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.     

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.     

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.     

Trans objects: materializing queer time in US transmasculine homes

Emerging from a participatory research project, this article draws on in-depth, semi-structured interviews, and home tours with trans masculine individuals and couples in the US Northeast to examine how homes come to function as spaces of both grounding and disidentification for transmasculine participants. In this article we argue that photographs and items of décor–particular, meaningful objects in trans homes–function to materialize the queerness of transition, and thus constitute a material expression of queer time. They provide a means for trans folks to acknowledge the queerness of the multiple life course temporalities co-present in the intimacy of private space, and we suggest that through these objects trans bodies engage in a process of becoming through moments of ‘co-substancing’ with the objects that are cherished, displayed, or hidden, in trans homespaces. In this article we suggest that objects on display in the home allow not just for a stretching of normative temporalities of the self, but also for the performance of home space as trans. We argue that more scholarly attention needs to be paid to the everyday, mundane geographies of transgender lives.     

Tanzanians in the Land of Oz: diaspora and transnationality in Wichita,Kansas

Studies of recent African immigration to the USA are part of increased scholarly concern for new diasporas and transnationality. Geographers' interests in how particular US settings impact upon African immigrants' experiences and how immigrants transform those settings can be enriched through studies of smaller communities, and their impacts on and experiences in the US outside of the main host cities. This case study of Tanzanians in Wichita, Kansas, concentrates on themes within this community's migration stories that emerged in our research. These include the pull of educational opportunity, the ambivalence of displacement, the simultaneous transnationality and translocality (or local fluidity) of Tanzanians in Wichita, and the diversity of experiences even within a small number of migrants. These themes appear commonly in many US African immigrant communities. We seek to address the possibly distinctive aspects of this case, due to its Tanzanian-ness and its relation to a presumably less likely migration destination, a mid-sized and not very diverse city in Kansas.     

Trans geographies,embodiment and experience

Queer geographers have long been interested in the interconnections between sexuality and space. With queer theorizing as its hallmark, queer geographical research has made substantial contributions to our understandings of genders, sexualities and embodiment and their constitution in, and production of, space and place. This article examines how trans scholarship intersects with several themes central to queer geographical research – subjectivity/performativity; experience/embodiment; and the historical, political and social constitution of what are now called ‘traditional’ LGBTQ or ‘queer’ urban spaces – and offers geographers interested in intersections between sexuality, gender and the body, alternative and challenging avenues of inquiry. This scholarship highlights, in part, the discontinuities and silences embedded in so-called LGBTQ and queer communities and spaces and points to the need to explore more particularly historical and political conceptualizations of the formations of subjectivities, identities and forms of embodiment in play in these spaces.     

Queers in the American City: Transgendered perceptions of urban space

This paper explores the complex relationship between transgendered people and cities in the USA, and, in particular, their relationship with queer spaces within those cities. Some have argued that queer spaces occur at the margins of society and constitute a safe haven for LGBT oppressed by the hetero-normative nature of urban areas. Data from a survey of 149 transgendered individuals indicate that although queer spaces provide a measure of protection for gender variant people, the gendered nature of these spaces results in continued high levels of harassment and violence for this population. The author argues that the strongly gendered dimensions of these spaces suggests that a discursive re-visioning of gender is needed to create more transgender friendly urban spaces.     

Women in prison: Ethnographic reflections on gender and the carceral state

The criminal justice system is increasingly becoming the subject of national dialogue throughout the United States due to the sheer number of people it impacts: according to the Department of Justice, nearly 7 million, or 1 in 35, U.S. residents are under some form of correctional control. The four books reviewed in this essay derive their findings from ethnographic methods that offer deep insights into the carceral state’s everyday operations in individual women’s lives, while raising profound theoretical and practical questions about gender and governance. We engage with these texts from unique situated standpoints as insider-outsiders with intimate knowledge of the U.S. criminal justice system gleaned from our respective lived experiences, services provision work, and research with currently and formerly incarcerated Wyoming women.     

Introduction: towards trans geographies

Gender geographies have focused on normatively gendered men and women, neglecting the ways in which gender binaries can be contested and troubled. Trans people question hegemonic conventions that link sexed bodies, gender roles and lives. This collection spans a range of theoretical fields in this context, including trans theories, queer engagement, feminist geographies, gender geographies and sexualities geographies. It offers empirical investigations of trans lives, while addressing the often theoretical use of ‘trans’ to render gender fluid, incoherent and unintelligible. As a whole this themed section questions geography's presumption of man/woman and male/female.     

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.     

Intimate mobilities: emotional embodiment and queer migration

This paper offers theoretically-informed empirical insights into queer migration in the contemporary West. Understanding the rationales, patterns and outcomes of migration is important for scholars researching the life experiences of gay men, lesbians and other non-heterosexuals. This paper advances knowledge of queer migration by interpreting interview data from thirty-seven gay and lesbian Australians. The analysis is prompted by a qualitative and narrative turn in migration studies, and the urgings of new mobility studies to account for the embodied and emotional dimensions of migration. Interrogating gay and lesbian Australians' migration narratives over the life course, I scrutinise the emotionally embodied nature of queer migration. I focus on the body as a vector of displacement, and explore how emotions, desires and intimate attachments shape queer mobilities. Respondents particularly emphasised the roles of ‘comfort’ and ‘love’ in relocation decisions. I found that these feelings interleaved with three patterns of emotionally embodied queer migration in the data—coming out, gravitational and relationship migrations. The embodied affects of comfort played a key role in coming out and gravitational migrations, while the exigencies of love underpinned relationship migration.     

Genocide and Global Queer Politics

This article presents a critical analysis of the relationship between the concept of genocide and global queer politics, offering an original mapping and examination of the discourse of genocide in this respect. Starting from the beginnings of genocide discourse with Lemkin and the United Nations Genocide Convention, existing literature is analysed to reveal circumscribed usage in relation to non-heterosexual lives. The methodology combines analysis of genocide discourse with case studies. The article maps and analyses the historically shifting form of genocide discourse, including through attention to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and demonstrates how the patriarchal and heteronormative origins of this discourse continue to have effects that exclude queer people. This analysis is developed, in particular, in relation to the absence of sexuality, gender, sexual orientation or gender identity as group categories in the Genocide Convention. Interwoven with this analysis of discourse, case study analysis is used in relation to Nazi Germany, Uganda and the Gambia to establish genocidal processes focused on homosexuality in each. The scope of claims for anti-homosexual acts of genocide is thus extended in Nazi Germany and Uganda, and such a claim is initiated in the Gambia, while appreciating the complex relation of “homosexuality” to African sexual identities. It is also argued that new definitions of groups from the Rwanda tribunal represent openings for some kinds of queer politics. The concluding section then draws on the discourse analyses of Foucault and postcolonial studies to initiate discussion of the potential discursive effects of invoking genocide in relation to homosexuality or queer politics, in particular contexts. It is argued that a greater consciousness of genocide in queer analysis and politics would be desirable, even while the existing terms of genocide discourse must be contested.     

Risk and security on the Mexico-to-US migrant journey: women’s testimonios of violence

In this article, I argue that immigrants’ meanings, perceptions, and feelings of risk and (in)security are relational, multi-scalar, and contextual to lived experiences before, during, and after the migration journey. Paying attention to and analyzing Mexican women’s testimonios of intimate experiences uncovers why they migrate, how migration is experienced, and how migrant women frame their lives in the US. In this article, I compare how national and transnational policies of the War on Drugs in Mexico, which increased militarization of the US-Mexico border and created tougher immigration policies in the US (all in the name of US national security), form and transform intimate experiences of risk and (in)security across the migration journey for the same population. This comparative approach challenges and expands US-Mexico literature that does not read across experiences in the three sites of the migration journey.     

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.     

Playing for Ireland in foreign fields: the Gaelic Athletic Association and Irish nationalism in America

With a few exceptions, the existing scholarship on the relationship between the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) and Irish nationalism has largely overlooked the experiences of the Irish diaspora. This article seeks to redress this neglect by exploring the ways in which Irish nationalism has historically been produced, reproduced and contested amongst members of the GAA in the USA. In light of their status as focal points of Irish immigration and as centres of Gaelic games activity in America, the article focuses on the cities of Boston, New York, Chicago and San Francisco. It draws on extensive archival and interview research conducted in each locale since 2000 and reveals that while intensely politicised and ethnic versions of Irish nationalism have historically weaved their way through US branches of the Association, since the mid-1990s there have been a number of socio-economic and political developments both in Ireland and in America that have seen the GAA begin to articulate a more civic, less ethnically bounded version of Irish nationalism.     

Towards transnational feminist queer methodologies

This article introduces the possibilities of transnational feminist queer research as seeking to conceptualise the transnational as a methodology composed of a series of flows that can augment feminist and queer research. Transnational feminist queer methodologies can contest long-standing configurations of power between researcher and researched, subject and object, academics and activists across places, typically those which are embedded in the hierarchies of the Global North/Global South. Beginning with charting our roots in, and routes through, the diverse arenas of transnational, feminist, participatory and queer methodologies, the article uses a transcribed and edited conversation between members of the Liveable Lives research team in Kolkata and Brighton, to start an exploration of transnational feminist queer methodologies. Understanding the difficult, yet constructive moments of collaborative work and dialogue, we argue for engagements with the multiplicities of ‘many-many’ lives that recognise local specificities, and the complexities of lives within transnational research, avoiding creating a currency of comparison between places. We seek to work toward methodologies that take seriously the politics of place, namely by creating research that answers the same question in different places, using methods that are created in context and may not be ‘comparable’. Using a dialogue across the boundaries of activism/academia, as well as across geographical locations, the article contends that there are potentials, as well as challenges, in thinking ourselves through transnational research praxis. This seeks complexities and spatial nuances within as well as between places.     

King Davidʼs Exposure while Dancing: A Queer Reading of 2 Samuel 6

According to the Hebrew version of the transport of the ark to Jerusalem in 2 Samuel 6, King David is so scantily dressed that he publicly exposes himself while dancing before G*d (????). David?s wild, gay and possibly sexual conduct can evoke associations with the behavior of gay persons of today. Queer readers may identify with David and like him turn their backs on dominant rulers—like the members of Saul?s dynasty—if they are not respected because of their queer way of life, but persecuted—as David was persecuted by King Saul. Such an interpretation implies that G*d (????) is on the side of persons like King David, who—from the point of view of other people as well as of David?s wife Michal—behave in a strange fashion, thus act queerly.     

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.     

Studies of Gender in the Prehispanic Americas

In the past ten years archaeologists have produced a vast literature on the study of gender in the prehispanic New World. This review defines key concepts, identifies three major themes within this tradition—gender in native cosmologies, intersections of gender and the body, and studies of work and specialization—and explores the significant contributions of engendered archaeology to the broader field. Final suggestions for linkages with queer studies and indigenous feminism point the way to where this field might develop productive new avenues of research.