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 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.     

Sexualised productions of space

This themed section consists of articles that explore the intricate and complicated relationship between sexuality and space. The underlying premise is that space is never a homogenous, unified, neutral and a-priori entity that precedes subjects but emerges as the outcome of an ongoing production process which involves actors and material components. Heteropatriarchal understandings of space based on masculinist premises have largely ignored women and queer subjects who may subvert or alter normative spatial practices. The latter challenge established spatial typologies and their gendered associations, such as the house with women and the war zone with men. Furthermore, the practices of marginalized subjects point to alternative understandings of space based on fluid and porous boundaries between such dualities as materiality/representation, inside/outside and private/public. The contributors to this themed section analyze non-normative spatial practices by drawing from feminist and queer theories, postcolonial studies, architectural theory and geography. They focus on specific cases from a broad geographical span ranging from South Asia to Europe. Despite their different contextual foci, the following authors speak to each other by engaging in scholarship that resists disembodiment and by addressing the materiality of space as an arena of continuous production in relation to sexed bodies and sexualized identities. They all focus on strategies that counter hegemonic spatial practices and engage with the crucial question of how to think space differently.     

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.     

Sex in the digital city: location-based dating apps and queer urban life

It is well established that digital technology and code mediate bodies in space. The collapse of any supposed physical/digital divide has been amply documented to the extent that everyday life is now widely theorised in terms of hybridisation. What is less clear is what comes next for those participating in this hybridisation. This article examines what Kitchin and Dodge term the ‘social contour of software’ via queer male locative media users who collectively negotiate digital hybridisation in their everyday lives. Using qualitative interviews with 36 non-heterosexual men using apps such as Grindr and Tinder in London, UK, I explore how locative media refigures conceptualisations of community, technological efficiency and boundaries between private and public space. The study finds that users express ambivalence about their membership of queer ‘communities’, and are also unconvinced by online sociality. Apps expedite searches for new partners but prove deceptively time-consuming. Public and private space are being hybridised by locative technology, but common codes of conduct are slower to develop, leaving users unsure of how to navigate physical encounter. This article concludes that schema for queer men’s lives are increasingly promulgated digitally but may be uneasily embodied in everyday practice.     

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.     

Space,power and sexuality: transgressive and transformative possibilities at the interstices of spatial boundaries

The themed section consists of articles that explore the relationship between power and space in relation to gender and sexuality by looking at processes of transgression, subversion or expansion of normative spatial practices and narratives. Using a theoretical framework that draws out power and space within a more specific context of feminist and queer literature, the articles explore the possibility to transgress, subvert or expand norms at the interstices of spatial boundaries beyond traditional binaries and hierarchies. Collectively, the articles call for a continued theoretical and methodological focus into the importance of looking at everyday sites of struggles and resistance in the crevasses, the liminal zones of space. The transgression of spatialized norms of sexuality and gender present a transformative potential that should be recognized for its political significance but, we argue, with caution as heteronormative and heteropatriarchal norms too often remain de rigueur in a neoliberal context.     

Introduction to Queer/ing Regions

Having been launched at a symposium at Nottingham Trent University in February 2013, the themed section Queer/ing Regions addresses the potentials of critical regionalisms in contemporary queer studies. The section explores the ways in which the complex regional/local formations of sexual dissidence emerges, if not being instrumentalized, as objects of theoretical inquiry when addressed within a global context by means of transnational formations of academic practice. Rather than appropriating queer theory through a global-local vector and affirming the complex alterity of the local vis-à-vis the flattening performative of the global, the contributors underline the regional complexities of sexual politics, the multi-scalar aspects of its spatial production, and the discourses of its worlding.     

‘Queer(y)ing methodologies: doing fieldwork and becoming queer’ – guest editorial

This themed issue contributes to discussions of queer positionalities in the context of doing fieldwork on/with queer-identified subjects. The point of departure being that the term queer has emerged to qualify a specific scholarship that contests normative orders in gender and sexuality, and that queering is a form of critique of multiple power relations that informs knowledge production. Normative sex and gender orders are reflected in the power-knowledge relations that produce ‘queerness’ as outsider, abnormal and subaltern. In order to challenge these normativities, the production of knowledge must be contested in its conception. Here we present the theoretical framework that grounds our themed issue as well a short summary of the articles in this series.     

Facilitating queer of color feminist co-mentorship: reflections on an online archive of scholar-activism

Abstract

We reflect on our relationship to the Feminist Freedom Warriors (FFW) online archive of transnational scholar-activist genealogies. From our respective locations at a PWI and an HBCU, we explore what it might mean to conceive of these new media narratives as archives of mentorship. For us, the archive is a significant resource of useful feminism–those modes of feminist thought, action, and history that meet our mentorship needs, stitching together practices of self-mentorship and co-mentorship. Our engagement with the narratives sharpen an understanding of how intertwined structures of gender, race, sexuality, caste and class operate at both the local and global level, and are facilitated by and through US academia. Moreover, the larger constellation of FFW inspire our own practice of ‘queer of color feminist co-mentorship’. We generate a collaborative analysis detailing our expanding perspectives on identity, difference, and the US graduate school experience. Our collective journey informs us that innovative conceptions and practices of feminist mentorship can radically challenge and enhance traditional mentorship, creating novel possibilities for learning and connection.     

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.     

Gender and sexual geographies of Blackness: new Black cartographies of resistance and survival (part 2)

The articles in part 2 of the themed section Gender and Sexual Geographies of Blackness focus on the creation of new cartographies of resistance, struggle, and survival in which black gender and sexual minority communities are engaged. Using black feminist readings of gender, sexuality, and geography as a point of departure, we consider the complex challenges that black gender and sexual minorities pose to conventional feminists and queer readings of space. These articles map unexplored sites of black struggle, resistance, and survival where black gender and sexual minorities confront marginalization and create new spaces of sociality, community, desire, pleasure, support, and love.     

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.     

In the Canine Archives of Sex: Radclyffe Hall,Una Troubridge and their Dogs

How does attention to dogs open up understanding of the queer, and more specifically, the Sapphic, past? This article examines the forgotten enmeshments of lesbian and pedigree dog subcultures in 1920s England. It takes as its case study one of the best-known couples of Sapphic modernity, Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge, and their dachshunds, Wotan and Thorgils. Bringing into dialogue scholarship on queer, trans and animal history, it traces the historical footprint of the dogs and considers how what this article calls the ‘canine archive of sex’ – a wide range of documents including show catalogues, newspaper reports, fiction and scientific writing – adds to understanding of the complexities of modern Sapphic history. Sapphic here is used to denote relationships between people assigned female at birth, some of whom may have transed gender norms and expectations. The article argues that the records of Hall's and Troubridge's involvement in the world of dog breeding expand understanding both of Sapphic modernity specifically and the intersections between histories of sexuality and gender and animal history more broadly. They reveal how gender norms, class privilege and racialised practices converged in modern pedigree culture, shaping canine–human relationships as well as the queer subcultures that formed around them.     

Soweto nights: making black queer space in post-apartheid South Africa

In this article, I examine black queer nightlife in Soweto and its relationship with the making of black queer space in South Africa. Through an in-depth examination of the microgeographies of a Soweto stokvel party, I reveal the complexities of post-apartheid formations of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Employing the idea of usable space, I highlight quotidian practices of leisure as an important site for understanding cultural creativity within the marginalized spaces occupied by black South African queers. Performance and performativity are central to organizing nightlife spaces and reveal both the possibilities and limits encountered by black queers as they try to construct livable lives.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

The matter of displacement: a queer urban ecology of New York City's High Line

This paper critically queers gentrification through an ecological analysis of the redevelopment of New York City's High Line. Taking the abandoned-queer-ecology-turned-homonormative park as a novel form of gay and green gentrification, I argue that the ‘success’ of the project must be critiqued in relational ecological terms. Intervening into the literature of gentrification, I begin to account for the material and symbolic aspects of ecological gentrification with the help of innovations in plant geography and queer ecology. To ground my analysis, I look to the process of ‘succession’, focusing, in particular, on one of the most established and successful plants growing on the abandoned High Line, Ailanthus altissima or the Tree of Heaven. Drawing on empirical insights, this account of the High Line's redevelopment tracks relations between queers and plants. Through layers of sexuality, ecology, and geography, the matter of displacement becomes central to a consideration of ethico-political possibilities for a queer ecological critique of urban space. In conclusion, I argue for an ethics and politics of responsibility to and for abandoned spaces that calls us to pay closer attention to the queer, the ecological, and their ongoing entanglement.