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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Planning,Law, and Sexuality: Hiding Immorality in Plain View

Emerging research in sexuality and space outlines the diverse forms of spatial governmentality used to discipline non‐normative sexual behaviours, exploring how exclusion, concealment, and repression combines to ensure that ‘immoral’ sexualities are out of the sight of the ‘moral majority’. In this paper, we explore this contention in relation to planning for sex service premises (brothels) in New South Wales, Australia. Though such sex service premises are now legal, our analysis nonetheless considers the way that these premises have been subject to forms of planning constraint that reflect planners' assumptions about the appropriate manifestation of sex premises within the urban landscape. By exposing the assumptions written into planning law that sex premises are legal but potentially disorderly, we demonstrate the evidential power of planning to reinforce dominant moral geographies through instruments which, at first glance, appear to be focused on objective questions of amenity and the ‘best use of land’. This paper hence explores the ways in which planners have translated assumptions of disorder into categories of visibility and distance, meaning that brothels have become hidden in plain view so as not to disturb the integrity of residential ‘family’ spaces.     

Dirty dancing: the (non)fluid embodied geographies of a queer nightclub in Tel Aviv

This paper examines the (non)fluid embodied geographies of a queer nightclub in Tel Aviv, Israel. The nightclub is considered to be a space of sexual liberation and hosted the Friendly Freedom Friday party. Yet, the space of the nightclub is also divided by gender and sexuality. We draw on individual in-depth interviews and participant observations to examine the tensions that arise from, and between, gay men, transwomen and club spaces. A number of paradoxes are present in the club. We argue that the fluidity of subjectivity—espoused by queer theorists—evaporates when confronted with the materiality of actual sweating bodies. We are interested in the visceral geographies of how and where sweat, and other body fluids, becomes matter out of place or ‘dirty.’ Three points structure our discussion. First, we outline the theoretical debates about body fluids and fluid subjectivities. Second, we examine gay men's and transwomen's bodily preparations that occur prior to attending the nightclub. The spatial, gendered and sexed dimensions of participants’ subjectivities are embedded in desires to attend the club. Finally, we argue that the spaces gay, partially clothed and sweating male bodies occupy are distinct from, and in opposition to, transwomen's clothed and non-sweating bodies.     

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.     

Critical urban collaborative ethnographies: articulating community with Sappho for Equality in Kolkata,India

This article reflects on the notion of community through a collaborative ethnographic study with women loving women in Kolkata. Performing critical urban ethnographies in the global south and writing about sexualities that defy easy spatial categorizations are vital for those who seek to extend the scholarship of sexualities beyond the ‘gayborhood paradigm’ in the global north. This article focuses on how women loving women understand community and activism in Kolkata, a city that exists within tireless attempts at economic rejuvenation and vibrant modes of living. The question of community is moot in political activism around decriminalization of same-sex relationships and social legitimacy of the same. Drawing on collaborative ethnographic work with Sappho for Equality, an activist collective working with sexually marginalized women in eastern India, we engage with community as a space through which women loving women articulate marginalization and strategically connect with normative social institutions. I begin my discussion by introducing the notion of critical collaborative ethnography as a way to practice accountability in social research. Following that through select ethnographic vignettes, I demonstrate how a ‘queer community’ is not a predetermined end but is always in the making: a process that forms and dissipates within specific material contexts, activist practices, and social encounters.     

Indigenous bodies,indigenous minds? Towards an understanding of indigeneity in the Ecuadorian Amazon

This article explores how perceptions about bodies and interpersonal exchanges contribute to the production of indigenous subjectivities in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Drawing on feminist methodologies and experiences with Cofán, Quichua and Secoya peoples in the province of Sucumbíos, I reflect on how bodies and their ‘grammar’ can become analytical spaces through which to understand indigeneity. Specifically, I look at the body as object and subject of imaginaries of difference with the goal to examine how moments and interactions through which people commonly identify as ‘indigenous’ construct, contest and/or maintain indigenous subjectivities. I conclude with a discussion on the possibilities of thinking about and with bodies to further a post-colonial questioning of indigeneity.     

Rethinking activism: tourism,mobilities and emotion

Abstract

This article seeks to trouble distinctions between activism and tourism, and activism and regionality. It does this by exploring the role of tourism, mobilities and emotion for a regional Australian queer collective, and their 1400 km return journey to the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Parade. In illustrating the ways this touristic journey represents alternative ways of performing queer activism, I argue that the existence of regional activism deconstructs notions that non-normative sexualities and queer politics do not exist beyond urban centres. Granting attention to the alternative ways the queer collective utilises tourism mobilities as part of their activism strengthens characterisations of leisure as always more than a space of hedonism and escape. Understanding the broader significance of events enables scholars to rethink festivals as spatially and temporally bounded, one off events but rather crucial to the ongoing sustainability of regional queer collectives and performances of queer activism in peripheral areas.     

A Transnational Feminist Critique of Queer Tourism

This article frames queer tourism through two lenses. First, I explore how queer tourism and queer spatiality occlude questions of gender and efface the varied modalities of travel, tourism, mobility, and space/place–making activities of women, especially with respect to queer women and lesbians. Second, I point out the neocolonial impulses of all queer travel by highlighting the colonial history of travel and tourism and the production of mobility through modernity, and vice versa. Following M Jacqui Alexander’s (1997) claim that white gay capital follows the path of white heterosexual capital, how are queer women, queers of color, and postcolonial lesbian and gays also implicated in this process? Through these questions I propose to think about queer tourism and space through theories of intersectionality. In other words, how do we acknowledge and theorize “difference” in queer spaces? How do multiple identities, intersectionality, and social differences make the construction of queer space impossible?     

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.     

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.     

Remapping disclosure: gay men's segmented journeys of moving out and coming out

Drawing on recent work that examines the contingent, personal nature of queer migration, this paper provides empirical support for recent claims that coming-out journeys are more complex than the linear, often rural-to-urban typologies that have framed them during the past two decades. Since coming-out journeys are rarely elaborated beyond a conceptual level, overly teleological understandings involving homophobic, rural places, inclusive urban homelands, and one-time, linear ‘flights’ and ‘escapes’ persist. Employing the migration narratives of 48 self-identified gay men who settled in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, and Washington, DC, USA, this paper challenges the linearity and finality of coming-out migration by highlighting particular segments of the journey. These include short-term trips to scout the gay life potentials of places, migrations that result in a degree of re-entry into ‘the closet,’ relocations that allow men to test or try on different places and identities, and moves (or imminent moves) that ‘trigger’—rather than stem from—a coming-out process. Taken together, these segments suggest that coming-out journeys are ongoing, relational, and often discontinuous journeys influenced by both queer individuals' intersectional subjectivities (e.g., age, race, and class) and the social contexts of the places they encounter.     

Flirtatious geographies: clubs as spaces for the performance of affective heterosexualities

This article addresses the (hetero)sexualized, sensuous and affective nature of straight club spaces in Singapore. By attending to the theoretical intersections between affect studies and feminist perspectives, I argue that straight clubs are sites for the performances of affective heterosexualities that may and may not end up re-inscribing asymmetrical gendered power relations. In so doing, I hope to contribute to the growing literature on affectual geographies by expounding on the numerous technologies of affect which are being deployed in order to incite, transmit and sustain (hetero)sexual desires between bodies. Flirtatious (hetero)sexual practices thus give rise to, and are a result of, the political manipulation of intensely felt affects. Furthermore, I suggest that we should not overlook how becoming (hetero)sexual ‘feels like’ because these ‘feelings’ work to crystallize (hetero)sexual spaces and subjectivities. Nonetheless, we must also be careful not to discount the salience of ‘heterosexuality’ as a representational device that serves to codify and categorize sexual desires between bodies.     

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.     

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.     

‘Lady Austin’s Camp Boys’: Constituting the Queer Subject in 1930s London

In December 1932, police raided a private ballroom in Holland Park Avenue. They found almost sixty men dancing, many in female clothing and make–up. An ongoing encounter between the police and working–class queer social worlds drew the ballroom into a public domain within which masculine sexualities were contested, produced and consumed. The ensuing trial gripped metropolitan opinion, becoming the most notorious and widely reported ‘pansy case’ of the 1930s. This paper explores the complex nexus of spaces and practices that cohered in the case as a site at which the queer subject was definitionally produced. During the trial both legal authorities and newspapers and the defendants sought to produce a stable contradistinction between queer and normal, though the meanings they invested in that difference diverged radically. Yet focusing upon the intersecting sites through which this queer subject was constituted – the city, the body and the police/policed interface – suggests the unsettling ambiguities undermining the stability of that difference. Throughout the case, the difference between queer and normal often seemed anything but self–evident, and the arrested men appeared an electric threat to the metropolitan cultural landscape.     

Pram mobilities: affordances and atmospheres that assemble childhood and motherhood on-the-move

The child-friendly city advocates for children's ‘right to the city’. Much of this advocacy focuses on the independent child, with little attention paid to the accompanied experiences of younger children, such as those travelling in prams. This paper draws on a material feminist perspective to help address this gap. We offer the concept of mother–child–pram assemblage to bring to the fore the corporeal dimensions of everyday pram journeys. By analysing sensory ethnographic materials collected with mothers and young children living in Wollongong, Australia, this paper highlights how the ‘affective affordances’ and ‘affective atmospheres’ of pram mobilities shape urban experience by reference to how motherhood and childhood are achieved on-the-move. We conclude with policy-relevant insights for the child-friendly city.