Queering bathrooms: sexing bathrooms

This article is part of a review symposium of Sheila Cavanagh's book Queering bathrooms: gender, sexuality and the hygienic imagination, 2010, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 295 pp., £19.94 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-4426-10736     

Queering bathrooms: gender,sexuality and the hygienic imagination

This article is part of a review symposium of Sheila Cavanagh's book Queering bathrooms: gender, sexuality and the hygienic imagination, 2010, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 295 pp., £19.94 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-4426-10736     

Queering women,peace and security

The aim of the eight Women, Peace and Security (WPS) United Nations Security Council resolutions, beginning with UNSCR 1325 in 2000, is to involve women in peacebuilding, reconstruction and gender mainstreaming efforts for gendered equality in international peace and security work. However, the resolutions make no mention of masculinity, femininity or the LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) population. Throughout the WPS architecture the terms ‘gender’ and ‘women’ are often used interchangeably. As a result, sexual and gender‐based violence (SGBV) tracking and monitoring fail to account for individuals who fall outside a heteronormative construction of who qualifies as ‘women’. Those vulnerable to insecurity and violence because of their sexual orientation or gender identity remain largely neglected by the international peace and security community. Feminist security studies and emerging queer theory in international relations provide a framework to incorporate a gender perspective in WPS work that moves beyond a narrow, binary understanding of gender to begin to capture violence targeted at the LGBTQ population, particularly in efforts to address SGBV in conflict‐related environments. The article also explores the ways in which a queer security analysis reveals the part heteronormativity and cisprivilege play in sustaining the current gap in analysis of gendered violence.     

Queering the transnational turn: regionalism and queer Asias

In recent years, queer studies has increasingly interrogated the racial and colonial unconscious embedded in the earlier studies of non-normative genders and sexualities through the critical frameworks of queer of color critique and queer diaspora studies. This article aims to ‘queer the transnational turn’ by considering what critical edge ‘regionalism’ might bring to the investigation of queer modernities in Asia from both contemporary and historical vantage points. The introductory section of the article provides a broad overview of the ‘transnational turn’ in queer studies, what we diagnose as the ‘area unconscious’ of queer studies in its exclusive critique of Western colonial modernity, and the related binary of cultural particularism versus Eurocentric universalism. Alternatively, we argue that the concept of regionalism can be productively mobilized in order to study the various scales of queer sexualities that traffic within and circulate across Southeast Asia, Australia, imperial China, and contemporary Sinophone cultures (Sinitic-language communities on the margins of or outside mainland China). Through a paired reading of Johann S. Lee’s Singaporean queer novel, Peculiar Chris (1992), and Su Chao-Bin and John Woo’s Sinophone martial art film, the Reign of Assassins (2010), our inquiry accounts for how the spatial–temporal telos of global queering get materially translated across multiple regional hubs of sexual differences. Queer regionalism in Singapore, China, and the Sinophone worlds encompasses relational dynamics, power differentials, and subnational and supranational linkages. Finally, queering regionalism can open up new analytical frameworks for the study of sexualities and corporealities across transcolonial relations and wider temporal and spatial connections.     

Peeing under surveillance: bathrooms,gender policing,and hate violence

The experiences of trans and gender non-conforming people in public restrooms confirms what feminist scholars have been saying for decades: public space is not a neutral space, rather it is where power is enacted. In this intervention, I extend Foucault’s analysis of docile bodies to gender, suggesting that sex-segregated bathrooms are technologies of disciplinary power, upholding the gender binary by forcing people to choose between men’s and women’s rooms. The resulting lack of safe access to public restrooms is an everyday reality for those who fall outside of gender binary norms. Faced with a built environment that denies their existence and facilitates gender policing, I argue that trans and gender non-conforming people sometimes engage in situational docility. Bodies are adjusted to comply with the cardinal rule of gender – to be readable at a glance – which is often due to safety concerns. Changing the structure of bathrooms to be gender inclusive and/or neutral may decrease gender policing in bathrooms and the need for this situational docility, allowing trans and gender non-conforming people to pee in peace.     

Operating anew: Queering GIS with good enough software

In the last decade, conversations around queering of GIScience emerged. Drawing on literature from feminist and queer critical GIS, with special attention to the under‐examined political economy of GIS, I suggest that the critical project of queering all of GIS, both GIScience and GISystems, requires not just recognition of the labour and lives of queers and research in geographies of sexualities. Based upon a queer feminist political economic critique and evidenced in my teaching critical GIS at two elite liberal arts colleges, I argue that the “status quo” between ESRI and geography as a field must be interrupted. Extending a critical GIS focus beyond data structures and data ethics, I argue that geographic researchers and instructors have a responsibility in queering our choice and production of software, algorithms, and code alike. I call this production and choice of democratic, accessible, and useful software by, for, and about the needs of its users, good enough software.     

Queering rurality: reading The Miseducation of Cameron Post geographically

This paper contributes to research on geographies of queer rural youth through an analysis of an award-winning young adult novel, The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Danforth (2012a. The Miseducation of Cameron Post. New York: Harper Collins). Three themes from the text are explored in this paper. The first is the well documented heterosexism of rural life. We note that the main protagonist, Cameron Post, experiences rural life on the margins, not only because of her queer identity but also because of her age and gender. A second theme in Danforth’s text is that rural spaces can be transgressively queer. In this respect the author subverts conflations of rurality and heterosexuality and urbanity and homosexuality as well as universalising notions of rurality as static, repressive and exclusive. The final theme emerging from a geographical reading of the text is that of placelessness. While highlighting the pervasiveness of this theme, we note that it elicits criticism from readers in relation to the book’s ending as it departs from the norms of familiar coming-out-narratives. In conclusion, we emphasise the efficacy of young adult literature as a source for furthering geographic knowledge about young people and sexuality.     

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.     

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.     

Queering the pitch: race,class, gender and nation in the Indo-Australian encounter

Recent cricket contests between Australia and India offer a fascinating theatre to examine issues of race, class, nation, and gender. I chart their protean character as they are performed and deployed in these encounters. Instead of exploring relations between already extant and singular entities called “India” or “Australia,” it might be more useful to see the performative practices of those situated at different loci of enunciation by which those categories are momentarily congealed and given meaning or content. While there is a surfeit of charged cricketing encounters between the two nations, I focus on two in this essay: (a) Rahul Dravid's speech at the annual Bradman Oration in 20111, and (b) what has come to be called ‘Monkeygate’ – a bitter and acrimonious cricket test match between India and Australia in 2007 played in Sydney.     

Queering disasters: on the need to account for LGBTI experiences in natural disaster contexts

This article seeks a queering of research and policy in relation to natural disasters, their human impacts, management and response. The human impacts of natural disasters vary across different social groups. We contend that one group largely absent from scholarly and policy agendas is sexual and gender minorities, or lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender/transsexual and intersex (LGBTI) populations. To demonstrate that these minorities have particular experiences that need to be addressed, we critically review five case studies that comprise the limited scholarly and policy research on LGBTI populations in disasters to date. Building on this, we offer some specific ways forward for queer disaster research that accounts for the vulnerabilities, needs and resilient capacities of LGBTI populations. In doing so, we recognise and urge researchers, policy-makers and aid agencies to acknowledge that LGBTI populations are not homogeneous and have different needs wrought by intersections of socio-economic resources, gender, race/ethnicity, age and regional or national location.     

Queering the family home: narratives from gay,lesbian and bisexual youth coming out in supportive family homes in Australia

Geographical literature has predominantly presented the heterosexual nuclear family home as an oppressive environment for gay, lesbian and bisexual (GLB) youth, reporting that homophobic abuse, violence and expulsion are not uncommon outcomes of coming out at home. While not denying the widespread reality of these experiences, little consideration has been given to GLB youth whose disclosure at home is affirmed by parents and siblings, nor the reasons for and consequences of this acceptance and support. This article begins to fill this gap, contributing to geographies of sexuality, home and family. Through a critical reading of autobiographical coming out narratives from Australia, I reconsider the experience of the nuclear family home for well-supported GLB youth, arguing against the normalization of the homophobic nuclear family home. Through the support of parents and siblings, family homes can become sites of resistance to wider practices of heterosexism, and support for GLB youth. Heterosexual identity does not ‘essentially’ generate heterosexist reactions and attitudes: some heterosexual parents and siblings welcome and nourish sexual difference, and this provides fissures in overarching structures of heteronormativity which allow for the generation of non-heterosexual subjectivities and desires. I contend that this actually ‘queers’ the family home, providing a space for the fluorescence of non-heterosexuality within an apparently heteronormative site.