grapple with these findings, I argue for a more ambivalent approach to queer theorizing.     

Two Stoves,Two Refrigerators,Due Cucine: The Italian immigrant home with two kitchens

Many Italian North Americans have two kitchens in their homes: one on the first floor, and a second in the basement. While this set-up is pervasive in cities across North America, homes with two kitchens are uncommon in Italy. This article explores the significance of the basement kitchen in first-generation Italian homes in Canada and the United States. Examining homes of various typologies in and around Toronto, Montreal and New York, purchased by Italian immigrants between 1950 and 1980, this paper argues that for Italian women the basement kitchen is a liberating space, free from the constraints of formality and traditional room divisions.     

Children's imaginaries in the city: on things and materials

The article is an exploration of urban imaginaries emerging through a play with materials. Starting from a complex activist exercise for reimagining the space of a park in decay, whose protagonists are children, we propose a reflection on the productivity and resilience of matter. We argue that a new materialist sociology is one that takes disappearances seriously. Capitalism renders space abstract not only through flow and circulation, but also through stillness. We follow the curious disappearances and reappearances of the park in question, tracing the mutations of urban planning, of the juridical domain and of the everyday use of space. Finally, we analyse the making of a maquette of the park by a group of children and their alliances with activists. The maquette is a political ‘thing': it leads us away from an urban imaginary populated by discrete objects to an urban imaginary of depth and it reconcretises space.     

Safe Space: Towards a Reconceptualization

The term “safe space” dates to the late twentieth century women's movement, but it has since been used in many different contexts. In this paper, we review and analyze historical and contemporary “safe spaces”. These include “separatist” safe spaces in women's, anti‐racist, and feminist communities, “inclusive” safe space classrooms, and safe spaces in which (non‐human) objects are central. We argue that safe spaces should be understood not through static and acontextual notions of “safe” or “unsafe”, but rather through the relational work of cultivating them. Such an understanding reveals several tendencies. Namely, safe spaces are inherently paradoxical. Cultivating them includes foregrounding social differences and binaries (safe–unsafe, inclusive–exclusive) as well as recognizing the porosity of such binaries. Renegotiating these binaries is necessarily incomplete; a safe space is never completely safe. Even so, we encourage the critical cultivation of safe space as a site for negotiating difference and challenging oppression.     

Where the heart is: home space transitions for residential college students

Home and the transition to adulthood are related temporal and spatial constructs. Building upon Kenyon’s [1999. “A home from home: Students’ transitional experience of home.” In Ideal homes? Social change and domestic life, edited by T. Chapman, 84–95. New York: Routledge] categorization of physical, social, personal, and temporal elements of home for college students, we analyze survey responses from 256 students at a 4-year U.S. residential college in order to uncover how perceptions of home-like spaces change as students move from pre-college homes, through on- and off-campus home spaces, and toward imagined future homes. Our quantitative findings show that the four home elements matter differently across time and type of home, supported by qualitative findings wherein students articulate how they conceptualize similarities and differences between the different home spaces. This study adds to ongoing conceptualizations of the transition to adulthood as placed (for four-year residential college students especially), and as fluid and multilayered in terms of social actors’ views of their past, present, and imagined future homes and accompanying identity transitions.     

Listening and learning: giving voice to trans experiences of disasters

This article gives voice to trans experiences of disasters, investigating their specific vulnerabilities and resilient capacities. We draw on findings from a project on lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) experiences of recent Australian and New Zealand disasters. We present and analyse trans voices from a survey conducted across multiple case study sites and insights from interview data with a trans person who experienced the 2011 Brisbane floods. Conceptually, to provide a robust understanding of trans experiences of disasters, we bring socially sensitive disaster studies into conversation with trans geographies. Disaster studies have begun to examine LGBT experiences, with some suggestion that trans people are most vulnerable. We advance this work by focusing on trans lives. Trans geographies, in turn, underline the importance of space, place and the body in understanding trans lives, and the need to examine the lived reality of trans people’s everyday geographies rather than embodiment as an abstract concept. Applying these insights to the trans voices in our project, we examine four themes that highlight impediments to and possibilities for trans-inclusive disaster planning: apprehension with emergency services and support; concerns about home and displacement; anxiety about compromising the trans body; and the potential of trans and queer interpersonal networks for capacity building. We offer suggestions for trans-inclusive disaster planning and preparedness, and indicate how the insights from trans experience can enrich disaster planning and preparedness for wider social groups.     

Living in anachronistic space: Temporalities of displacement in Moscow's Soviet-era standardised housing

In 2017, the Moscow municipality announced the demolition of several thousand remaining Soviet-era, standardised apartments (khrushchevki). Known as the Renovation, the renewal project promises to replace the khrushchevki with new residential districts. Based on fieldwork in Northern Izmailovo, a district targeted for demolition, this article analyses encroaching displacement by foregrounding the temporal experiences of affected residents. Building on literature that explores the political underpinnings of discourse and aesthetics in urban renewal projects, with particular attention to Rancière's temporal politics, the article contends that the Renovation depends on the discursive construction of its targets as spatial anachronisms. This renders the Soviet-era housing blocks, and those who live within them, vulnerable to a spectrum of modernising aestheticising interventions—from minor ornamentation to wholesale demolition. Based on ethnographic data, the article shows how the initial stages of redevelopment have altered a local network of benches. For a group of long-standing, elderly residents, these disruptions have instigated more profound reckonings with their own sense of time in/and space, leading to an understanding that they, too, are seen as anachronistic features of the city. Paying attention to urban materiality on a granular scale, particularly in standardised housing estates, reveals the multifaceted temporalities that inform residents' engagements with the spaces of their home districts. The article argues that doing so counters the exclusionary temporal logic of the discourse of anachronism by denying its ubiquity. In turn, it speaks to growing geographic interest in amplifying alternative temporalities in the face of destructive, terminal change.     

Using Facebook as a Space for Storytelling in Geographical Research

Geographers have long been alert to the ways space matters to knowledge production and the stories participants choose to share. Despite such understandings, however, geographers remain surprisingly absent from discussions regarding the ways these concerns play out across online spaces. This article reflects on the employment of one online space, Facebook, as a site for storytelling in research exploring return journeys to two Australian festivals – the Big Day Out and Mardi Gras Parade. This article argues that insight over longer temporalities and shifting spatialities afforded through Facebook facilitates heightened understandings of the nuances, repetitions, differences and paradoxes of identities, encounters, and politics. Facebook, therefore, has the potential to allow for different ways of knowing that cannot be ascertained in more orthodox research spaces. Moreover, the slipperiness of conceptualisations of privacy and consent in this space draws attention to the necessity of understanding consent as fluid and ongoing, rather than antecedent to fieldwork commencement. Crucially, however, reconceptualisations of privacy and consent in this space expose potential obstacles university ethics committees may meet in responding to research moving online.     

Stuck between ‘the rock’ and a hard place: rural crisis and re-imagining rural Newfoundland feminine subjectivities

There has been a growing body of research exploring the mobility experiences of rural youth as they migrate in search of work, education and leisure. In this article we contribute to this body of knowledge by examining the mobility experiences of young women (16–24 years) living on the southwest coast of Newfoundland, Canada. In contrast to dominant constructions of rural crisis that position out-of-the-way places as in decline, dying or dead, we argue that the young women in our study articulated complex, affective relations to place. In so doing, they negotiated localized histories, prevailing social relations, broader discursive constructions and embodied affective connections in forging their emplaced feminine subjectivities. We argue that foregrounding the complex and at times contradictory relationships that the young women articulated with their rural homes is an important step in prying open dominant albeit constraining constructions of the rural, thereby allowing for alternative and more inhabitable imaginings of out-of-the-way places.     

Money talks: banknote iconography and symbolic constructions of Scotland

ABSTRACT. It has become common for scholars of nations and nationalism to use banknotes, coins and postage stamps as passing examples of everyday objects expressive of nationalism. Until recently, however, it has been less common for these objects to form the focus of empirical enquiries that substantiate their contribution to the creation and transmission of national symbolism. This article addresses this lacuna through an empirical investigation of over 300 years of Scottish banknote iconography. In their symbolic content, banknotes are shown to be amenable to the service of both national and non‐national political agendas. To explain this phenomenon, we advance three interrelated arguments. First, we contend that variations in banknote iconography reflect the different political contexts in which notes were produced and the distinctive loyalties and customer constituencies of the banks that issue them. Second, we argue that changes in banknote imagery reflect changes in the scale of their circulation. Third, we argue that Scottish banknotes have always included iconography that constructs the image of the bank and advertises its reliability, often through association with national images. The article concludes by addressing Scotland's place in wider understandings of the iconographic power of banknotes.     

The moral economy of home construction in late socialist Yugoslavia

Housing shortages in Yugoslav cities were a perennial concern for authorities and citizens alike. They disproportionately affected Yugoslav workers who as a consequence were the demographic most likely to independently construct a family home. This article explores how informal builders justified home construction in moral terms, legitimizing it on the basis of physical labour that was invested in home construction. This was couched in both the language register of Yugoslav socialism and patriarchal custom (according to which a male-headed household should enjoy the right to a family home). Construction was also conditioned by the opportunities and constraints of late socialist temporalities.     

Grabbing Land for Equitable Development? Reengineering Land Dispossession through Securitising Land Development Rights in Chongqing

This article examines the securitisation of land development rights under the dipiao scheme in Chongqing, China. It argues that this instrument is based on the dispossession and exploitation of rural households but these unequal relations have been concealed and naturalised through the complex geographies and temporalities of dispossessory arrangements, financing mechanisms and discursive tactics. By overcoming political barriers to land commodification and dispossession in this way, the Chongqing government has expanded the frontier of commodifiable land and sustained a land‐based, urban‐centric and debt‐financed accumulation. Instead of narrowing the urban–rural divide, this instrument reproduces and solidifies it. On this basis, the article argues that conceptual and political innovations for inclusive and equitable development needs to shift the attention from land to people.