Urban Sexualities -- Companion to Urban Anthropology (proofs)

CHAPTER 11 Sexualities Ara Wilson THE SEXUALITIES OF CITIES In the West at least, the city has been associated with sexuality unmoored from traditional constraints. The Western urban world is inlected with sex: Jack the Ripper’s sexual violence; shadowy vice zones; and eroticized consumer desire. Cosmopolitanism is characterized by the urbane sophisticate, a igure who, if not decadent him or herself, is luent in, and relativist about, sexual matters (see Chapter 18, “Cosmopolitanism”). Offering the anonymity of the crowds, distance from kin, and a cornucopia of markets, the city offers different sexual prospects from the small town, notably stranger sex, a relational form cultivated in male homosexual milieus around the world (Humphreys 1975; Leap 1999). The regulation of sexuality also shapes city life, as policing, harassment, and violence affect suspected practitioners of disparaged sexual behavior and demarcates urban zones in relation to sexual norms (see Chapter 16, “Policing and Security”). Accounts of modernity agree that the city is a space that shapes, and is shaped by, sexuality. If the city is sexual, the study of sexuality is itself disproportionately urban. This is particularly true for studies of sexual modernity, a term meant to capture such phenomena as single women’s erotic mobility, plural forms of commercial A Companion to Urban Anthropology, First Edition. Edited by Donald M. Nonini. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Nonini—A Companion to Urban Anthropology El 194 El ARA WILSON sex, and gay, lesbian and transgender communities. Research on the sexual agency and control of women or forms of sexuality marked as deviant – particularly commercial sex and gay, lesbian, or queer subcultures – are the focus of critical urban scholarship. Gay life is particularly associated with cities, both by anti-gay critics, for whom it manifests the destructive excess of Western modernity, and by queer subjects themselves, who so often see in the city “a unique milieu in which to create a gay sense of self” (Manalansan 2003: 65). Indeed, scholarship on LGBT or queer life is so concentrated in cities as to have prompted critiques of urban bias and calls for rural research on queer themes (e.g., Browne, Lim, and Brown 2007). This essay highlights feminist and queer approaches to urban sexuality. Scholarship taking up these frameworks has enhanced our understandings of the interaction of sexuality, space, and power, by decentering heterosexual male experience as the deining perspective on urban life, explaining how gender and sexuality are structuring processes, and interweaving symbolic, subjective, and political economic elements in their approach. Feminist accounts have shown how urban space has been predicated on sex/gender systems that allocate mobility and access by gender (in classed and raced ways) while demonstrating how those norms are transgressed and resisted (Walkowitz 1992) (see Chapters 9, 10, and 12, “Class”, “Gender”, and “Race”). Queer scholarship requires more of an introduction. The term “queer,” which became relevant to scholarship in the 1990s, conveys two overlapping yet distinct sets of meanings. One meaning describes a set of non-heterosexual and presumably non-normative sex/gender identities. Political activism replaced clinical vocabulary (e.g., homosexual) with selfidentiications: gay, lesbian, bisexual, two-spirit (a Native American term), intersex, genderqueer, transgender, and transsexual. This plurality is conveyed either by expanding the acronym LGBTQ or by using “queer” as a gloss for this diversity, albeit not an unproblematic one. “Queer” also refers to queer theory, a speciic set of scholarly approaches that takes up continental critical theory (notably the work of Michel Foucault) with less recognized roots in anthropological scholarship, including the work of Gayle Rubin (2011), Esther Newton (1972), and the linguistic theories of Ferdinand Saussure and J.L. Austin. Centering on symbolic realms, queer theory disaggregates Western society’s conlation of sexed bodies, gender identity, and sexuality, showing how discourse naturalizes sexual categories through hierarchical norms that exclude those deemed non-normal from full social membership. Rather than attempting to assimilate “deviants” into mainstream culture, queer theory valorizes deviance as a form of resistance to normativity. Queer theory also undoes the modern assumption that sexual orientation is a deining feature of selfhood. This queer orientation at times contradicts LGBT advocacy for more civic inclusion through, for example, rights to marry or to arguments that sexual orientation is biologically based. More recently, queer studies has turned to consider race and ethnicity as central to queerness, seeing whiteness itself as a form of normativity and emphasizing the ways that sexual dissidence is inlected with racial, immigrant, or ethnic status in Europe and its Nonini—A Companion to Urban Anthropology SEXUALITIES 195 settler societies. Queer and feminist work has also sought to consider a range of social relationships not reducible to gender or sexual identity, notably through the rubric of intimacy (Bernstein 2007; Shah 2011; Wilson 2004). Can we describe non-Western sexuality through Western rubrics? Not only are gay and lesbian clearly English words, the notions of selfhood they are based on are also characteristic of Western modernity. Accordingly, recent anthropological studies of homosexuality and transgenderism counter the presumed universality of Western-derived models of sexual identity as well as the associated political idioms for queer life of visibility and rights. While “gay” has become a globally recognized term, and signs of gay culture are found in metropolitan centers around the world (Altman 2001), ethnographies of urban gay culture emphasized important variation in same-sex and transgender lives. They show how sexual concepts – even the word “gay” – embed very different cultural meanings and how profoundly social contexts affect sexuality, such as ongoing legacies of colonialism. Such variations provide evidence for arguments that sexuality is socially constructed rather than a biologically based quality of universal humanity. Yet it is a mistake to see “queer” as an inherently more cross-culturally applicable rubric, as some studies seem to do, since it is founded on critiques of the institutionalization of gay and lesbian identities, a situation that is hardly universal. For expedience, in this essay I use “queer” in the bifurcated meanings of both LGBT identity categories and the critical theory while also using the English terms gay, lesbian, and transgender, but note that such usage perpetuates problems that sensitive scholarship is attempting to remedy. Sexuality research is interdisciplinary. This review necessarily references not only works from cultural anthropology but also from allied ields of social history, archaeology, linguistics, and geography (cultural, social, or human), as well examples from the humanities, which deines much of the current scholarship on urban sexuality. This review summarizes a body of sexuality scholarship that is in sync with urban anthropology not only through its urban setting but also through approaches that embed the axis of sexuality within a broad social context of politics, infrastructure, and economics. Scholarship in social history, archaeology, and geography model ways to simultaneously study both sexuality and urbanism (Rubin 2011). Feminist social history, for example, has shown how the emergence of the modern Western form of the city was fundamentally organized by codes of sexuality that were linked to gender, race, and class formations. Victorian society – that is, the consolidation of hegemonic English moral culture which was spread through colonies, culture, and imperial inluence from the mid-nineteenth century on (Walkowitz 1992) – was predicated on a division of public and private realms organized by idealized forms of heterosexuality and associated binary gender positions, forms most realized in elite classes but imposed on the poor. This sex/gender matrix was integral to the emergence of industrial capitalism, affecting the composition of the working class and the bourgeoisie. Spatially, it manifests in the architecture of homes, the design of work sites, and zones demarcated in terms of respectability and entitlement (such as, where an elite woman should not go at particular times). Nonini—A Companion to Urban Anthropology El 196 ARA WILSON While modernity has been deined by separating the public sphere from domestic life, queer geographic analysis has shown how the Western public is structured as heterosexual (unlike, for example, ancient Athens), excluding signs of homosexuality while sheltering male–male homosocial relationships (Bell et al. 2001; Mort and Nead 2000). One illustration of a heterosexual matrix structuring the built environment is the mid-twentieth-century US culture of suburbanization (see Chapter 5, “Built Structures and Planning”). US President Herbert Hoover promoted home ownership explicitly for nuclear families as a path to national development. Following World War II, the suburbs evolved through government subsidies to war veterans (mostly white and male), the car industry, the national highway system, and consumer corporations like Tupperware (see Chapter 8, “Cars and Transport”). Such Western templates for urban order were applied across the outposts in the vast British empire, as were comparable systems in Spanish, French, and later US empires, and by global consumer capitalism. These inluential blueprints for urban life alter, but also interact with, existing sex/gender spatial arrangements (Voss 2008; Wilson 2004). Their dictates have not fully determined, and in fact are routinely contradicted by, the realities of metropolitan life within the West and certainly beyond it. Capitalist modernization has resulted in more people paid wages, often separated from kin, and able to partake of urban life (D’Emilio 1983). These result in unintended sexual consequences of modernization, for example, relaxing codes for heterosexual courtship, facilitating same-sex sexual encounters, and allowing sexually inlected subcultures to lourish. The essay begins with the well-known example of such an unintended consequence, the city of San Francisco, an urban center renowned for bohemian experimentation and a “live-and-let-live” culture as well as for a large gay community. The case of the eroticized city of San Francisco leads to discussions of the two main subjects found in the interdisciplinary scholarship on urban sexuality: commercial sexuality (e.g., prostitution) and queer life. It then returns to the urban scale, to world cities in the South that are characterized by sexual reputations. Bangkok is one sexualized city that has recently become the site for much research on both commercial sex and queer sexual identities. The essay then considers key thematic threads in critical research on sexuality, notably gender, intersectionality, race, and liberalism, and the methodological issues in studies of sex, before concluding with thoughts about the urban dimension of urban sexuality studies. SAN FRANCISCO El San Francisco provides an exemplary site for studying sexuality and the city, not only for its contemporary fame as a capital of gay life, but also for the wealth of historical and even archaeological research that brings attention to the spatial dimension of sexuality. Archaeologist Barbara Voss has applied feminist and queer frameworks to analyze sexuality in eighteenth-century Spanish colonial northern California. Using reading material remains and ethnohistorical records, Nonini—A Companion to Urban Anthropology SEXUALITIES 197 she shows how colonizing sexual practices – both the colonial military’s routine rapes of native women and the imposition of strict missionary policies – structured the layout of native and colonial settlements and Hispanicized native sexual patterns (Voss 2008). From the mid-nineteenth century, when the region transferred from Spanish to US control, the town of 800 Mexicans and natives became a booming, multiethnic city. The 1949 gold rush brought scores of prospectors, followed by Chinese and African American laborers. The lax climate of trade, in-migration, cultural mixing, and mining created enduring spaces associated with vice and a live-and-let-live sensibility (Boyd 2003). White authorities attempted to realize order in racial and sexual terms. Nayan Shah (2011) interprets oficial concern with public hygiene as an effort to shore up white, heterosexual norms against the perceived threat of Chinese immigrants. The deep history of San Francisco, read through a critical queer and feminist lens, shows how its colonial, racially organized development (reliant on boundaries of sex) and the interacting dynamic of the regulation and expression of sexuality (inlected by race) shaped the character of the city itself. In the twentieth century, San Francisco became a bohemian city, known for experiments in drugs, literature, lifestyles, and particularly sex, in this “wide open town” where “queerness is sewn into the city’s social fabric” (Boyd 2003: 2). How did that happen? Answers combine political economic analysis, cultural studies, network analysis, social movement theory, and discussions of formal politics (e.g., voting blocs and municipal politics). Boyd (2003) traces the city’s climate to its polyglot port-city character, adding that sexual cultures blossomed from the 1930s on. John D’Emilio dates this burgeoning to the 1940s, noting “World War II was something of a nationwide coming-out experience” (1983: 24). His analysis emphasizes structural forces, tracing the conjuncture of industrial capitalism, US military, and political dynamics that funneled homosocial clusters of men and women with a little money in their pockets through San Francisco, which was a major port in the war in the Paciic. Manuel Castells (1983) covers the emergence of the gay community as a political force in the city, exploring the formation of gay networks in relation to space, social structure, and resistance communities. Gayle Rubin’s long-term ethnographic research has chronicled the formation of sexual communities organized around non-normative practices, such as leather, ist fucking, or sadomasochism (s&m), arguing that changing urban policies and economic conditions, more so than the HIV/AIDS epidemic, as is commonly believed, eroded the infrastructure for this community (Rubin 2011). Collectively, this scholarship on a distinctive North American city illustrates the interdisciplinary scope of research on metropolitan sexuality. To ind urban sex means re-reading oficial discourses against the grain while creatively using alternative sources to incorporate networks of lesbians of color, transgender performers, or the gay pride parade into a portrait of a city and its politics. The study of San Francisco illustrates the necessity of combining attention to the political economic structures (military stipends, rents, electoral politics) with the realm of cultural meanings and social identities: not only politicians and homophile organizations but also leather bars and little black books. Just as Castell’s account contributed to his inluential conception of urban social Nonini—A Companion to Urban Anthropology El 198 ARA WILSON movements, the rich ethnographic and historical accounts of San Francisco’s emergence as a gay metropolis by such authors as D’Emilio and Gayle Rubin have, in turn, informed the study of urban sexuality in metropolitan sites well beyond the Bay Area. (see Chapter 27, “Social Movements”). The dramatic example of San Francisco might be generalized to an expectation that understanding sexuality is integral to understanding the life of the city. CITIES OF VICE El A favored topic in studies of urban sexuality is prostitution, or the broad range of transactional erotic exchange in varying shades of formalization and legality. Studies of female sex workers in the heterosexual sex trade continue to be informed by stark feminist debates about sex and power around prostitution and traficking. Campaigns against the organized movement of women and girls to provide sexual services (“sex traficking”) has become an international cause, at times echoing earlier European and US campaigns against “white slavery.” In many cases, advocates against traficking also aspire to abolish all forms of prostitution, which these feminists see as an engine of female subordination and male dominance. The contrasting feminist view understands prostitution as work, insisting that sex-work traficking should not be singled out from other forms of exploited labor (e.g., domestic work or sweatshop labor). These advocates argue that draconian government measures like outlawing prostitution or raiding brothels actually harm, rather than protect, those working in the trade. Scholarship enters this stark political debate about the sale of sex. Most feminist empirical studies of prostitution emphasize the agency of women (or men) engaged in transactional sex, and therefore fall more on the side of the sex-work advocates. This research nonetheless highlights the effects of poverty, racial stratiication, and of course gender on the trade (Altman 2001). But most argue that public stigma and social regulations, rather than sex for pay, negatively affect workers (Bernstein 2007; Frank 2002). Most studies of commercial sex, if they are not based in an eroticized resort, are located in cities. The discussion presents a few examples of those that take the urban context into account in their analysis. Historical research provides path-breaking models for situating transactional sex in relation to broad processes of gender relations, urbanization, capitalism, and governance. Luise White’s study, The Comforts of Home, examined how prostitution changed over the development of a colonial British settlement in Africa. Considering casual and professional forms of prostitution, she shows sex workers’ role in establishing urban society in colonial Africa (White 1990). Studies of scholars like White (1990) and Walkowitz (1992) are examples of feminist approaches to sexuality that describe both conditioning structures and the agency of women engaged in material transactions for sex. Contemporary ethnographies continue this vein. In Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club (Allison 1994), Anne Allison draws on her own participant observation as a hostess for a club Nonini—A Companion to Urban Anthropology SEXUALITIES 199 for salarymen in boom-time Japan. Her analysis situates erotic leisure within the context of transforming economic and kinship contexts that reworked the meaning of heterosexual exchange. Katherine Frank also took up long-term participant observation to explore erotic services in the southern United States in her study, G-Strings and Sympathy (Frank 2002). As with Allison, Frank’s research “observes the observers,” focusing on the relatively unstudied male customers of erotic entertainment, including exotic dance, striptease, and lap dances. Her work sympathetically unpacks contradictory dimensions of masculine heterosexual desire found in the clubs. Other studies have looked at male workers who provide sexual services to male customers, often with attention to the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. These studies consider forms of intimacy that are realized through market exchange in the intermediate spaces outside of home and work. The intersection of economics and intimacy are key to such explorations, conveyed by such titles as Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex (Bernstein 2007) or The Intimate Economies of Bangkok (Wilson 2004), among others. The sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein (2007) identiies a new form of commercial intimacy emerging in post-industrial urban centers. Studying middle-class women engaged in commercial sexual exchanges in San Francisco, Stockholm, and Amsterdam, Bernstein suggests that the new trade offers not just sex but also the “bounded authenticity” of a girlfriend-like experience, which is similar to the tenor of friendship that Frank described in the US stripclubs. My study of interactions between Thai women workers and foreign, Western men in Bangkok similarly suggests that customers’ desires also include authentic experience and gradations of intimacy (Wilson 2004). Although irstworld contexts differ from Southeast Asia in signiicant ways, these studies use urban sites for commercial sex to analyze how political economic contexts shape not only labor conditions but also sexual desire. Gay Publics The city holds a special place in queer narratives that emphasize its role in migration, coming out, inding community, learning sexual culture, and forging political claims. Scholarship on queer urbanism has highlighted queer subcultures, characterized by cultural expression, social ties, and patterns of conduct. The social character of queer life has to be stressed especially for sexual transactions that are denigrated by the broader society, such as sex that is anonymous, public, or kinky. Sexual cultures forged by gay and transgender communities, notably male-to-female transwomen, have predominated in studies of queer urban sexuality, providing examples of theatrical, even heroic resistance to the violent opprobrium from dominant heterosexual society as well as established patterns for sexual transactions. The drag queen is perhaps the proletarian of queer analysis. Esther Newton’s 1972 ethnography of drag queen performance anticipated the focus and ideas of queer theory about gender performance by nearly two decades. Her study illustrates the ways queer subjects forged worlds of meaning, sociality, and Nonini—A Companion to Urban Anthropology El 200 El ARA WILSON commerce. The well-known 1990 documentary, Paris is Burning, directed by Janet Livingston, provides one of the best visual accounts of queer publics through a portrait of the 1980s culture of New York City drag balls, in which queer (gay or transgender) people of color organized into “houses” modeled on couture labels and familial metaphors. This ilm provides an inluential text for queer scholarship, celebrating the creative production of those otherwise marginalized by structures of US urban life. Another central topic to research on queer sexual cultures in the city is sex, chiely sex outside of domestic space or long-term relationships. Newton, Rubin, Boyd and others have written about the commercial erotic spaces for gay men and transwomen. Others have turned to the even more stigmatized case of public sex. Public sex converts urban space from designated use – a family friendly park, a utilitarian bathroom – to a site for sexual encounter, remapping the city for insiders and those who regulate them in ways that remain “private,” or relatively off the radar, to the general public. Laud Humphreys’ research offers a controversial touchstone for research on male–male public sex. A former Episcopal priest and civil rights advocate in the United States, Humphreys conducted dissertation research in the late 1960s on men’s use of public restrooms for sex, known in the United States as the “tearoom trade.” Deploying classic sociological techniques, his study extrapolated from the minutiae of interactions the codes that governed them. Humphreys wrote that, “Tearooms are popular, not because they serve as gathering places for homosexuals but because they attract a variety of men, a minority of whom are active in the homosexual subculture” (Humphreys 1975: 11). That is, most of the men in the trade were what today is called men who have sex with men (MSM). In fact, this non-homosexual presence structured the codes of privacy organizing interaction. Cultures of male–male sex – with strangers, in public, for cash, across vast divides of social capital (and at times fetishizing race, class, and age differences, for example through the category of “rough trade”) – have been central to interdisciplinary queer scholarship, including anthropological work. Men’s non-domestic sex with men has received more attention in response to the research demands of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In response to widespread critiques of male sexual promiscuity, queer theorists insisted on viewing such sexual domains as social and cultural lifeworlds (Leap 1999). Samuel Delaney, an American science iction writer and essayist, wrote an inluential autobiographical paean to the male–male sex in the seedy movie theaters of Times Square (Delaney 2001). He proposes that stranger sex embodies a democratic spirit through its respectful, even generous, openness to “others” across various social divides, notably race and class. Humphreys similarly suggested that, “there exists a sort of democracy that is endemic to impersonal sex. Men of all racial, social, educational and physical characteristics meet in these places for sexual union” (Humphreys 1975: 13). Gayle Rubin (2011) argues that institutionalized modes of promiscuous sex – anathema to civil society – have been the foundation of community. When the US government and the larger society were slow to respond to the mortal threat of the AIDS epidemic, this sexual Nonini—A Companion to Urban Anthropology SEXUALITIES 201 culture provided necessary care and information. The queer reading of male– male sex thus inverts hegemonic understandings of the relationship between social order, ethics, and sexuality. Instead, it argues that dominant norms – the valorization of private, nuclear family life as the container of legitimate sexual expression – harm other lifeways, vibrant worlds predicated on humane values. Viliied forms of anonymous, public, commercial, or non-normative sex (e.g., that integrates “toys” or enacts plays of power) exemplify the meaning of “queer” as non-normative as well as the emphasis on practices (sex) rather than on gay identity per se. While the vast majority of this sex, and the scholarship on it, considers male–male encounters, it is noteworthy that there is some available research on an occasional sex club for women and transgendered people held in Toronto. Scholarship on queer urban life relects political understanding of these subjects as dissident cultures, resistant communities, new social movements, or expressions of identity politics. The cumulative world-making activities of gays, lesbians, and transgenders in turn inlect the meaning of cities. As Castells and others have shown, gays or queers often cluster in particular neighborhoods, creating concentrations of residences, businesses, and services. Transgendered people share maps for technologies of body transformation, including sources of less expensive hormones or the clinics known for highly skilled, less expensive, or readily obtainable sex reassignment surgeries. Many queer people thus have a map of the urban zones relevant to them, with particular cities animating aspirations for sexual experiences, privileges like marriage, or comfortable livelihoods in a gay orbit. Gay urban culture reaches majority heterosexual cultures as well. Tourists lock to see the famous gay pride celebrations in San Francisco and Sydney. Gay culture has become a hallmark of cosmopolitan sophistication, even a marker of cultural capital, as illustrated in the US television show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy in which a quartet of gay men provide a socially enhancing makeover to hapless heterosexual men. Indeed, a gay presence has become a sign of urban economic development, for example in the well-publicized discussions of the creative class by urban planners such as Richard Florida. These developments have been criticized by queer scholars in ways I discuss below. The spatial metaphor of the closet suggests the salience of space to queer life. If social life is characterized by struggles in a context of hierarchy, studies of cities examine how sexuality is a subject of urban struggles for space, meanings, or survival. While queer space is a relatively new legitimate topic of research, this scholarship nonetheless engages established themes of urban anthropology, geography, and urban studies in general (see Chapter 1, “Spatialities”). SEXUAL CITIES The cities characterized by a global reputation for sexuality are found across the global North and South. For commercial sex, metropoles of renown include Havana (before the Cuban revolution and after dollarization), Bahia, and Nonini—A Companion to Urban Anthropology El 202 El ARA WILSON Bangkok among others. Historically, speciic cities provided men latitude for sexual encounters with “local” male youth, notably in the Maghreb of North Africa: Tangiers, Morocco was dubbed “Costa Del Sodomy” by one prominent European gay visitor. Now, a global cartography of gay cities includes not only Europe and its settler societies – Sydney in Australia; Manchester and Amsterdam in Europe – but also postcolonial cities like Rio (Parker 1999) or Johannesburg. These urban gay spaces are recognizable through common cultural signs, leading Dennis Altman to propose that, as an effect of transnational consumer capitalism, gay has become a global category that breaks with local versions of same-sex sexuality (Altman 2001). His presentation of a Western-deined, global gay identity has been much criticized, prompting scholars to emphasize that same-sex, transgender, or queer life has locally informed histories, even when traficking in the same club music, fashion styles, and erotic iconography. In urban China, for example, a new term for female–female eroticism is la-la, derived from lesbian, but with a different meaning, describing events and places rather than a woman’s identity. The authoritarian, multiethnic postcolonial city-state of Singapore has been a global queer site. In the mid-twentieth century, Singapore’s Bugis Street was well known for the presence of transwomen until they were evicted for commercial redevelopment. More recently, a gay Singaporean internet site hosted an enormous international rave on the national holiday called Nation. In Africa, Johannesburg and Cape Town in South Africa host vibrant scenes of men who have sex with men and prominent lesbian and gay political activism. Research on these African cities situates contemporary queer life in relation to an unfolding history of British and Afrikaaner colonialism, the effects of apartheid, and the immiserating policies of neoliberal economic agendas. More recently, scholars have turned attention to countries in transition from planned economies (or state socialism) to market-based economies. Research on the former Soviet Union and China (Rofel 2007), but also Cuba, Vietnam, and other less prominent sites have described the rise in commercial sex (including pornography and what is known as traficking) and the emergence of visible gay and lesbian spaces in the wake of capitalist transformations. It is possible to consider India after the liberalization of the postcolonial economy in a comparative post-socialist context as well. Urban India has been the site for a number of studies of the well-known, and often sensationalized, sex trade as well as of the burgeoning public presence of those identiied, by varying terminology, as gays, lesbians, or transgendered people. Studies of these sexually marked cities consider the articulation of populations with the state and with transnational lows, including lows of political discourse such as gay rights or anti-traficking policies, as well as non-governmental organization (NGO) workers, tourists, military programs, and popular culture (see Chapter 2, “Flows”). On any map of global sexuality, Bangkok is a major city and has been the site of earlier research on population control (Thailand was a demographic Nonini—A Companion to Urban Anthropology SEXUALITIES 203 success story) and more recent studies of commercial sex, HIV/AIDS, and queer topics. The researcher who has conducted the most in-depth, long-term investigations of gay life in Bangkok is the Australian Peter A. Jackson. With a background in Buddhist studies, Jackson embeds his discussion of the emergence of the term gay and changing manifestations of homosexual and transgender life in a thick portrait of Thai semiotics and worldview and also the history, political economy, and governance of the capital. Jackson’s studies of gay life began as a portrait of “Thai” culture – a national scale that is typical for transnational research on queer subjects – but more recently made more explicit a focus on Bangkok – “the gay capital of Southeast Asia.” In his most recent edited collection (Jackson 2011), Jackson writes of a twenty-irst century “queer boom” in Bangkok, noting the increased public prominence of gays, MSM, masculine or female-to-male (FTM) transgender females (tom), and male-tofemale (MTF) transwomen (kathoey). My own work on Thailand has considered a range of forms of sexuality in the political economic development of late twentieth-century Bangkok. In addition to considering the famous red-light area for foreigners, Patpong, other chapters of the ethnography explore the sexual nature of changing Chinese Thai identities or the ways that sexuality is deployed in day-to-day work. One chapter analyzes the centrality of commercial spaces to female–female sexuality or the tom igures. The Intimate Economies of Bangkok (Wilson 2004) thus models a different approach to the study of sexuality in the urban global South. Rather than focusing on one sexual subject (such as the sex worker or MTF kathoey igure) as most studies do, it embeds sexuality across a broad ethnographic landscape by exploring the articulation of such sexual forms as heterosexual male polygyny, sex work, or female–female relationships with commercial urban infrastructure. IN BED WITH POWER The body of work summarized in this essay share in common a central concern with power. This focus, while not uniform, is informed by strands of critical theory ranging from Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx to Franz Fanon and Judith Butler. This section condenses the critical edge of studies of urban sexuality into thematic keywords: gender, intersectionality, race, liberalism, and normativity, followed by relection on methods. Gender As described above, feminist scholarship opened space for critical discussions of sexual life in the city (see Chapter 10, “Gender”). Queer theorists differentiated their method from feminist approaches to sexuality, arguing that sexuality can be disaggregated from gender or at least that the regulation of sexuality should not be reduced to male dominance (Rubin 2011). An example is found in the Nonini—A Companion to Urban Anthropology El 204 ARA WILSON policing of public sex, which includes female and male sex workers as well as non-commercial sexual encounters. Most ethnographic studies, however, ind systems of gender and sexuality to be mutually constitutive. Studies of the city ind that the spatial manifestation of sexuality tends to be highly gendered (Bell et al. 2001; Browne, Lim, and Brown 2007; Hubbard 2012). Feminist accounts have argued that sexualized violence is a social force that limits women’s spatial, and erotic, mobility. Networks organized around female same-sex sexuality (e.g., lesbians) have often been less public than male or male-to-female transgender communities, conducted through private residences or small bars in remote parts of the city (Browne, Lim, and Brown 2007). Male-bodied persons, or those assigned the male sex at birth (such as MTF transgenders) are granted greater spatial license than similarly situated females, which has consequences for sexual experience. However, female masculine subjects (as butch lesbian, tomboy, FTM transgender) (Kennedy and Davis 1993; Wilson 2004) or sex workers (Walkowitz 1992; White 1990) may be granted a comparable mobility. While clearly overly simpliied, this gender schema, more than a biological male tendency to territoriality (Castells 1983), explains why there is more public presence, and ethnographic research, on male–male or MTF transgender social worlds than on female–female sexuality. Ethnographers have developed creative methods to study urban female–female sexual cultures, particularly, in the United States (Kennedy and Davis 1993), Europe (Browne, Lim, and Brown 2007; Hubbard 2012), and in Asia (Rofel 2007; Wilson 2004). If the gender ratio of queer scholarship skews towards men and MTF transgenders, in research on heterosexual prostitution it skews towards women, with key exceptions (Allison 1994; Bernstein 2007; Frank 2002). This is because male customers’ role in the trade is often taken for granted, ergo naturalized, rather than subject to analysis. While gender remains a key domain of sexuality research, most current scholarship avoids reduction of sexual matters to gender by integrating other social domains, such as race, that disaggregate coherent categories of man and woman or masculinity and femininity. Intersectionality El Black feminist legal theory introduced the term “intersectionality” to show the limits of US legal frameworks that allowed claims of discrimination based on either race or gender but not in combination. Now a cardinal feminist approach, intersectionality means studying sexuality not as an isolated axis of analysis, in which race offers a modifying variable, but rather studying how sexuality is inextricably intertwined with race or other forms of social location. An example is how immigrants of color engaged in same-sex relations view “coming out” differently from white gay culture (Manalansan 2003). Classic anthropological approaches, in their insistence on embedding people’s identities within contexts of social relations, economic conditions, and cultural themes – and at least since the 1970s, within historical and colonial contexts as well – provide methods for realizing intersectional aims. Nonini—A Companion to Urban Anthropology SEXUALITIES 205 Race Intersectional approaches have foregrounded simultaneous attention to race and sexuality. An apt illustration can be found in Humphreys’ 1960 encounter with a plainclothes patrolman in a public bathroom: After inishing his business at the urinal and exchanging some remarks about the weather, the [policeman] came abruptly to the point: “Look, fellow, if you’re looking for sex, this isn’t the place. We’re clamping down on this park because of trouble with niggers. Try the john at the northeast corner of [Reagon] Park. You’ll ind plenty of action there” (1975: 6–7). This anecdote shows how, even in a context of patent homophobia, sexual regulation was inlected by racial politics. While blurring social difference, the tearoom trade itself remains structured by race, citizenship, and class. As Manalansan notes, “being a person of color added to the danger of being arrested” when engaging in public sex in New York City (2003: 81). Renowned gay districts such as Chelsea in New York City, Oxford Street in Sydney, Covent Garden in London, are associated with white gay life (Boyd 2003; Manalansan 2003), reinforcing the association of gay identity with whiteness. Communities of queers of color, who most often live in neighborhoods of their racial group, are neglected in maps of gay publics. For example, with all the attention to gay families in the United States, one would hardly know that more black than white lesbians are raising children (see Chapter 12, “Race”). As these examples suggest, studies of the intersections of race and sexuality are heavily inluenced by US scholarship and relect speciic contours of US history and politics. Outside of the West, postcolonial theory also analyzes sexuality in terms of white dominance. This raises questions about how racialized sexuality plays out in cities where the dominant national class is not white and where non-Western capital has great force. Intersectional sexuality research has paid less attention to power relations inside the global South or between non-white populations than it has to the sexual dimensions of white Euro–US dominance of people of color. Liberalism The emergence of visible gay urban cultures is popularly understood as an example of political liberalization that gets equated with Western modernity. Liberalism identiies progressive development from constraining tradition characterized by compulsory heterosexuality and female chastity to greater possibilities for sexual diversity. For conservatives, gay publics represent the problematic excess of liberal modernity, the erosion of religious and familial foundations, by sexualized individualism and materialism, and in some cases, a form of Western imperialism against nationalist conceptions of traditional culture. In progressive scholarship, postcolonial and critical race approaches have led to critical analysis of what otherwise would be seen as positive developments in liberal terms, such as the sedimentation of gay enclaves or the spread of women’s human rights projects. This increasingly inluential vein challenges the Nonini—A Companion to Urban Anthropology El 206 ARA WILSON common assumption that the irst world provides more advanced conditions for queer life than the non-Western world as a recapitulation of racist scales of development. These approaches also ind efforts to advance gay rights or women’s sexual rights to be complicit with dominant power structures, including neoliberal capitalism, racial inequality, and US or European hegemony (see Chapter 15, “Governance”). They argue that struggles to increase gay people’s membership in society, for example through marriage rights or the niche consumer power of the “pink dollar,” predominantly relect elite, particularly white, gay interests. The ways that metropolitan tourist boards foster gay community as a path to economic development, for example, denies other groups (poor people of color, immigrants, public-sex aicionados) the “right to the city.” Critical scholarship proposes that liberal sexual projects can actually harm nonmiddle-class, non-white, non-Western communities, by reinforcing norms of social order that lead to the policing of populations marked by race, class, or nationality, particularly in the context of the post-9/11 war on terror and expansion of security apparatus worldwide (see Chapter 16, “Policing and Security”). These tendencies have been dubbed “homonormativity” (as opposed to “heteronormativity”), “homonationalism” (when gay claims to citizenship reinforce xenophobia), and “pink washing” (Browne, Lim, and Brown 2007; Manalansan 2003). From this perspective, for example, heralding the gayfriendly nature of Israeli cities delects criticism of state violence against Palestinian territory and peoples. Scholarship drawing on these critical approaches views inclusion and exclusion as two sides of the coin. It provocatively argues that liberal sexual agendas are not equally liberatory but rather are inextricable from the violence and inequality that dominant social forces – particularly white and irst-world powers – impose on its others. Methods How does one study sex in a bathroom or a bar – and should one? The ethnographic study of such sites has invited a disproportionate share of methodological and ethical relection. Humphreys’ methods have been criticized and debated, because he did not inform subjects that he was conducting research and pursued follow-up interviews by tracing their license plates (Humphreys 1975). What about conducting research through sexual encounters (Leap 1999) or work as an erotic entertainer (Allison 1994; Frank 2002)? Is sex itself a mode of participant observation? How does one conduct research in what might be legally vulnerable sites for leeting, anonymous sexual encounters (Humphreys 1975; Leap 1999)? The frontiers of research on urban sexuality have been accompanied by such ethical and methodological debates. THE URBANITY OF SEX El The real fun began during the depression. There were all those new buildings, easy to reach, and the automobile was really getting popular about then . . . Suddenly it just seemed like half the men in town met in the tearooms (Humphreys 1975: 5–6). Nonini—A Companion to Urban Anthropology SEXUALITIES 207 The ethnographic study of urban sexuality is not a distinct subset of the subield of urban anthropology itself. Rather, ethnographic studies of commercial sex or queer cultures mainly refer to scholarship in sexuality studies. In particular, feminist and queer frameworks inform the analysis of urban sexuality in relation to modes of power. Queer theory, increasingly inluenced by postcolonial and critical race theory, brings attention to discourses that valorize certain versions of sexuality (monogamous, non-commercial heterosexuality and increasingly, acceptable homosexuality, particularly among white elite populations) while dehumanizing others (Rubin 2011). Much scholarship on sexuality, urban or otherwise, has emphasized the roles of governing norms, a focus often attributed to the work of Michel Foucault but also rooted in earlier studies, notably the work of Gayle Rubin (2011). Laws, activism, science, and cultural expressions provide sources for analyzing governing norms and resistance to them. Most studies of queer sexuality, including the intersectional work on race, relect this emphasis. Urban sexual life, however, cannot be reduced to the discursive effects of norms, which remains a major emphasis in non-anthropological queer and feminist scholarship. For example, the gentriication of red-light areas – New York City’s Times Square or San Francisco’s South of Market – is shaped as much by the political economy of real estate and heightened policing of groups disenfranchised by race, class, or citizenship status as it is by the imposition of sexual norms. While Gayle Rubin’s writing has directed attention to the power of sexual norms, her empirical research emphasizes political economic contexts (Rubin 2011). Empirical studies of urban sexuality draw on, but offer different perspectives from, humanities approaches. Since critical theories of Western sexuality are limited by their European compass, anthropology’s studies of non-Western cities, global cities, and Western minority communities offer a more transnational picture of urban sexuality. They also draw on a wider repertoire of methods than humanities scholarship’s almost exclusive reliance on discourse and texts. The richest ethnographic studies of urban sexuality embed normative discourses within social organization, political economic infrastructure, and historical dynamics. The informant quoted in the epigraph above illustrates Humphreys’ inding that, “the real turning point for the tearoom trade arrived with the WPA” (Works Progress Administration) (Humphreys 1975: 5), because the American New Deal hired workers to build the public bathroom facilities that became popular for public sex (a history that, if known, would surely shore up conservative opinion against public-works projects). Findings such as this link sexuality to labor, social reproduction, consumption, political structures, and urban space as much as to norms of sexual propriety. In turn, such thick historical and ethnographic descriptions have informed not only sexuality studies but also urban research more generally (Castells 1983; D’Emilio 1983; Walkowitz 1992). To what extent is the city itself the object of research on urban sexuality? Just because most scholarship on sex is sited in cities does not mean that an urban anthropology of sexuality is well developed. If much of the general subield of urban anthropology proceeds without a great deal of attention to sexual life, Nonini—A Companion to Urban Anthropology El 208 ARA WILSON anthropological investigations of sexuality typically concentrate on the sexual topic (same-sex sexuality, sex work, or transgenderism), giving uneven attention to the context of the city. For the most part, the urban context provides a default setting rather than an integrated focus of the analysis. In fact, most cross-cultural ethnographic studies of urban sexuality are identiied as a country study, such as China (Rofel 2007), presenting the relevant scale as national rather than urban. What do sexual mores have to do with municipal authority, urban development, or zoning regulation? How do sexual politics relate to the metropolitan scale? What are the speciic spatial dynamics involved in sexual expression? At this point in the conversation, these inductive questions are more interesting, but far less addressed, than deductive arguments about how mainstream norms regulate devalued forms of sexuality. As this review has shown, renewed attention to path-breaking studies of earlier scholars (Humphreys 1975; Newton 1972; Rubin 2011) and contemporary spatially oriented frameworks offer fruitful methods for capturing the urban/sex nexus. Rubin (2011) notes that training in archaeology in urban European history underwrote her research on San Francisco’s gay leather culture. Geographic perspectives illuminate the spatial nature of sexual expression and also how sexuality informs space (Hubbard 2011; Mort and Nead 2000). Such works have considered the territoriality of non-normative sexual cultures; how spatial practices shape sexual cultures; ways that a public/private binary is complicated by urban sexuality; and how sexuality plays out on scales ranging from the body to the closet to the nation. Anthropologists have engaged architecture (Leap 1999), corporate archives (Wilson 2004), and material culture (Voss 2008) to address such questions. Literary projects and ilms provide not only content, but also informative analyses of distinctly urban expressions of sexuality. We can use more studies of urban sexuality that, like the foundational texts, make sex and the city both objects of critical analysis. REFERENCES El Altman, D. (2001) Global Sex. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Allison, A. 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