Messing with the attractiveness algorithm: a response to queering code/space

Responding to the collection of articles, ‘Queering Code/Space,’ this article discusses how algorithms affect the production of online lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) spaces, namely online dating sites. The set of articles is well timed: lesbian bars have closed en masse across the US and many gay male bars have followed suit so that online spaces fill – or perhaps make – a gap in the social production of LGBTQ spaces. I draw on Cindi Katz’s idea of ‘messy’ qualities of social reproduction and the necessity of ‘messing’ with dominant narratives in order to think about the labor, experience, and project of queering code/space.     

A queer theory of software studies: software theories,queer studies

This introduction to the themed section ‘Queering Code/Space’ poses the question: what is the spatial relationship between technology and sexuality? We outline two overarching issues concerning technology and sexuality that lie outside of yet intersect with discussions in geographical scholarship. We then detail the characteristics of two largely distinct schools of thought – software studies and queer theory – to examine the tensions of and correspondence between these separate intellectual systems. We assess what might be productively found at the intersections of software studies and queer theory in terms of their respective epistemological approaches toward the topics of technology and sexuality. We briefly outline the effects the combination of software studies and queer theory have had on geography and what more they might have to offer. We conclude by providing an overview of the articles in the themed section.     

Trans experiences in lesbian and queer space

This article explores how individuals who identify as transgendered and transsexual men experience the internal possibilities, limitations, and resistances found in spaces identified as ‘lesbian’ or as ‘queer’ in the City of Toronto. The article draws on interview data transcribing the experiences of 12 transgender and transsexual individuals in LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer) spaces. These interviews empirically illustrate how fluid and unfixed gendered and sexualized practices can transform spaces and their occupants. Further, this article considers the ways spaces may be ‘queered’ and the implications of these processes on the constitution of LGBTQ spaces. The experiences of transmen in lesbian and queer spaces bring into sharp relief the complex ways that material spaces, even those arising out of resistive impulses, incorporate disciplining expectations and new opportunities. Those who research or utilize these places must be attentive to these processes, if there is to be a serious commitment to the creation of libratory, inclusive spaces.     

Queering code/space: the co-production of socio-sexual codes and digital technologies

The mutual production of space by sexuality and technology has been differently addressed in the often-disparate disciplinary pursuits of queer geographies and critical studies of technology in geography. Building on Dodge and Kitchin’s ‘code/space,’ we highlight how studies of technology in geography are already concerned with questions of sexuality through the examination of biopolitics and the regulation of bodies, together with the (re-)establishment of new and old lines between the public and the private. The immanence of sexuality in code/space foregrounds the importance of spatial processes characterised by their difference and normativity in the geographies of technology. Queer geographies critically examine such different experiences and processes of differentiation through space in their nuanced conceptualisations of spatial regulation and transgression. We illustrate how these two bodies of geographical scholarship might be synthesised by outlining three approaches for studies of ‘queer code/space.’ To show how there are a variety of relationships between sexuality, code, and space, we play on the double entendre of ‘code’ as a set of social rules and norms, and ‘code’ as the set of algorithmic instructions underlying software systems. In both senses, codes constrain forms of intimate life, but can also transgress, disrupt, and distribute the norm. To queer code/space is to emphasise the complexities of difference and normativity in living with technologies, where technologies might both proliferate and regulate socio-spatial experience.     

Intersectional feminist and queer geographies: a view from ‘down-under’

Despite rapid growth of geographies of genders and sexualities over the past decade, there is still a great deal of homophobia, transphobia, and heterosexism within academic knowledges. A queer and feminist intersectional approach is one way to highlight gendered absences, institutionalized homophobia and transphobia. To understand the diversity of genders and sexualities, feminist and queer geographers must continue to talk about, for example, genders (beyond binaries), sex, sexualities, bodies, ethnicities, indigeneity, race, power, spaces and places. It is vitally important to understand the way that genders and sexualities intermingle in community group spaces, rural spaces, and within indigenous spaces in order to push the boundaries of what feminist and queer geographers understand to be relevant sites of queer intersectionality. Reflecting on the production of queer and feminist geographical knowledges ‘down-under’ may prompt others to consider the way place matters to intersectional feminist and queer geographies.     

‘The Tent’s Big Enough for Everyone’: online slash fiction as a site for activism and change

This article draws on a piece of wide-scale mixed-methods research (n = 429) that examines how women who write and read male/male erotica feel their involvement with the genre has affected their views on gender and sexuality and their political engagement with gay rights issues. Previous work has looked at how online slashfic communities might provide a safe space for exploring gender performance and sexuality, while other researchers have observed a tension between those who identify as queer themselves and those who only ‘play at queerness’ exclusively within the online environment. However, much of this work has examined the theoretical positioning of such forums as transgressive and/or political. Far fewer pieces have attempted to engage with the women who frequent such sites to ask them about whether their involvement in these online spaces has affected their attitudes and behaviours. This study looks not only at the ways in which online m/m fandoms can act as a safe space for women to explore their sexualities and gender identities, but whether and how these insights connect to women’s real-world lives. Data presented here shows a strong consensus among participants that involvement with explicit slash communities has had a positive effect on their lives, as well as contributing to beneficial changes in their knowledge, attitudes, and practices with regards to LGBTQ+ issues. Overall, slash is seen as a medium which can create better allies, encourage cross-identification, and bring about positive personal changes. To this extent, I argue that explicit online slash sites can act as heterotopias.     

The Freak Show’s ‘Missing Links’: Krao Farini and the Pleasures of Archiving Prehistory

This article offers a new perspective on Victorian freakery and prehistory by reading the career of Krao Farini, the ‘Missing Link’, through lenses of queer theory and archival studies. Born in Laos with hypertrichosis, a condition that produces an abundance of body hair, Krao transformed into living proof of the ‘Missing Link’ upon migrating to London in the 1880s. I contextualize Krao’s exhibition by situating her show within contemporaneous visual, textual, and performed examples of the ‘Missing Link’. Reading Krao alongside these other ‘Missing Links’ illuminates inconsistencies in their representations of gender and sexuality that nullify firm distinctions between ‘pre’ and ‘history’. I argue that the freak show’s ‘Missing Link’ materializes rhetorical and epistemological connections between Victorian prehistory and contemporary queer historiography to provide a valuable framework for accessing queer archives otherwise buried in the historical record. Though the correlations between prehistory and queer history are not necessarily explicit, locating their similarities reveals how persistent notions of Victorian time inform contemporary queer scholarship. Presaging recent queer archival interventions, Krao’s remaining archive demonstrates how prehistory breeds alternative models of evidence that disorder the archive’s relation to time: evidence of the ‘Missing Link’ unravels the language of stability, family, and presence on which archives typically rest. Resisting the implicitly heteronormative logic of the archival document, prehistory makes possible new ways of narrating Victorian histories of freakery, imperialism, and gender and sexuality.     

Confusing the grid: spatiotemporalities,queer imaginaries,and movement

Mediating between queer theory's privileging of time as actor and geographic emphases on material spaces and identities, this article engages feminist geographies and the work of Deleuze and Guattari to understand the implications of time and space as imagined, or actors' spatiotemporal imaginaries. We draw on Massumi's metaphor of the ‘grid,’ which sediments ways of seeing self and other and logics for action and interaction. The grid incites imaginaries of time as active and space as passive, which evoke past, present, and future, offering coordinates for locating identities. Focusing on spatiotemporality, we conduct a discourse analysis of interviews with two Chilean lesbian-feminist activists, focusing on (1) overtly spatial and temporal dimensions (nation, region, history), (2) the constitution of lesbian space and identity (identity, visibility, consciousness, and community), and (3) oppositional entities that stabilize lesbian identity and space (men, gay men, feminists, universities, and queer). We demonstrate how the activists' imagining of Chile as a space with a linear history with a fixed past and present directs their actions to a particular future of pre-given positions. Nonetheless, we point to moments of disidentificatory movement that returns analytic attention to process, creation, and the open potentiality of movement. The politics of spatiotemporal imaginaries offers activists, geographers, and queer theorists ways of narrating sexualized subjects and politics that are not repetitive of identitarian debates, history as necessary sequence, or spaces as material.     

Feminist historical geographies: doing and being

Abstract

As part of GPC’s 25-year anniversary celebrations, this article explores possibilities and prospects for feminist historical geographies and geographers. Here I define feminist historical geography as scholarship which asks geographical questions of historical material and is informed by feminist theories, approaches and methodologies. Its empirical subject matter is necessarily expansive and diverse, but often has a particular focus on the lives of women and other marginalized groups, and on the ways gender and space were co-constituted. This essay interrogates recent developments within this broad terrain, specifically articles and books published in the period from around 2000 onwards and either appearing in geography journals or written by those self-identifying as geographers. The main exception is work by historians and archaeologists interested in gender, space and place, which is cited here in an attempt to open up new research directions for feminist historical geographers. In what follows, we shuttle across spaces and between scales, roaming from the sites of empire to the intimate geographies of the home, from landscapes and buildings to personal possessions like clothes and letters. Doing so is a deliberate act intended both to demonstrate the liveliness of feminist historical geographies broadly conceived and to counter hierarchical readings of space, society and history with their inherent danger of privileging the public over the private, and the exceptional over the everyday and mundane.     

Making space for queer youth: adolescent and adult interactions in Toledo,Ohio

Queer youths and queer youth-related issues are under-researched in geography. I contribute to the existing literature by investigating how adultist practices can both constrain and empower queer youth within the context of schools. Issues involving adolescence and sexuality are complex, and these nuances become more pronounced with regard to nonnormative sexual identities and expressions. Using interviews with adult queer youth advocates in Toledo, Ohio, I look at the ways in which adults construct uncertain, anxious and contradictory ‘safe spaces’ that can work to constrain/restrict queer youth but also to empower and/or facilitate queer youths' negotiation and navigation of other, predominantly heterosexist social spaces.     

Can't I be seen? Can't I be heard? Black women queering politics in Newark

What does it mean for a black female to negotiate urban space? How is her body read, her politics enacted, and her agency understood and interpreted? How do black women use their bodies and identities to challenge structural intersectionality in US cities? To answer these questions, I explore how black women embraced a set of oppositional spatial practices to resist the intersectional effects of misogyny, homo/transphobia, racism, and poverty in Newark, New Jersey. I reconstruct the creation of the Newark Pride Alliance, a local lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual and queer coalition that mobilized in 2003 and 2004, after the death of Sakia Gunn. Exploring migrations between ‘black women,’ ‘black queer’ and ‘black feminist,’ I examine how black women respatialized social capital and enacted resistance. Through semi-structured interviews and frame analysis, I explore how black women forged new relationships between queer youth and black vernacular institutions, and created political spaces in which honest engagement of issues of gender violence, poverty, and power could take place.     

Immoral geographies and Soho’s sex shops: exploring spaces of sexual diversity in London

London’s Soho, situated in the urban heart of the city has long been understood as both a cosmopolitan and diverse space where transgression and deviance, particularly in relation to the sex industry and sexual commerce, are constitutive of this area. Drawing on three years of ethnographic fieldwork, we add to some of the existing debates on sexual spaces in Soho by documenting the changes to the social/sexual landscape of sex shops in this area, and look to geographers interested in the spatial politics of gender and sexuality to understand the importance of this particular place. Looking at two particular sex shops in Soho, we argue that the spatial practices in this very specific part of the city encourage a disruption of traditional hierarchies that often govern gender and sexed practices, and invite women, LGBTQ and kink communities to inhabit more inclusive spaces of sexual citizenship.     

Queering Communia: the politics of positionality when doing research on squatting in Rome

The politics of positionality in relation to sexuality and desire has remained unquestioned when investigating autonomous and alternative spaces, these studies mainly focused on political positionality through the adoption of militant and action-based methodologies. The article tries to fill this void by discussing issues of positionality related to sexuality and desire when doing research on squatting. The main aim is to discuss how entering the field in social movements research through an action-based approach can lead the researcher to involve every aspect of their life, including sexuality and desire. By discussing the case of my PhD research project focused on the re-emergence of squatting initiatives in Rome, the article is aimed at showing how my sexuality, notably my previous engagement in queer politics, has represented an important issue when negotiating with my research partners. When discussing the strategies and activities I adopted, the article plays with the tensions between being queered by the fieldwork and queering it, showing the possibilities of contamination as well as the limits of the politics of positionality.     

White gloves,feminist fists: race,nation and the feeling of ‘vintage’ in femme movements

This article raises the question of how the cultural politics of race and nation manifest within contemporary queer femme movements, performances and aesthetic practices. Focussing on the feeling of ‘vintage’, I specifically examine symbols, icons and aesthetics used in projects to queer femininity that invoke ‘the 1950s’. Grounded in femme-inist multi-sited ethnographic research in a movement to which I also belong, I draw on interviews and participant observation in queer subcultural spaces and analyse two examples of ‘vintage’ iconography within contemporary femme organizing where ‘vintage’ is a form of archival activism that also relates to a broader cultural imaginary of racialized femininity. Then I turn to an example of queer performance where ‘vintage’ is used as a critique of imperialism and whiteness. In closing, I discuss how the feeling of ‘vintage’ relates to whiteness and to a form of imperialist nostalgia.     

Queerly situated? Exploring negotiations of trans queer subjectivities at work and within community spaces in the UK

While traditional perspectives on transgender from some strands of feminism and within medical/psychoanalytical discourse have argued that transgender people conform to and reproduce gender stereotypes, queer theory has celebrated transgender as a site that highlights the social and cultural construction of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ and, moreover, as a symbol of transgressive gender possibility. Both of these readings ignore the complexities of lived trans experiences and identifications. By evaluating a queer reading of trans through recent empirical research into transgender identities, I suggest that while trans identifications certainly queer binary models of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’, such transgressions are materially, culturally, socially and spatially contingent. The article draws on empirical research to explore the ways in which access to queer subjectivities is constrained by, and negotiated alongside, the locales of the workplace and community spaces.     

Gay-riatrics: spatial politics and activism of gay seniors in Tel-Aviv’s gay community centre

This paper discusses aspects of spatial politics and activism at the municipal Gay Community Centre in Tel Aviv. It focuses on one marginal group within the LGBT community that is active in the centre – gay seniors. Drawing on theories of queer geography, queer gerontology and geographies of activism and social movements, the qualitative research reported here uses in-depth interviews and participant observations to demonstrate how these men construct the space for their activity both inside and outside the centre. On the one hand, this spatial politics shifts along a delicate axis between proximity to the municipality and community hegemony, looking ‘inside’ the community on the one hand. On the other, it subverts and challenges the existing communal order, looking ‘outside’ to the surrounding society. However, these two directions are not necessarily binary; rather, as the paper shows, they stand in a dialectic that holds them in tension. This tension is evident in the ways in which the group operates from within the core of the hegemony, creating a complex non-dichotomous reality that enables politics that acts within – and despite – the mainstream.     

The ‘rights’ (and ‘wrongs’) of articulating race with sexuality: the conflicting nature of hegemonic legitimisation in South African queer politics

Much work has recently explored the remarkable legislative achievements that have benefited queer groups in South Africa. Less well understood has been an appreciation as to how the links between histories of racism and histories of sexuality deployed to legitimate such legal challenges may also have directly helped to entrench the ability of others to argue against queer rights. Drawing on the work of Stuart Hall, this article will explore how queer activist's association with an ideology of ‘equality’ (and the link between racism and sexuality-based discrimination) has not simply concluded discussion about the rights (or wrongs) of queer rights. Instead that association has helped align the issue of sexuality within a far broader debate as to what the ‘New South Africa’ should mean after a racist past. This may help us appreciate a so far little understood and yet key reason why homophobia remains such a pervasive problem in the country.     

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.     

Putting Geography in its Place

Work on the history of geographical knowledge and practice frequently draws inspiration from theoretical insights developed elsewhere in the academy. After briefly touching on some of these historiographical matters, I argue that geographers might make some telling interventions into this debate by attending to some of their own key concepts – space, site, location – and disclosing their significance for elucidating the history of intellectual traditions. The fact that historians of science have begun to remark on the role of ‘place’ in knowledge production and consumption further confirms the value of this ‘geographical turn’. Subsequently I dwell on the implications of a spatialised historiography for work on the history of geography itself, and urge that ‘the history of geography’ might profitably be reconceptualised as ‘the historical geography of geography’.     

Sexualities,subjectivities and urban spaces: a case for assemblage thinking

In this essay, we argue that assemblage thinking has much to offer geographers attempting to conceptualize the interrelationships between sexualities, subjectivities and contemporary urban spaces. In our current research on queer mobilities, we found that despite the explanatory weight provided by mobilities approaches, two fundamental questions remained: how to conceptualise the nature of ‘the queer subject’, and how to better explain why certain kinds of urban spaces still seemed to support these newly mobile queer subjects. Here we speculate on the potential of assemblage thinking to formulate some new theoretical and conceptual responses to these questions. While quite preliminary, there is the potential to understand how interlocking (but temporary and unstable) notions of identities, subjectivities and mobilities (of ideas, people, knowledge, capital, etc.) can be ‘assembled’ in and across urban spaces, recursively reshaping sexualities and places.