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.     

新时期大都市公共交通发展策略研究——香港公交发展启示

优先发展公共交通是破解我国城市交通困境的唯一方法,是建立"两型"社会的科学要求,是城市可持续发展的必由之路。从香港公共交通系统发展历程、规划设计和运营管理等视角,归纳总结了其成功经验和发展趋势,即从中心区走向市域、从道路走向轨道、从线网拓展走向服务提升、从行政干预走向法制保障、从环境污染走向环境友好。并针对我国城市公交发展现状,从社会人文、城市规划、科技体制等方面提出了:以人为本、公交城市、持续发展、系统协调、科技引领、体制建设的发展策略,以期为我国城市交通的新一轮跨越式发展提供参考依据。     

The tyranny of gendered spaces – reflections from beyond the gender dichotomy

This article argues critically that the consequences of a binary system of gender norms is experienced as a kind of gender tyranny both for those who transgress gender in their daily lives, but also for those whose lives are lived within such constraints. Feminist geographers and urban theorists have argued that space is gendered and that gendering has profound consequences for women. This article extends this analysis and shows how rigid categorizations of gender fail to include the intersexed and transgendered populations, a small and highly marginalized segment of the wider population. This article uses autoethnographic methods to illustrate the ways that those who transgress gender norms experience a tyranny of gender that shapes nearly every aspect of their public and private lives. The nature of these consequences is explored using citations from the transgender and queer literature as well as the lived experience of this tyranny by the author in a continuum of public to private spaces, including: parking lots, public restrooms, shopping malls, the workplace and the home.     

Gender and Sexuality in Latina/o Miami: Documenting Latina Transsexual Activists

This article examines the borderlands between transgender MTF (male‐to‐female) and gay male communities in Latina/o Miami through an analysis of the participation of Latinas in the Transsexual Action Organization (TAO). Previous research suggests that Cuban and Cuban American gay male culture have historically been associated with gender transgressive behaviour and identity. Because of this, it is often unclear how to distinguish between what is gay male/homosexual expression and transgender expression. If outward gender manifestations that we now call ‘transgender’ were understood in other historical and cultural contexts as ‘homosexual’, how do we label those manifestations today? By labelling them as homosexual are we simply reinscribing the marginalisation of transgender individuals? On the other hand, by labelling them as transgender are we imposing a contemporary category and therefore performing another kind of intellectual violence? In order to address these questions, I analyse a Latino/a organisation that explicitly labelled itself ‘transsexual’. TAO was an early transsexual rights organisation founded in 1970 by Angela Douglas in Los Angeles which moved to Miami Beach, Florida in 1972. Drawing on the organisation's publications, Moonshadow and Mirage Magazine (1972–75), and Douglas's self‐published autobiographical texts, Triple Jeopardy: The Autobiography of Angela Lynn Douglas (1983) and Hollywood's Obsession (1992), I analyse the rarely discussed participation of Latinas in the organisation.     

The affordable housing,transportation, and food nexus: Community gardens and healthy affordable living in Calgary

This study examining community gardens in Calgary was initiated in collaboration with the non-profit organization, Sustainable Calgary, as part of their housing-transportation-food nexus initiative. The main research objectives were to determine the socio-economic demographics of neighbourhoods that support community gardens and the proximity of community gardens to active transportation and public transit. Methods included the use of GIS visualization and quantitative analyses to investigate relationships between demographic variables of neighbourhoods that support community gardens, as well as the accessibility of active transit routes and Light Rail Transit stations. Findings show that community garden neighbourhoods are located in neighbourhoods with significantly fewer visible minorities, higher levels of educational attainment, and more attached dwellings such as apartments and townhomes. The average distance of community gardens from a major bike lane is 330 m, while the average distance from a Light Rail Transit station is 1.78 km. This study suggests potential inequities that may be present within the proliferation of public community gardens based on socio-economic factors other than economic capital. This paper concludes with a discussion surrounding implications and recommendations to further the equitable expansion of community gardens.     

“Protect the women!” Trans-exclusionary feminist issue framing and support for transgender rights

An increasingly salient policy innovation pursued by LGBT+ rights groups and socially liberal policy entrepreneurs is the right of trans people to bring their legally recorded sex in line with their lived gender by way of self-identification. In response to these moves toward trans inclusion, a unique coalition of trans-exclusionary (gender critical) feminists and traditionalist conservatives has emerged to challenge these reforms. This coalition of policy opponents, mirroring historical issue frames that present homosexuals as predatory sexual deviants, campaign on a salient issue frame that presents transgender individuals and the expansion of trans rights as an inimical threat to the security, safety, and welfare of (cisgender) women, particularly in single-sex spaces. In this paper, we address two questions. First, we ask: do trans-exclusionary “protect women” issue frames over the alleged threat of trans persons to (cis) women shape mass public opinion? Second, we ask: in a relatively LGBT+ friendly policy environment, who supports the right to self-identification for trans individuals? We answer these questions via an original pre-registered survey experiment embedded within the 2021 Scottish Election Study. We find that trans-exclusionary issue frames appealing to (cis) women's safety significantly depress support for trans rights, particularly among women respondents. Highlighting these concerns is an effective means of increasing already robust opposition to reforms designed to improve the welfare of transgender individuals, which should be of concern for proponents of self-identification policies.     

Quaker Schoolmasters, Toleration and the Law, 1689–1714

The 1689 Toleration Act allowed Protestant dissenters freedom to worship in public, but it was only a limited toleration and dissenters continued to suffer discrimination. This article examines the experience of Quakers in one important area, the Anglican monopoly in teaching. Although the prosecution of unlicensed teachers was patchy, localised, and dependent upon the hostility and zeal of particular individuals, few dissenters escaped harassment. Moreover, Friends appear to have suffered more severely because of the particular dislike that they still provoked and their unwillingness to compromise which often led to imprisonment. The growth in High Church feeling during Anne's reign led to a more rigorous enforcement of the existing statutes and the passing of the Schism Act (1714). The consequences of an Anglican educational monopoly have not been properly considered by historians largely from the assumption that the Schism Act was fatally compromised by the death of Queen Anne, and because little attention has been paid to the continued harassment of dissenters after toleration who attempted to teach. The Schism Act was repealed in 1719, but freedom for Quakers and other dissenters to teach had already been achieved largely through the courts.     

Geographies of gender and sexuality in Australia,from 1994 to 2018

Abstract

Corresponding with Gender, Place and Culture’s twenty-fifth anniversary, this country report surveys geographies of gender and sexuality in Australia over the last twenty-five years, from 1994 to 2018. It is a necessarily selective, rather than comprehensive, review. We map out some broad areas tackled by geographers of gender and sexuality in Australia, and accordingly scaffold our survey through themes that include the geographies of women, feminist approaches across the discipline, geographies of masculinities and geographies of sexualities. We highlight research that has investigated gender and sexuality in relation to private and public spaces, workplaces and leisure spaces, urban and rural spaces, digital spaces, and disasters, inter alia.     

Intersectionality and planning at the margins: LGBTQ youth of color in New York

Through an intersectional lens, this article reflects on the dialog between planning and gender, feminist, and queer studies to analyze the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth of color (YOC) community in New York City (NYC). The community is subject to multiple disenfranchisements, given their ethno-racial status, class, age, gender, and sexual orientation. This community's limited access to safe public spaces and amenities, housing, health services, job training, and other opportunities is an urban planning challenge insufficiently understood or addressed. Our methodology includes participant observation and analysis of an LGBTQ YOC tour of West Village in NYC, interviews with LGBTQ individuals and NGO staff, life stories, observations in LGBTQ-friendly meetings and facilities, and content analysis of LGBTQ reports and media coverage. The research shows the agency of an LGBTQ youth group as a resilient community organization effectively participating in planning processes and exerting rights to public space and services. Finally, it offers recommendations to planners and policy-makers to facilitate the recognition and expansion of rights to the city for LGBTQ, particularly YOC, by committing to understanding their unique conditions and needs and expanding their access to safe housing and public spaces, poverty reduction programs and job opportunities, and health and social support services.     

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.     

Trans migrations: Seeking refuge in “safe haven” Toronto

Trans and gender nonconforming (TGNC) people who make refugee claims in Canada negotiate a complex nexus of identity, belonging, and citizenship. Drawing on insights from TGNC refugees, immigration lawyers, and frontline workers, in this paper we examine the ways the state controls the trans body through the refugee claims process and in the process of integration into life in Canada, while also highlighting trans refugee methods of survival and resistance. What emerges is an understanding of the ways that refugees navigate the tension between gender, sexuality, and homecoming as both intimately felt and geopolitically managed. We convey TGNC refugee narratives to demonstrate how they both confirm and expand upon the existing literature on Canadian LGBTQ+ refugees. TGNC refugees' experiences at the Immigration and Refugee Board confirm insights from existing LGBTQ+ refugee studies. However, TGNC refugees' day-to-day lives differ significantly from LGB refugee lives as recounted in the literature. In TGNC refugees' attempts to access gender-affirming documentation, healthcare, housing, and income, they confront distinct systems of transgender exceptionalism, border imperialism, and racial and heteropatriarchal capitalism that limit their access to basic necessities and impact how they build home both conceptually and materially.     

Obscenity,Moral Contagion and Masculinity: Hijras in Public Space in Colonial North India

Abstract:

In the 1850s, the British “discovered” a community of transgender eunuch performers, the hijras, and legislated for their surveillance and control under the Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) in 1871. This article examines how the British dealt with transgender colonial subjects and the implications for our understanding of colonial masculinities. In particular, I analyse colonial attempts to erase hijras as a visible socio-cultural category and gender identity in public space through the prohibition of their performances and feminine dress. This case study demonstrates, first, how masculinity intersected with a broad range of colonial projects, agendas and anxieties. Focusing on the problematic presence of cross-dressing and performing hijras in public space, I examine how colonial attempts to order public space and reinforce political borders dovetailed with discourses of masculinity, obscenity and contagion. Second, I argue that attempts to discipline masculinity and obscenity were uneven in practice, meaning the CTA had varying localised impacts upon hijras. The lack of interest of some British officials in regulating hijras, inadequate policing resources, and pragmatic compromises opened up gaps in surveillance that hijras grasped and expanded, frustrating colonial attempts to transform their bodies and behaviours.     

“非正常”的文化标签下“同志”社会空间的生产——以广州市X公园“同志渔场”为例

性少数群体对于城市空间的利用是城市研究中的新兴话题。这类研究主要探讨"非主流"的社会身份如何通过对特定的社会空间的利用,引发空间意义的生产及社会关系的建构。本文以广州市X公园的"同志渔场"为案例,研究男同性恋者对于城市公共空间的利用与体验。研究认为,X公园的"同志渔场"不仅给性少数群体提供了性身份暂时解放的空间,亦是其不断体验自身"非正常"的身份标签的空间。同志的空间实践体现的不是对于主流的社会规范的抵抗。相反,他们的空间实践是明显地处在"非正常"这一身份标签的作用之下的。     

‘Some Very Queer Couples’: Gender Migrants and Intimacy in Nineteenth-Century America

This article contends that the term gender migrant – which describes a person who changed gender on a long-term basis in their everyday life – offers a useful tool for grappling with the ambiguities of nineteenth-century transgender history. Examining four cases of gender change that circulated in the popular press between the antebellum era and the turn of the twentieth century, the article brings to light intimate relationships that do not fit within the categories of female husbands or sexual inverts that have become familiar to historians of sexuality. Some female-assigned gender migrants lived as men and sought same-gender intimacy in the company of other men. Reading ambiguous cases of love and marriage from multiple angles provides insight into the strategies that resourceful gender migrants used to legitimise their public gender identities.     

Beyond moving people: excavating the motivations for investing in urban public transit infrastructure in Bilbao Spain

This paper explores the context and contradictions that have brought Bilbao Spain, a city of some 1 million inhabitants, to its stature as a leader and model of contemporary public transit. The decision to invest in public transit infrastructure is situated within an urban context that includes historical, economic, urban design, social, environmental and political motivations. From this contextual rooting, public transit projects are examined for their potential to achieve both a tangible set of objectives and an intangible symbolic meaning that presents transit projects as being about more than just moving people.     

Editorial: Gender and sexual geographies of blackness: anti-black heterotopias (part 1)

This editorial theorizes the spatialization of black gender and sexual minorities. We examine the ways in which race, gender, and sexuality work to complicate the geographies of black gender and sexual marginality. Drawing on insights from Foucault's theory of heterotopia, we develop the concept of anti-black heterotopias to understand the spatial ordering of black gender and sexuality within the larger geographies of black people. We contend that if anti-black racism forces black people to live within contained landscapes that exist on the margins of whiteness, then black gender and sexual minorities, who are subject to violence and public ridicule, live in a placeless space, a location with no coordinates. In other words, the heterosexism/homophobia toward black gender and sexual minorities that is expressed in socio/spatial terms is complicit with the spatialization of anti-black racism. We also use anti-black heterotopias as a way to situate the eight articles in parts 1 and 2 of this themed section, as well as to highlight the theoretical linkages between them.     

Feminism from the Margin: Challenging the Paris/Banlieues Divide

This paper aims to cast light on specifically French constructions of gender, citizenship and nationhood and articulate two bodies of work, one dealing with political mobilizations of racialized minorities in the French context, and the other dealing with gender concerns in urban policy. Emerging social movements in the urban area of Paris are having to take position in a context in which a normative “state feminism” is being used to stigmatize working‐class neighbourhoods in the banlieues as well as their male inhabitants. This paper considers the “double bind” in which feminist activists, and women more generally, find themselves as a result. It argues that some formerly silenced groups are being granted space for expression by the current foregrounding of “women” in urban policy. Drawing on bell hooks' insights on the margin/centre tension in feminist theory as a useful way of thinking about the spatial dimension of these issues, the paper looks at one group in particular that defines itself and its strategies in spatial terms.     

Performance and the politics of gender: transgender performance in contemporary Chinese films

This article focuses on two different genres of gender transitivity or impersonation. First, male actors who impersonate female characters. The two examples used to examine these impersonations are Chinese films Farewell My Concubine (Ba Wang Bie Ji 1993) and Forever Enthralled (Mei Lanfang 2009). Both films are based on the historical practice of dan in Peking Opera. Second, women who cross-dress as men for the sake of transgressing into the public sphere that had traditionally been forbidden for women. The main example of this is Hua Mulan (2009), a live action movie based on a Chinese legend of a female warrior called Hua Mulan, who disguises herself as a man to replace her father in the military service. Based on my close reading of the transgender performance in these Chinese films, the article will engage discussions of Western gender theories by Garber, Butler and Halberstam to examine the discourse and politics of gender and sexuality in contemporary China. To be more specific, a critical analysis will be carried out in the following three aspects: first, gender performativity is not necessarily subversive, but only suggests that heterosexual norms are arbitrary and unnatural. Second, rather than challenging heterosexism and gender binarism in contemporary China, the three films seem to support and consolidate the gender hierarchy. Thirdly, the category of transgender is intersected with art, identity and ideology in the specific social and historical settings. The contextualized analysis not only sheds new light on the implications of transgender in contemporary Chinese culture and politics but also questions the universalism of Western gender theories in cross-cultural contexts.     

Pray the gay away: identity conflict between Christianity and sexuality in Hong Kong sexual minorities

Recognition and respect for sexual minorities in Hong Kong is still a contested area. Public sexual identity politics in Hong Kong has been framed by traditional Chinese gender ideology and imported Christian beliefs which are profoundly negative. Focusing on the interpersonal relationships in three spheres of life, the research adopted the sociological perspective of personal life and the feminist geographers’ idea of spatialization of identity management to analyze how the sexual self of sexual minorities has been marginalized and excluded in intimate social spaces of family, church communities and schools in Hong Kong with specific spatial practices and different forms of power/knowledge. By examining overlooked intimate injustice in personal life, this study illustrates that identity conflicts between Christianity and non-heterosexuality in everyday life is constructed through misrepresentation, misrecognition, harassment and exclusion in intimate relationships. Different types of knowledge are being used to reiterate pre-existing norms and institutionalized patterns of cultural value that constitute the sexual minorities as comparatively unworthy of respect. These micro-political processes involve both conformity and resistance to gender and sexual stereotypes. Participants managed to develop spatial coping strategies such as concealment, compartmentalization, confrontation and alternative sources of support to manage their lives with dignity and self-esteem.