Sexualities (In the 2017 Wiley-AAG Enyclopedia of Geography)

Sexualities In the Wiley-AAG Enyclopedia of Geography Abstract Geographers of sexualities have highlighted the ways in which human sexualities and the ways in which they are performed can shape and are shaped by place. Their research examines explicitly spatial topics, such as the formation and evolution of urban gay villages, as well as theoretical questions about how sexual identities, behaviours, and performances are inscribed, valued, and regulated in particular places. This field maintains a strong commitment to critical social theory, and queer theory in particular, asserting that sexualities are not fixed or innate, but contingent upon the places where they are performed and the intersecting identities of those performing them. Main Text During the past several decades, geographers have begun to consider seriously how human sexualities are both shaped by and expressed through the places in which they live and encounter. Prior to the 1980s, human geography had typically treated human sexuality as innate, fixed, and presumably heterosexual. Despite some early attention to sexuality in psychoanalytic strands of the social sciences, a mid-20th century quantitative revolution favoring measurable phenomena had made geographers more concerned with, for example, fertility patterns in countries rather than the gendered and sexualized experiences or family formations that produced those patterns. Progress toward more critical, flexible understandings of sexualities has since been somewhat gradual and uneven. Geographers’ understandings of sexuality now encompass lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI) populations, and often emphasize a “queer” politics that blurs the lines between sexual and other social categories. At the same time, much of their work remains uneven both geographically and socially, focusing mostly on gay and lesbian sexualities in the cities of the Global North. Many of the first interventions into geographies of non-normative sexualities in the 1970s and 1980s simply described uses of urban space among sexual identity “groups” (e.g., gay men) and still treated sexuality as a fixed characteristic. Many of these studies were also urbaneconomic in orientation, identifying how spatial concentrations of residences and businesses among gay men in cities such as New Orleans formed the basis of political voting blocs and complementarities within a gay consumer market. More recent work has focused on how these areas in North American and European cities have been developed, branded, and visibly marketed to attract a broadening based of consumers, including heterosexual people, while excluding others such as gays and lesbians who are working-class or transgender individuals. Meanwhile, work on lesbian communities has revealed a more diffuse, socially networked (as opposed to spatially concentrated) form of kinship. Work on younger gay men and lesbians has also examined the role of more specific processes (e.g., migrating away from the family home to “the big city”) and urban spaces (e.g., the “gay scene”) in sexualized life transitions, such as coming out or developing a gay or lesbian identity. Over time, research on sexuality and space became influenced increasingly by feminist and critical approaches in Euro-American geography 1 that acknowledged sexualities as one of the multiple, overlapping forms of social subjectivity that mediate how individuals experience the places they inhabit. The narrower body of work on urban-focused “gay and lesbian geography” is now joined by work on sexual identities in a wider variety of populations (including heterosexual people) and on the inscription of sexuality in places through ongoing processes of performance, evaluation, and regulation. Performativity refers to the ways in which individual representations of sexualities (e.g., dress, corporeal movements, and speech) are shaped by dominant, often repetitive discourses. While performances that align with these scripts might elicit positive responses such as love, affection, and social affirmation, those that do not might be met with violence or exclusion. In this way, individuals become the actors that perform “acceptable” discourses to make them a lived reality. Since sexualities—at least as they are interpreted societally—are characterized by particular sets of gendered norms (e.g., “masculine” confidence and aggression vs. “feminine” fragility) that can be altered or concealed, they may be performed differently in different areas: a gay-identified man might walk more “butch” in certain areas where he expects to be threatened or harassed for being perceived as gay. Similarly, research on urban nightlife has shown that codes of behavior (e.g., self-segregation of men and women into different spaces of bars, perceived conventions that men must approach women or buy drinks for them) are reinforced by expectations that those behaviours are given in those spaces. Consequently, they may disempower some individuals (heterosexual women) by casting them as sexualized objects that are meant to be sought out or solicited by others (heterosexual men). Research on the regulation of sexuality has also been fruitful in outlining how sexualities are inscribed in particular places. Some work has looked at the regulation of female sexualities, which were historically thought of as needing to be “cocooned” in domestic, procreative heterosexual relationships. Historical work on British imperialism, for example, demonstrates how control over sexuality through dress codes and curfews for single women, was used to create “proper” female subjects (and prevent prostitution by “fallen women”) within a colonial empire. More recently, the study of how women’s sexualities are regulated has somewhat shifted to the city scale, again with particular emphasis on their location in public versus private spheres. Some work on female sex work has shown that local and national governments’ attempts to regulate it, positioning the sex worker as harmful or morally corrupted, may push it further underground and into more geographically marginal areas, threatening the safety of workers. Conversely, attempts to bring sex work into the public sphere through legalization and containment (e.g., in urban red light districts) can encourage a sense of public ownership over individuals’ sex work, leading to moral panic over “powerless” sex workers being trafficked, and in turn, police interventions that may leave sex workers without economic livelihoods. In these ways, sexualities also became understood as fundamental to how individuals and the state relate to one another. Through a process of sexual citizenship, individuals are granted moral and social recognition for acting in a way that underpins the values that states use to construct themselves (e.g., as economically viable, safe, and family-oriented). Sexualized bodies therefore make places by providing the basis for social norms and policies, but also solidify (or resist) those norms by enacting (or rejecting) them. For gay men and lesbians, regulation stemmed from the categorization of same-sex attraction into a single population category (i.e., homosexuals) at the turn of the nineteenth 2 century, the subsequent classification of homosexuality as a mental illness as outlined (until 1978) in the American Psychiatric Associations Manual of Disorders, and a criminal offense (until 2003 in many U.S. states). The classification and regulation of same-sex attraction as “deviant” was evident in a number of historical campaigns. The U.S. and Canadian governments, for example, sought to root out sexual non-normativity from the civil service by expelling thousands of gay-identified or gay-suspected employees in the 1950s and 1960s, often on the premise that homosexuality was tantamount to other deviant affiliations, such as Communism. In the 1970s and 1980s, the police raids and subsequent closures of urban bath houses, carried out in the name of public decency and public health, removed sexual and social spaces that were crucial to many in the community amidst otherwise heteronormative and heterosexist environments. More recently, some urban gay communities have experienced the “de-gaying” of historically established gay space through gentrification and residential development intended for straight, middle-class inhabitants. The study of geographies of sexualities has also been extended into a wider range of places and scales beyond the urban centre. Work on sexuality and space has often positioned metropolitan areas as the socially progressive places in which sexual and gender norms are challenged, and from which important notions of “gay culture” and “queer culture” diffuse (Knopp and Brown 2003). Rural and suburban areas, in contrast, have often been assumed to be profoundly heteronormative places where coupled-ness and gendered work-home divides most in line with the Euro-American state are valued and sexual non-normativity—in the form of being queer, or even heterosexual and single—is excluded. Since the 1990s, however, many geographers of sexualities have challenged these notions. Some have looked explicitly at events (e.g., gay- and lesbian-friendly festivals and retreats) or processes (e.g., return migrations of gay men and lesbians) that temporarily or permanently transform rural areas. Others have examined more intimate spaces (e.g., gay men’s suburban homes) that act as community spaces and are marked as visibly gay or queer through subtle uses of art and design referencing places and events relevant to the gay experience. Still other work, however, has suggested that rurality is not necessarily something to be transformed or overcome, but a consciously chosen milieu that facilitates its own forms of kinship among sexual “others.” More theoretical strands of sexuality and space, particularly those concerned with queer theory, call into question the concepts of “abnormal” and “other” themselves. Queer theory offers a challenge to heteronormativity (the norms that make heterosexuality right in the first place) and the associated systems of patriarchy and of “othering” of those who do not conform. It not only imagines sexuality as a flexible continuum rather than a set of categories, but posits “queerness” as both a sexual non-normative identity and a political disposition that actively rejects the normalization of certain sexual identities and the notion of fixed identities themselves. Part of this work is concerned with critiquing the ways in which some sexual identities have become accepted and even co-opted into heteronormative “mainstream” society. The concept of homonormativity, for example, suggests that gay and lesbian citizens, as long as they engage in coupledom, monogamy, full-time work, home ownership, and consumption habits that build the economy, can transcend their previous position at the margins of society. Figures such as the white, middle-class lesbian couple and the well-traveled “global gay” become assimilated while other less acceptable sexualities (e.g., non-monogamous, working class, and trans sexualities) are pushed to the margins in the same way that gays and lesbian had been within heteronormative 3 society (Duggan 2002). These so-called homonormative subjects have also been described as complicit in the systems traditionally used to oppress them. Since they partake in recently granted marriage and adoption rights, and other practices regarded by the state and society as “responsible” (e.g., home ownership), their actions are thought to marginalize those queer people who are unable to participate in these practices due to laws, discrimination, or financial limitations. Other work influenced by queer theory asks why certain sexualities are considered normal in the first place. Recent work on polyamory, for example, has suggested that rather than combating portrayals of polyamory as personal underdevelopment, immaturity, or selfabsorption, scholars should question why “traditional” romantic love and monogamy were ever considered morally or ethically superior. Even framing polyamory as an acceptable, private personal choice, then, prevents it from being understood as another way of loving that need not be valued differently. Yet other work rejects treating sexualities as categories or stand-alone attributes. Recent work on intersectionality has suggested that sexualities cannot truly be separated from other individual identities and characteristics such as “race”, and the term intersection erroneously assumes that they are separate to begin with. Although more traditional streams of the social science suggest that discrimination experienced by queer individuals who are also ethno-racial, class or other minorities is additive (e.g., “double discrimination”), others have suggested that discrimination can only be understood through lived experience and encounters with different places (Valentine 2007). In these encounters, one subjectivity might be favoured over another to negotiate a new place or scenario. In others, a more privileged subjectivity (maleness) can undo a more marginalized one (gay sexuality). In the past decade, work on global sexualities has further destabilized ideas about EuroAmerican categories of sexualities. Many scholars have noted that the ideas animating much of sexuality and space studies, such as urbanity, rurality, liberalism, conservatism, and “coming out,” are profoundly Western (Brown et al. 2010) and white. In addition, the places and events (e.g., San Francisco’s Castro, the Stonewall Rebellion in New York City) discussed in so-called “gay and lesbian history” tend to be located in North America and Europe. Work on South and East Asia, in contrast, shows that same-sex attracted communities are constructed flexibly alongside—or even as part of—religious, non-urban, and deeply familial communities that would be described as “traditional” in the West. By the same token, work on countries such as Brazil and Thailand has shown acceptance for same-sex affinities involving drag queens and other gender-bending performers, but less so for men that present as typically male (in Western countries, the opposite is often true). The study of global sexualities has broadened not only in its geographic scope but also in its scale: increasing mobility of individuals and information means that sexualities are also informed by cross-cultural encounters. A gay Filipino man who moves to the United States, for example, might find that the more effeminate performance of a bakla identity that would be accepted or even celebrated in the Philippines is marginalized and excluded in New York City. In contrast, Filipina domestic workers working in Hong Kong who have heterosexual identities at home may find that it is common within their specific community to have masculine female lesbian partners while working away. The globalization of sexuality is now also increasingly seen in concepts of development and nation-building that have gained transnational popularity. There is, for example, an 4 increasing association of sexual diversity with cosmopolitanism and the “creative city” notion popularized by Richard Florida. In this model, cities that are welcoming to sexually nonnormative individuals are thought to also support artistic enterprise, innovation and diversity in general, making them viable centres of tourism and capital accumulation. Consequently, countries such as Singapore have overturned strict anti-gay policies and begun holding Pride festivals, even though the lived experience of being gay or lesbian is still subject to less strenuous but equally present regulation. Despite welcoming sexual diversity in theory, many jurisdictions have also tried to suppress the sexualisation of urban space. The Giuliani administration in 1990s New York City, for example, removed sex work, sex shops, cinemas and other visibly sexualized spaces from Times Square to secure the city’s place as a global tourist destination. At the national scale, non-normative sexualities have been employed in what Puar (2007) calls “homonationalist” discourses of nationalism, terrorism, and counterterrorism. In these scripts, governments and media outlets in countries such as Israel and the United States may portray national acceptance for non-normative sexualities as evidence of their own political liberalism even as they pursue aggressive military actions in Muslim countries. In European countries, such as the Netherlands and France, similar scripts have been used as justification for assimilationist integration policies that presume homophobia and intolerance among new, often Muslim immigrants. Some have argued that the recent emphases on sexual identity, the state, and its regulatory capabilities have obscured some of the practices and emotions associated with sexualities. At the same time, work in several areas is both returning to the particularities of sexualized everyday lives and extending sexualities work beyond the realm of cultural geography. Work on love within emotional geography, for example, has shown that—despite its status as an ideal in the eyes of the state—can actually be a competitive and pressure-filled endeavour for single people, especially living in certain settings. Similarly, work in migration and population geography has shown how mobilities for gay men and lesbians are influenced by distinct historical contexts, institutions, and personal transitions they encounter across the life course (Lewis 2014). Geographers working on health and sexuality, a field long dominated by psychology, epidemiology, and other quantitative health-sciences, has sought more to engage with the actual contexts (e.g., the clinic, the “gay scene”) in which elements of sexualities— including sex itself—might influence health outcomes (see Del Casino in Browne et al. 2007). Sexualities therefore retain solid (and growing) intellectual purchase within geography into the second decade of the new millennium. SEE ALSO: Body (the), Foucault, Gender, Intersectionality, Urban villages, Feminism/Feminist Geography, Cultural Geography, Performativity, Heteronormativity References and Further Reading Browne, Kath, Jason Lim. and Gavin Brown. 2007. Geographies of Sexualities: Theories, Practices, and Politics. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Brown, Gavin, Kath Browne, Rebecca Elmhirst, and Simon Hutta. 2010. Sexualities in/of the Global South. Geography Compass 4 (10): 1567–1579. DOI: 10.1111/j.17498198.2010.00382.x. 5 Duggan, L. 2002. The new homonormativity: the sexual politics of neoliberalism. In R. Castronovo and D. Nelson (eds.), Materialising democracy: towards a revitalized cultural politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 175–194. Knopp, Larry and Michael Brown. 2003. Queer diffusions. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 21: 409−424. DOI:10.1068/d360. Lewis, Nathaniel M. 2014. Moving “Out,” Moving On: Gay Men’s Migrations through the Life Course. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104(2): 225–233. DOI:10.1080/00045608.2013.873325. Puar, Jasbir. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Valentine, Gill. 2007. Theorizing and Researching Intersectionality: A Challenge for Feminist Geography. The Professional Geographer 59 (1): 10–21. DOI: 10.1111/j.14679272.2007.00587.x Key words: gay, lesbian, intersectionality, performativity, sex work, queer, gender, cities, gay villages, heteronormativity 6