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THE ROUTLEDGE RESEARCH COMPANION TO
GEOGRAPHIES OF SEX AND SEXUALITIES

This immensely useful collection of essays rigorously and insightfully addresses urgent
questions about sexuality, space and place in an impressive variety of contexts. It will be of
benefit not only to geographers, but also to anyone interested in a rich, nuanced analysis
of the production and control of sex, sexuality, and sexual and gender identities and
subcultures.
Dean Spade, Seattle University School of Law, USA

This volume definitively demonstrates that the study of sexuality is not a sub-field of
Geography but rather a crucial and integral component that, taken up seriously, inherently
redefines the field. Comprehensive, well-organized, and all-encompassing, it is a must far
any syllabus not solely on sexuality studies, but more trenchantly, on human geography.
The encapsulation of many decades of work on sexuality and its implications far the study
and field of geography is breathtaking.
Jasbir K. Puar, Rutgers University, USA and author of
Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times

Comprehensive and authoritative, this state-of-the-art review both charts and

develops the rich sub-discipline geographies of sexualities, exploring sex-gender,
sexuality and sexual practices. Emerging from the desire to examine differences
and exclusions as a key aspect of human geographies, these geographies have
engaged with heterosexual and queer, lesbian, gay, bi and trans lives. Developing
thinking in this area, geographers and other social scientists have illustrated the
centrality of place, space and other spatial relationships in reconstituting sexual
practices, representations, desires, as well as sexed bodies and lives. This book
reviews the current state of the field and offers new insights from authors located
on five continents. In doing so, the book seeks to draw on and influence core
debates in this field, as well as disrupt the Anglo-American hegemony in studies
of sexualities, sexes and geographies. This volume is the definitive collection in the
area, bringing together many intemational leaders in the field, alongside scholars
that are well-established outside the Anglophone academy, and many emerging
talents who will lead the field in the decades to come.

Gavin Brown is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of

Leicester, UK.

Kath Browne is Professor in Human Geography at the University of Brighton, UK.

 The Routledge Research
Companion to Geographies of
Sex and Sexualities

Edited by
GAVIN BROWN
University of Leicester, UK
KATH BROWNE
University of Brighton, UK

With Section Editors:

Andrew Gorman-Murray, Robert Kulpa, Maarten Loopmans,
Tiffany Muller Myrdahl, Catherine J. Nash, Joseli Maria Silva,
Andrew Tucker, Paulo Jorge Vieira

I~ ~~~1!;n~~~up
LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published 2016
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2016 selection and editorial matter, Gavin Brown and Kath Browne;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Gavin Brown and Kath Browne to be identified as the authors
of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has
been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
Ali rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Productor corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without
intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN: 9781472455482 (hbk)
ISBN: 9781315613000 (ebk)
Typeset in Palatino Linotype
by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Printed and bound in the United States of America by Publishers Graphics,

LLC on sustainably sourced paper.
 Contents

List of Figures ix
List of Tables xi
Notes on Contributors xiii
Acknowledgements xxiii

1 An Introduction to the Geographies of Sex and Sexualities 1

Kath Browne and Gavin Brown

SECTION 1 URBAN SEXUALITIES

Gavin Brown, Tiffany Muller Myrdahl and Paulo Jorge Vieira (editors)

2 Urban Sexualities: Section lntroduction 13

Gavin Brown, Tiffany Muller Myrdahl, Paulo Jorge Vieira

3 Disaggregating Sexual Metronormativities: Looking Back at 'Lesbian'

Urbanisms 21
Julie A. Podmore

4 Dyked New York: The Space between Geographical Imagination and

Materialization of Lesbian-Queer Bars and Neighbourhoods 29
Jen Jack Gieseking

5 Visibility on Their Own Terms? LGBTQ Lives in Small Canadian Cities 37

Tiffany Muller Myrdahl

6 Trans(itional) Geographies: Bodies, Binaries, Places and Spaces 45

Lynda Johnston and Robyn Longhurst

7 Sexualities and Urban Life 55

Gustav Visser

SECTION 11 SEXUAL POLITICS

Kath Browne and Gavin Brown (editors)

8 Sexual Politics: Section Introduction 63

Gavin Brown and Kath Browne

9 Temptresses and Predators: Gender-based Violence, Safekeeping and the

Production of Proper Subjects 71
Jasan Lim and Alexandra Fanghanel
THE ROUTLEDGE RESEARCH COMPANION TO GEOGRAPHIES OF SEX ANO SEXUALITIES

10 Eco-sexual Normativity and Queer(ing) Ecologies 79

Emma A. Foster

11 Tunnels of Social Growth within the Leviathan: A Story of China's

Super Girl 89
Camila Bassi

12 In Italy It' s Different: Pride as a Space of Political Contention 97

Cesare Di Feliciantonio

13 Radical Activism and Autonomous Contestation 'From Within': The Gay

Centre in Tel Aviv 105
Chen Misgav

14 Intersectional Geopolitics, Transgender Advocacy and the New Media

Environment 117
Natasha Vine and Julie Cupples

15 Sexual Tensions in Modemizing Singapore: The Postcolonial and the

Intima te 129
Natalie Oswin

SECTION 111 DECOLONIZING SEXUALITIES

Robert Kulpa and Joseli Maria Silva (editors)

16 Decolonizing Queer Epistemologies: Section lntroduction 139

Robert Kulpa and Joseli Maria Silva

17 Queer Affirmations and Embodied Knowledge in the Brazilian

Performance Group Dzi Croquettes 143
Jan Simon Hutta

18 Feminist and Queer Epistemologies beyond Academia and the

Anglophone World: Political Intersectionality and Transfeminism in the
Catalan Context 155
Maria Rodó-de-Zárate

19 Performing Academy: Feedback and Diffusion Strategies for Queer

Scholactivists in France 165
Rachele Borghi, Marie-Hélene/Sam Bourcier, Cha Prieur

20 Writing through Activisms and Academia: Challenges and Possibilities 175

Niharika Banerjea, Kath Browne, Leela Bakshi, Subhagata Ghosh

21 'Wake up, Alice, This is Not Wonderland!' Power, Diversity and

Knowledge in Geographies of Sexualities 185
Joseli Maria Silva and Marcio /ose Ornat

vi
 CONTENTS

SECTION IV MOBILE SEXUALITIES

Andrew Gorman-Murray and Catherine f. Nash (editors)

22 Mobile Sexualities: Section Introduction 195

Andrew Gorman-Murray and Catherine f. Nash

23 Moving to Paris! Gays and Lesbians: Paths, Experiences and Projects 201
Marianne Blidon

24 Queer Migration: Going South from China to Australia 213

Audrey Yue

25 Evolving Bodies: Mapping (Trans)Gender Identities in Refugee Law 221

Senthorun Raj

26 Queer Political Geographies of Migration and Diaspora 229

Farhang Rouhani

27 You've Come a Long Way, Baby: Unpacking the Metaphor of Transgender

Mobility 237
Petra Doan

28 LGBT Communities, Identities and the Politics of Mobility: Moving from

Visibility to Recognition in Contemporary Urban Landscapes 247
Andrew Gorman-Murray and Catherine f. Nash

SECTION V SEXUAL HEALTH

Andrew Tucker (editor)

29 Sexual Health: Section Introduction 257

Andrew Tucker

30 Queering Epidemiology 263

Gerry Kearns

31 'Why Must We Stay in This Cage?' Goveming Sexuality in Biomedical

Research 275
Stephen Taylor

32 Relocation and Negotiation: Integrating Mobilities in Gay Men's

Sexual Health 283
Nathaniel M. Lewis

33 Reconsidering Relationships between Homophobia, Human Rights and

HIV/AIDS 295
Andrew Tucker

vii
THE ROUTLEDGE RESEARCH COMPANION TO GEOGRAPHIES OF SEX AND SEXUALITIES

SECTION VI COMMERCIAL SEXUALITIES

Maarten Loopmans (editor)

34 Commercial Sexualities: Section Introduction 307

Maarten Loopmans

35 Sex Work, Urban Govemance and the Gendering of Cities 313

Phil Hubbard

36 Defining Commercial Sexualities, Past and Present 321

Magaly Rodríguez García

37 Sexualities, Tropicalizations and the Transnational Sex Trade: Brazilian

Women in Spain 331
foseli Maria Silva and Marcio /ose Ornat
38 Beyond Dichotomies of Victimization versus Agency: Bringing in
Gendered Spatial Subject Positions Related to Intimacy 341
Marlene Spanger

SECTION VII DIGITAL SEXUALITIES

Catherine f. Nash and Andrew Gorman-Murray (editors)

39 Digital Sexualities: Section Introduction 353

Catherine f. Nash and Andrew Gorman-Murray

40 Sexting, Schools and Surveillance: Mediated Sexuality in the Classroom 359

KathAlbury

41 Youth Online: Non-heterosexual Young People's Use of the Internet to

Negotiate their Identities, Support Networks and Sociosexual Relations 369
Gary Downing

42 'Male Blood Elves Are So Gay': Gender and Sexual Identity in Online
Carnes 379
Cherie Todd

43 Homy at the Bus Stop, Paranoid in the Cul-de-sac: Sex, Technology and
Public Space 391
Sharif Mowlabocus

44 Digital Technologies and Sexualities in Urban Space 399

Catherine f. Nash and Andrew Gorman-Murray

Bibliography 407
Index 497

viii
 List of Figures

11.1 Super Girl 2004-5 final with Zhou Bichang (left), Li Yuchun (centre) and
Zhang Liangying (right). By permission of Associated Press (2005) 93
13.1 The LGBT community centre. By permission of Chen Misgav 108
13.2 The Radical Gay Parade, 2011. By permission of Chen Misgav 113
13.3 Signs in Hebrew and Arabic against racism and nationalism on the
Radical Gay Parade, 2011. By permission of Chen Misgav 113
23.l Residential distributions of the respondents in terms of the size of districts.
By permission of Marianne Blidon. Reproduced from Blidon (2007) 205
23.2 Map of the municipalities of origin of respondents who have lived orare
living in Paris. By permission of Marianne Blidon. Reproduced from
Blidon (2007) 206
23.3 Map of destination towns of respondents who have resided in Paris. By
permission of Marianne Blidon. Reproduced from Blidon (2007) 208
 List of Tables

23.1 Sample characteristics. By permission of Marianne Blidon. Reproduced

from Blidon (2007) 204
27.1 Travel to Southern Comfort Conference in 2000 242
37.1 Discourses of Spanish men about themselves and about Brazilian women 335
37.2 Discourses of Brazilian women about themselves and about Spanish men
and women 337
 Notes on Contributors

Kath Albury is an Associate Professor at UNSW Australia, in the School of Arts and Media.
Her research focuses on mediated sexual self-representation, sexual subcultures, and the
role of user-generated media (including social networking platforms) in young people's
formal and informal sexual leaming.

Leela Bakshi took part in the 'Count Me In Too' project, which researches LGBT, initially
as a participant and subsequently as part of the research team. This has led to a role as an
'activist researcher', working on the 'Making Lives Liveable' project and with university
researchers in academic fora that offer opportunities for LGBT activism. A resident of
Brighton and Hove, Leela is co-author, with Professor Kath Browne, of Ordinary in Brighton:
LGBT, Activisms and the City (Ashgate, 2013).

Niharika Banetjea is Associate Professor in the School of Liberal Studies at Ambedkar

University, Delhi. Her interests lie in the areas of gender and sexuality, gender and
development, space and sexualities, globalization, and qualitative methods and ethnography.
She has published in joumals such as Gender Place and Culture, Contemporary South Asia and
the Global Studies fournal. She is currently co-editing an anthology on friendship and social
activism. She is also working on a manuscript about community and queer activism with
Sappho for Equality, the activist forum for lesbian, bisexual women and transmen rights in
eastem India.

Camita Bassi is a human geography academic. Her doctoral research on Birmingham (UK)
and recent research on Shanghai concem the intersection of 'race' and sexuality within
and through political economy. Camila's ongoing project within critica! geography is to
indicate the benefits of a retum to, and reinvigoration of, Marx and Marxism. Accordingly,
her work offers an original exploration of key ideas from Marx and Gramsci in order to think
through more subtle accounts of capitalism - specifically, instances from within that escape
its oppressive conditions. Camila makes a case for a retum to Marxism as an altemative
to the seeming necessity to reconfigure Marxianisms via poststructuralism. She builds
on this retum to Marxism by critiquing the revolutionary left vanguard of England's
anti-war movement through what she argues to be the spirit of Marxism - that is, the task
of building a third camp of independent, intemationalist, working-class politics. Finally, an
excavation of early Marxist work on the Jewish question guides Camila's current writing on
the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Marianne Blidon is Associate Professor at Paris 1-Panthéon Sorbonne University and

associate researcher at INED (National institute of Demographic Studies). She is a feminist
geographer, working on gender and sexualities. She was the first French geographer to
achieve a PhD on geography of sexualities ('Distance and Meeting: Elements for a Queer
Geography'). She has organized severa! seminars and symposia on gender and queer
THE ROUTLEDGE RESEARCH COMPANION TO GEOGRAPHIES OF SEX AND SEXUALITIES

geographies, helping to legitimize these topics in France. She founded, with other social
researchers, a free open-access joumal Genre, sexualité & société that she led for eight years.
She is an editorial board member of the joumal Gender, Place and Culture. She collaborates
with the European Network on Geographies of Sexualities and has published severa! issues
in French journals such as L'Espace Politique and Echogéo.

Rachele Borghi aka Zarra Bonheur describes herself as a queerlesbianfeminist

pornoactivademic geographer and is currently at the University of Paris Sorbonne. Her
work focuses on post-pom and the transgression of normative space, including reflection
on the academic practices and researcher's positionality. She has created the persona of
Zarra Bonheur, in order to find a 'teotetic' (theoretical and pragmatic) way out of conceptual
cages, to experiment with the embodied research, and to convey subjects, objectives and
concepts through her body. Through navigating experimental epistemic pathways, she felt
that the new could still spring from the source-rich bibliographic research. She has therefore
explored a way - shared by other individuals - that took shape through libraries, self-
managed squats, universities, associations' headquarters, and the streets of ltalian, French
and Spanish cities. For her, sharing practices and reflections with old and new comrades is at
the heart of her understanding of militancy, as it is the research and discovery of sensations
that puts her body at the centre and makes it, on the one hand, an instrument of pleasure
and, on the other, a potential site for subversion. Zarra Bonheur is not the other side, the
alter ego of Rachele Borghi or the stage name of the academician. Rather, it is a game. lt is
an attempt to build a collective creation and experimentation project, a palimpsest of roles
and places, travesting Rachele's body and flowing, contaminating, creating and nourishing
exchanges of practices, networks and relationships.

Marie-Hélene/Sam Bourcier is a queer activist and theorist. He is an Associate Professor

of Cultural Studies, Feminist Studies and Queer Studies at the University of Lille III. He
founded Le ZOO, the first queer group in France in 1996. He translated Teresa de Lauretis
and Monique Wittig into French and writes extensively on queer epistemology, gender and
sexual politics, pornography and post-pornography, queer subcultures and politics. He is
the author of the trilogy Queer Zones 1, Politique des identités sexuelles et des savoirs (2001),
Queer Zones 2, Sexpolitiques (2005), Queer Zones 3, ldentités, Cultures, Politics (2011). He is
currently writing a book on sex, neoliberalism and discrimination at university. Ali his
books and papers are available at https://univ-lille3.academia.edu/marieheleneBourcier.

Gavin Brown is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Leicester. He

was a founding officer of the Space, Sexualities and Queer Research Group of the Royal
Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers). He co-edited Geographies
of Sexualities: Theory, practices and politics (Ashgate, 2007) with Kath Browne and Jason Lim.
He has published widely on the geographies of gay men's lives, radical queer activism and
rethinking debates about 'homonormativity'. In recent years, his research has focused as
much on the historical geographies of British anti-apartheid solidarity activism, as it has on
the geographies of sexualities, and he has a book forthcoming with Routledge on that theme.
Follow him on Twitter: @lestageog.

Kath Browne is Professor in Human Geography at the University of Brighton with research
interests in sexualities, genders and spatialities. Her current research includes 'Making
Lives Liveable: Rethinking Social Exclusion' and explorations of transnational resistances
to LGBT equalities. She has worked on LGBT equalities, lesbian geographies, gender
transgressions and women's spaces. Kath was a founding member of the Space, Sexualities

xiv
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

and Queer Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British
Geographers). She has authored a number of journal publications, co-wrote with Leela
Bakshi Ordinary in Brighton: LGBT, Activisms and the City (Ashgate, 2013), and Queer Spiritual
Spaces (with Sally Munt and Andrew Yip, Ashgate, 2010), and co-edited Queer Methods and
Methodologies (with Catherine Nash Ashgate, 2010) and Geographies of Sexualities: Theory,
Practices and Politics (with Gavin Brown and Jason Lim, Ashgate, 2007). Her most recent
book, Lesbian Geographies, co-edited with Eduarda Ferreira, is forthcoming with Ashgate.
Follow her on Twitter: @kathbrowne.

Julie Cupples is Reader in Human Geography and Co-Director of the Global Development
Academy at the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests span cultural geography,
development studies and media and cultural studies. She is currently engaged in a
collaborative research project exploring the geographic dimensions of media convergence,
funded by the Marsden Fund of the Royal Society of New Zealand. This project is exploring
the democratizing and decolonizing dimensions of the new media environment, with a
focus on mainstream entertainment media as well as community and indigenous media
operations. She is the author of Latín American Development (Routledge, 2013), co-editor of
Mediated Geographies and Geographies of Media (forthcoming with Springer) and co-author
of Media/Communications/Geographies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (forthcoming with Routledge).

Cesare Di Feliciantonio is currently enrolled in a PhD programme in Geography between

KU Leuven (Belgium) and Sapienza - University of Rome (Italy). His research interests
include a wide range of issues from social and urban geography to critica! political economy.
Beyond academia, he is a militant in the queer leftist scene in Rome, where he has belonged to
various collectives/groups. Currently, he is part of the Roman node of Communia, a national
network involving different forms of squatting and grassroots initiatives (communianet.org).

Petra Doan is Professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at Florida State
University. In addition to her research on planning in the developing world, she conducts
research on planning issues surrounding the LGBTQ community. Most notably she has
edited two books, Queerying Planning: Chal/enging Heteronormative Assumptions and Reframing
Planning Practice (Ashgate, 2011) and Planning and LGBTQ Communities: The Need for Inclusive
Queer Space (Routledge, 2015). As an openly trans woman she has also published a number
of articles on trans and LGB perspectives on cities in Gender, Place, and Culture, Environment
and Planning A, the fournal of Planning Education and Research and Progressive Planning.

Gary Downing is a postgraduate research student at the University of Reading, UK. His
research interests include sexual and gender identities, the interconnections between young
people's online and offline lives, and sociocultural geographies. His recent work has been
published in Children's Geographies. He is also about to submit his PhD, which explores
disabled young people's everyday corporeal realities, their sociosexual and support
networks, and their use of the internet and assistive technologies.

Alexandra Fanghanel is a Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Greenwich. She is

interested in the production of knowledge, sexuality and subjectification in public spaces.
Her research examines questions of fear of crime, securitization, risk and citizenship in
public spaces. Alex has also published work on the anthropology of households and families.
Sorne of Alex's work is published in Geoforum, Theoretical Criminology, the European fournal of
Population and Cultural Geographies.

XV
THE ROUTLEDGE RESEARCH COMPANION TO GEOGRAPHIES OF SEX ANO SEXUALITIES

Emma A. Foster is a Lecturer in Intemational Politics and Gender in the Department of

Political Science and Intemational Studies at the University of Birmingham. Her research
interests include gender and sexuality, environmental politics and Foucault. She is currently
researching issues related to queer ecology and queer(ing) development. Emma has
published in a variety of joumals including Gender, Place and Culture, the British Journal of
Politics and lnternational Relations and Globalizations.

Subhaga ta Ghosh is a founder member of Sappho for Equality, the activist forum for lesbian,
bisexual women and transmen rights in eastern India. Holding a PhD in Bioinformatics,
she is professionally involved in the government research and development sector. Science
provides her living and sexuality activism bestows her life.

Jen Jack Gieseking (@jgieseking), Assistant Professor of Public Humanities in American

Studies at Trinity College, is engaged in research on co-productions of space and identity in
digital and material environments, with a focus on sexual and gender identities. Jack's work
pays special attention to how such productions support or inhibit social, spatial and economic
justice. S/he is presently writing her second book, Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians,
Dykes, and Queer Women, 1983-2008. Jack's first book is The People, Place, and Space Reader,
co-edited with William Mangold, Cindi Katz, Setha Low and Susan Saegert, and recently out
with Routledge. S/he has published work on the topic of lesbian and queer spaces in Area,
Radical History Review and the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, and has published
on related topics in Qualitative Inquiry and the f ournal of Urban Affairs. S/he also blogs and
creates data visualizations about urban queer history on her website, jgieseking.org.

Andrew Gorman-Murray is a Senior Lecturer in Geography and Urban Studies at the

University of Western Sydney, Australia. He is a social and cultural geographer whose
research has focused on geographies of gender and sexuality and the politics of belonging.
He has examined LGBTQ experiences and place-making activities across urban and regional
Australia, at the scales of the nation, state, city, neighbourhood and home. He has published
severa! edited collections: Material Geographies of Household Sustainability (Ashgate, 2011,
with Dr Ruth Lane), Sexuality, Rurality, and Geography (Lexington, 2013, with Barbara Pini
and Lía Bryant), and Masculinities and Place (Ashgate, 2014, with Peter Hopkins).

Phil Hubbard has written extensively on the relations of sexuality and the city, and
has particular expertise in the regulation of sex work through planning, licensing and
environmental controls. This has included intemational comparative projects funded by
the ESRC, Joseph Rowntree and the British Academy: he has given expert testimony to the
British All-Party Parliamentary Group on prostitution, and his work has also been cited in
Australian and New Zealand parliamentary reviews. His publications include Sex and the
City: Geographies of Prostitution in the Urban West (1999) and Cities and Sexualities (2012).

Jan Simon Hutta is Lecturer at the University of Bayreuth in Germany, working in the
Cultural Geography Research Group. He has conducted research in Brazil and Germany on
sexual and transgender politics, urban governmentality and relations of affect, subjectivity
and space. He received his PhD from The Open University in Milton Keynes, UK. Between
2010 and 2012, he worked for the Transgender Europe's intemational research project
'Transrespect versus Transphobia Worldwide'. He is a committee member of the Space,
Sexualities and Queer Research Group (SSQRG) of the Royal Geographic Society and
founding editor of the German-language open-access journal on critica! urban research,
sub\ urban - Zeitschrift für kritische Stadtforsclzung.

xvi
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Lynda Johnston is a Professor in Geography at the University of Waikato. Her research

interests include gender, sexuality, embodiment, tourism and leisure, subjectivities,
methodologies, constructions of geographical knowledge and cultures of nature. Lynda
is interested in the relationship between bodies and ('real' and discursive) spaces. She
concentrates on the formation of subjectivities - gender, sexuality, ethnicity and class - and
the ways in which these are performed in different spaces (for example, home, weddings,
activist spaces, gay pride para des, beaches, internet). Her publications include Space, Place and
Sex: Geographies of Sexualities (2010) co-authored with Robyn Longhurst, Queering Tourism:
Paradoxical Performances of Gay Pride Parades (2005) and Subjectivities, Knowledges and Feminist
Geographies: The Subjects and Ethics of Social Research (2002), a multi-authored work. Lynda is
currently working on a sole-authored manuscript, Gender Variant Geographies, for Ashgate.

Gerry Keams is a Professor of Human Geography at Maynooth University, Ireland. He

works at the intersection of historical, political and medica! geography. His Geopolitics and
Empire: The Legacy of Halford Mackinder (Oxford University Press, 2009) was awarded the
Murchison Prize from the Royal Geographical Society in 2010. With colleagues, David
Meredith and John Morrissey, he has edited a collection of essays on the geography of
austerity in Ireland, Spatial fustice and the Irish Crisis (Royal Irish Academy, 2014). His work
in historical geography includes editing Irish Historical Geographies: Colonial Contexts and
Postcolonial Legacies, which appeared as two special issues of the journal, Historical Geography
(2013, 2014). He is currently the Distinguished Historical Geographer for the Historical
Geography Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers and also serves on
the Geographical and Geosciences Committee of the Royal Irish Academy. He is currently
working on an Irish Research Council-funded project, The Geographical Turn, a study of the
geographical research and explorations undertaken by Irish artists, and on a book about the
cultural politics of AIDS, Making Space for AIDS.

Robert Kulpa is interested in critica! epistemologies within/of gender and sexuality

studies, pertaining to the modes of knowledge production and hegemonic geotemporal
'knowledge situations'. His doctoral research (Birkbeck College, University of London)
explored discourses of nationhood and homosexuality in the context of 'post-communist
transformations' in Poland. He has also engaged in the study of geographies and
temporalities of transnational sexual politics, nationhood and non-normative identities as
interlocked with discourses of the 'Occident'/'West' and 'the Rest', 'development', 'human
rights' and 'EUropeanization'. Previous publications include De-Centring Western Sexualities:
Central and Eastern Perspectives (2011), a special issue of Lambda Nordica journal, 'Central-
Eastern European Sexualities "in Transition"' (2012, both co-edited with J. Mizielinska), and
articles in Sexualities (2014), Gender, Place and Culture (2014) and Southeastern Europe (2013).
For more information, visit http://independent.academia.edu/robertkulpa.

Nathaniel M. Lewis is a Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Southampton,

UK, and formerly a Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Postdoctoral Fellow in
the School of Health and Human Performance at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova
Scotia, Canada. His research focuses on relationships between migration, health and the
urban environment among gay-identified men in North America. He serves on the editorial
board of Gender, Place and Culture: A fournal of Feminist Geography, and his work can be found
in a variety of journals such as Health & Place, Geoforum, Social & Cultural Geography and
Annals of the Association of American Geographers. He has also contributed to recent volumes
such as Planning and LGBTQ Communities: The Need for Inclusive Queer Spaces (edited by Petra

xvii
THE ROUTLEDGE RESEARCH COMPANION TO GEOGRAPHIES OF SEX AND SEXUALITIES

Doan, Routledge, 2015) and Masculinities and Place (edited by Andrew Gorman-Murray and
Peter Hopkins, Ashgate, 2014).

Jason Lim a Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Brighton, UK. His research
concems the interactions between the affective, the material, the practica! and the embodied.
He has explored how the embodiment of sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity and class can be
understood in terms of 'affect'. His work has also addressed how political problems are
framed within feminist activism using assumptions about certain proper modes of gendered
desire, embodiment, subjectivity and agency. He has worked with Kath Browne (University
of Brighton, UK) to examine inequalities and marginalization faced by LGBT groups in
the city of Brighton and Hove in the UK. Jason is co-editor of Geographies of Sexualities:
Theories, Practices and Politics and one of the founding members of the Space, Sexualities
and Queer Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British
Geographers). He has published papers in Gender, Place and Culture, Geoforum, Environment
and Planning A, Sociological Research Online and the fournal of Social Policy.

Robyn Longhurst is Pro Vice-Chancellor Academic and Professor at the University of

Waikato. For many years she has taught feminist geography and is committed to providing
innovative teaching, leaming and postgraduate supervision. Robyn has been awarded both
a University of Waikato Teaching Excellence Award anda University of Waikato Research
Postgraduate Supervision Excellence Award. She has been Editor-in-Chief of Gender, Place
and Culture: A fournal of Feminist Geography and Chair of the Intemational Geographical
Union Commission on Gender and Geography. Robyn has published on issues relating to
pregnancy, mothering, sexuality, 'visceral geographies', masculinities, and body size and
shape. Her articles have appeared in joumals including Environment and Planning O: Society
and Space, Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, Progress in Human Geography, Geoforum,
Social & Cultural Geography and the Feminist Review. She is author of Bodies: Exploring Fluid
Boundaries (2001), Maternities: Gender, Bodies and Spaces (2008) and co-author of Pleasure Zones:
Bodies, Cities, Spaces (2001) and Space, Place, and Sex: Geographies of Sexualities (2010). Currently,
she is working on a sole-authored manuscript titled Skype: Bodies, Screens Space for Ashgate.

Maarten Loopmans is currently an Associate Professor of Geography at the University of

Leuven, Belgium. He has a broad range of research interests that span urban geography and
planning, political ecology and the geographies of sexualities. These topics are studied in
many countries across the globe, both in the Global North and the Global South. His research
on sexuality examines the dialectic relationship between norms surrounding sexuality
and the production of space. He has written extensively about the spatiality of sex work
and sex-work policies in Belgian cities and is currently researching non-heteronormative
heterosexualities. His English-language publications include work published in Environment
and Planning A, Social and Cultural Geography and Urban Studies.

Chen Misgav is a Research Coordinator and Research Fellow in the Minerva Humanities
Center, Te! Aviv University, and teaches in the Urban Design programme in Bezalel and
in the Department of Geography and Human Environment in Te! Aviv University. He is
engaged in, and writes about, activism, queer and feminism. He recently completed his
PhD titled 'Spatial Activism: Perspectives of Body, Identity and Memory' in the PECLAB
(Planning with Communities for the Environment) in the Department of Geography and
Human environment at Te! Aviv University, Israel. Chen graduated with an MSc in Town
and Regional Planning at the Technion and wrote his thesis on queer perspectives of Te!
Aviv. Chen has published joumal papers and book chapters in Hebrew, Italian and English.

xviii
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Sharif Mowlabocus is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media at the University of Sussex,

UK. His research focuses on the intersections between sex and technology, with a particular
emphasis on the role that digital technologies are playing in the construction, maintenance
and discussion of sexual identities, practices and poli tics. He has worked with HlV / AIDS
organizations on digital community outreach initiatives and has published widely on themes
ranging from pomography to dating applications to cinema and queer representation.

Tiffany Muller Myrdahl is the Ruth Wynn Woodward Junior Chair (2012-15) in the
Department of Gender, Sexuality & Women's Studies at Simon Fraser University (Bumaby,
BC, Canada). She completed her PhD in Geography with a certificate in Feminist Studies
at the University of Minnesota in 2008. Her publications appear in ACME: An International
E-fournal for Critica/ Geographies, Social & Cultural Geography, Leisure Studies and the Journal
of Lesbian Studies, among others, and she serves on the editorial board of Gender, Place and
Culture: A fourna/ of Feminist Geography. Her current manuscript, 'Here is Queer: Sexual
Difference and Urban Change in a Small Canadian City', is under contract with University
of British Columbia Press.

Catherine J. Nash is a Professor of Geography at Brock University in Canada. She is a social

and cultural geographer with research expertise at the intersections of feminist geographies
and the geographies of sexualities. Her recent research (with Kath Browne), funded by
the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, investigates resistances
to LGBT equalities in the UK and Canada. She also has a developing research interest in
cyberspace, virtual geographies and mobilities. She is co-editor (with Kath Browne) of Queer
Methods and Methodologies (Ashgate, 2010). Her work has been published in a wide range of
joumals including Antipode, Area and The Canadian Geographer.

Marcio Jose Omat is a Professor of Geography in the graduate programme at the State
University of Ponta Grossa and Vice-coordinator of the Group of Territorial Studies at the
same university. He is one of the founders of the lbero-Latin American Network for the Study
of Geography, Gender and Sexualities. His research focuses on the relationships between
space, gender, sexualities and culture, with special attention on transsexualities, homophobia
and transphobia. He is a member of the Renascer (Rebom) NGO, which works in support of
citizenship and the human rights of LGBT groups. He has edited severa! books, including
Geograftas malditas: corpos, sexualidades e espm;os (Cursed Geographies: Bodies, Sexualities and
Spaces), Espa~o, género e masculinidades plurais (Space, Gender and Plural Masculinities) and
Espa~o, género e feminilidades ibero-americanas (Space, Gender and Ibero-American Femininities).

Natalie Oswin is Associate Professor of Geography at McGill University, Montreal, Canada

and has a research interest in sexual citizenship, with a specific emphasis on how sexual
politics intertwine with processes of globalization and urbanization. Her publications
include articles on South Africa's post-apartheid gay and lesbian movement, the cultural
politics of heteronormativity in Singapore and conceptual pieces on queer geographies.
She is one of the editors of the interdisciplinary joumal Environment and Planning D: Society
and Space.

Julie A. Podmore is a College Professor in Geosciences at John Abbott College and an

Affiliate Associate Professor in Geography, Planning and Environment at Concordia
University in Montreal. The intersections between gender and sexuality in urban space have
been her sustained research focus - a perspective that is reflected in her publications on
Montreal's lesbian geographies. A member of the Sexuality and Gender Diversity research

xix
THE ROUTLEDGE RESEARCH COMPANION TO GEOGRAPHIES OF SEX ANO SEXUALITIES

team at the Université du Québec a Montréal, she is currently developing research projects
on the intersections between LGBTQ populations, generations and geographies.

Cha Prieur is a PhD student (ABO) and an Assistant Professor in Geography at the Paris-
Sorbonne University. Their thesis concems queer places, communities and sexualities in
París and Montreal, with a focus on the concepts of 'safe spaces' and 'brave spaces'. Cha
is interested in methodological, epistemological and ethical questions of a researcher's
place in relation to their subject, fieldwork and people encountered during the fieldwork,
and identifies more generally with the fields of gender geography and geographies of
sexualities. Cha's perspectives for further research concem the ways in which researchers
deal with their emotions in relation to their researches and also interviewees' emotions in
the fieldwork, as well as the possibilities of linking together geography and psychotherapy
to help researchers in their fieldwork.

Senthorun Raj is a researcher and advocate with a passion for popular culture, social justice
and politics. He is currently completing his PhD titled 'Feeling Law: Intimacy, Violence, and
Queer Subjects' and is a sessional teacher at the Sydney Law School. He is a contributing
writer for the Guardian and has published a number of academic papers. He has written on
a range of topics including refugee law, queer intimacies, marriage equality, homophobic
violence and popular culture. He is also an advisory board member of the sexuality, gender
and diversity studies joumal Writing from Below. In a govemance capacity, he serves on the
boards of Amnesty Intemational Australia and ACON Health. Sen is a former Churchill
Fellow and has worked as the Senior Policy Advisor for the NSW Gay and Lesbian
Rights Lobby.

Maria Rodó-de-Zárate is a postdoctoral researcher (PNPD-CAPES) at the Sta te University of

Pon ta Grossa, Brazil, anda feminist activist. Her main research fields are feminist geographies
and geographies of sexualities and youth, with a special focus on intersectionality theory
and the development of new visual methodologies such as Relief Maps. She is a member of
the Geography and Gender Research Group (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona) and has
spent visiting research periods at CUNY (New York, USA), UEPG (Ponta Grossa, Brazil) and
UCD (Dublin, Ireland).

Magaly Rodríguez García is a Lecturer at the History Department of the University of

Leuven (KU Leuven). Her research focuses on the League of Nations and its campaigns
against traffic in women, prostitution and slavery, as well as on sex work and coerced labour
in the global perspective. Her publications include 'The League of Nations and the Moral
Recruitment of Women' (2012), 'Prostitution in World Cities (1600s-2000s)' (2014) and
'Child Slavery, Sex Trafficking or Domestic Work? The League of Nations and its Analysis
of the Mui Tsai System' (2015).

Farhang Rouhani, Professor of Geography at the University of Mary Washington, received

his doctoral degree from the University of Arizona in 2001. He is a cultural and political
geographer who researches and writes about globalization, state formation and new
media politics in Iran, diasporic Iranian and Muslim queer political geographies, and
anarchist-geographic theories and practices.

Joseli Maria Silva is a Professor of Geography in the postgraduate programme at the

State University of Ponta Grossa. She is a coordinator of the Group of Territorial Studies
at the same university and chief editor of the Revista Latino-americana de Geografia e Género

XX
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

(Latín American Journal of Geography and Gender). She is one of the founders of the lbero-
Latin American Network for the Study of Geography, Gender and Sexualities. Her research
focuses on the relationship between space, gender and sexualities, with special attention on
transsexualities. She is a member of the Renascer (Rebom) NGO, which works in support of
citizenship and the human rights of LGBT groups. She has edited severa! books, including
Geografías subversivas: discursos sobre espai;o, género e sexualidades (Subversive Geographies:
Discourses on Space, Gender and Sexuality), Geografías malditas: carpos, sexualidades e espai;os
(Cursed Geographies: Bodies, Sexualities and Spaces) and Espai;o, género e poder: conectando
fronteiras (Space, Gender and Power: Connecting Borders).

Marlene Spanger is an Assistant Professor at Aalborg University, Denmark. She is a researcher

and teacher in the fields of transnational migration, intimacies, gender and sexuality and has
a special interest in transactional and intimate relations, sex work and human trafficking,
focusing on how multiple subject positions of female migrants intertwine. Other fields of
interest are global care chains and transnational family, addressing gendered and racial
formations as well as intimate and care relations. Spanger is engaged with poststructuralist
feminist theory and discourse analysis theory. Her other relevant publications are: 'Doing
Marriage and Love in the Borderland of Transnational Sex Work: Female Thai Migrants in
Denmark' in NORA - Nordic /ournal of Feminist and Gender Research (2013); "'You See How
Good-looking Lee Ann is!" Establishing Field Relations through Gendered and Racialised
Bodily Practices' in Qualitative Studies (2012), 'Human Trafficking a Lever for Feminist
Voices? Transformations of the Danish Policy Field of Prostitution' in Critica/ Social Policy
(2011) and 'Disturbance and Celebration of Josephine Baker in Copenhagen 1928: Emotional
Constructions of Whiteness', in Andreassen and Vitus (eds), Affectivity and Race: Studies from
a Nordic Context (Ashgate, 2015).

Stephen Taylor is Lecturer in Human Geography at Queen Mary University of London.

His research focuses on the geographies of biomedical research in sub-Saharan Africa,
with a particular emphasis on emergent urban clinical tria! economies in South Africa. He
is currently completing a book manuscript based on his ethnographic fieldwork in Cape
Town, Durban and Johannesburg that explores the production of scientific facts in South
Africa, with special attention to the promises, perils and practica! labours of experimentation.
He was formerly a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Geography, University of
Cambridge and Queens' College, Cambridge. During this time he conducted research for the
World Health Organization on the securitization of polio eradication efforts in Pakistan and
Nigeria, and conducted collaborative research at the Rockefeller and Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundations on the catalytic role of philanthropy in driving global food security discourses.

Cherie Todd is a Senior Tutor for Student Leaming at the University of Waikato, Aotearoa,
New Zealand and she has recently completed her PhD titled 'Sex and Gender in World
of Warcraft: ldentities, Love, and Power' in the Geography, Tourism & Environmental
Planning Programme at the University of Waikato. Her PhD examines further the diverse
complexities of gaming culture and the relationships between gamers, as well as online/
offline identities. Cherie's MA thesis titled 'Gaming and Gender: Home as a Place of (Non)
conformity for Women Gamers' examines the experiences of women who game at home
and how they negotiate stereotypical and conflicting identities (woman at home/woman
gamer). Her research interests focus on social/cultural and feminist geography, and critica!
social theory.

xxi
THE ROUTLEDGE RESEARCH COMPANION TO GEOGRAPHIES OF SEX AND SEXUALITIES

Andrew Tucker is an MSM Research Specialist at the Anova Health Institute in South Africa.
Anova, through its Health4Men initiative, is creating access to MSM-focused competent
health services through a variety of training and mentoring programmes in partnership
with the South African Department of Health and implementing best-practice prevention,
treatment and community engagement models. Dr Tucker was previously a lecturer at
the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge and the Deputy Director
of the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies. He has published widely on
sexuality and health in sub-Saharan Africa in both geographical and medica! joumals. His
monograph Queer Visibilities: Space, Identity and lnteraction in Cape Town was published by
Wiley-Blackwell in 2009. Dr Tucker is also an Honorary Research Fellow at the Department
of Environmental and Geographical Sciences at the University of Cape Town.

Paulo Jorge Vieira is a researcher at the Center for Geographical Studies of the Institute of
Geography and Spatial Planning, University of Lisbon and at GETE - Group of Territorial
Studies at the State University of Ponta Grossa, Paraná, Brazil. He attended the Masters and
Doctorate programme 'Post-Colonialism and Global Citizenship' at the Center for Social
Studies and the Faculty of Economics, University of Coimbra (2005-2006). He is currently
studying for an MA in Geography - Population, Society and Territory in the Institute of
Geography and Spatial Planning, University of Lisbon. Paulo is a member of the editorial
team of the Revista Latino Americana de Geografia e Género and a committee member of the
Space, Sexualities and Queer Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society. His
research interests focus on three main areas: social and cultural geography, equality and
diversity; gender studies (masculinity) and lesbian, gay and queer studies; and social theory
and history and theory of geography (qualitative methodologies and epistemology).

Natasha Vine is a New Zealand queer activist, political scientist and graduate student
at Victoria University of Wellington. She has worked with queer and women's rights
organizations across New Zealand including UniQ VUWSA Women's Group and the
Young Labour Rainbow Branch.

Gustav Visser, an urban geographer by training, is currently Professor of Geography at

Stellenbosch University. His main research interest lies in identity-based consumption and
urban morphological change, which is best expressed in his work on sexuality and space
in urban South Africa. He also has a strong interest in the tourism and development nexus.
His most recent research focuses on Western theorizations of the relationship between gay
sexualities and knowledge production, and its links to specific forms of urban space, such as
gay ghettos and neighbourhoods.

Audrey Yue is Associate Professor in Cultural Studies at The University of Melboume.

Her recent publications include Sinophone Cinemas (Palgrave, 2014), Transnational Australian
Cinema: Ethics in the Asían Diasporas (Lexington, 2013) and Queer Singapore: llliberal Citizenship
and Mediated Cultures (Hong Kong University Press, 2012). She is currently Chief Investigator
in the Australian Research Council-funded project on multicultural arts govemance and is
completing a book project on queer Asian Australian migration.

xxii
 Acknowledgements

We would like to thank ali of the section editors and authors who made this volume possible.
Their work and dedication has resulted in a rich and outstanding collection of work that
offers both breadth and depth in ways that include but move beyond the Global North.
We want to acknowledge ali of those who created this area of investigation, and those
who continue to develop this area. Sorne are included in this collection, but there are
many others.
Thanks go to Clara Rivas Alonso for ali of her hard work in getting the manuscript to the
point of submission.
We would also like to thank Catherine Nash, Cesare di Feliciantonio and Eduarda Ferreira
for their (speedy and) insightful comments on an earlier draft of the main introduction. They
helped edit the editors and ensured that we remembered to see the world from perspectives
other than our own.
Kath would like to thank Donna for her unfailing support and putting up with her loud
typing at ali times of the day and night!
Gavin would like to thank Seosaimh for his !ove and encouragement, as well as the
insightful words of critique that so often accompanied that support. Thanks also for
reminding me to stop and rest.

Chapter 11 uses similar empirical material to an article published in Gender, Place & Culture:
'What's Radical about Reality TV? An Unexpected Tale of a Chinese Antihero' (Bassi, date)

Figure 11.1 this chapter is reproduced with the permission of AP Archive.

Chapter 15 is an abridged version of Natalie Oswin (2010) 'Sexual Tensions in Modernizing

Singapore: The Postcolonial and the Intimate' Environment and Planning D: Society and Space,
vol. 28, pp. 128-141. It is reproduced with the permission of Pion Ltd, London.

The epigraph at the beginning of Chapter 17 is from Difference and Repetition, translated
by Paul Patton. Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Ple. © Gilles
Deleuze and also © 1968 Columbia University Press. It is reprinted with the permission of
the publishers.
 Chapter 1
An Introduction to the Geographies of
Sex and Sexualities
Kath Browne and Gavin Brown

Introduction
Sexuality has been present, but obliquely addressed, in human geography for a long time.
Whenever geographers discussed demographic transition models, population dynamics
or fertility rates, for example, they were, at least implicitly, discussing human sexuality.
Such approaches tend to assume, prioritize and only attend to aspects of heterosexual
coupledom, parenthood and family arrangements. As in most of the topics we study, as
geographers we have leamed to be wary of assuming that these normative forms of family
and coupledom are universal and do not vary between places or across spatial scales. By
contrast, geographies of sexualities scholarship considers the different ways in which human
sexualities vary geographically.
Geographies of sexualities scholarship is now in its fourth decade. This approach
emerged from the desire to examine geographical differences in sexualities and their spatial
specificities as a key aspect of human geographies. This geographical work has engaged
with a multiplicity of sexual identities and practices, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans,
queer and heterosexual/straight as well as myriad other practices and experiences. This
rich body of work illustrates the centrality of place, space and other spatial relationships in
shaping sexual desires, practices and identities, as well as how they are represented, policed
and treated in law and everyday life. Similarly, geographers argue that place and space are
central to the production of sexed bodies (Duncan, 1996; Longhurst, 2001 ).
Often starting from the idea that there is nothing innate or natural to either space/place/
environment or sex and sexualities, these geographies have shown how sex and sexualities
are created in, through and by space, place and environment. Moreover, how space and place
are organized and used is directly related to sex and sexualities. Space/place are usually
understood as heterosexual and meant to be used by two people who are unambiguously
sexed (man or woman), exhibit proper gendered behaviours (femininity and masculinity)
that are mapped on to that unambiguous physical body and sexual interests that are directed
towards the clearly differentiated 'opposite sex'. Heteronormativity refers to the ways in
which sexuality, sex and gender are intertwined in ways that are presumed to be natural. lt
is usually based on particular class, race and able-bodied ideals.
Uncomplicated presentations of heterosexuality are what are expected to be visible in
spaces, making heteronormativity the marker of heterosexual space. Heterosexual couples
holding hands, for example, are unremarked upon and seen as 'normal' in most public
spaces in the Global North (Bell, 1994). In contrast, those who contravene these norms are
detected and repudiated, often with verbal and physical violence. For example, those who
THE ROUTLEDGE RESEARCH COMPANION TO GEOGRAPHIES OF SEX AND SEXUALITIES

are not 'properly' gendered-that is, easily read as male/female-can be subject to prejudice,
abuse and violence in spaces such as toilets (Browne, 2004). Similarly, couples who are read
as both being of the same sex, or those who are seen as beyond the 'correct' boundaries
of heterosexual monogamy can also be policed through shouting, comments and physical
attack (Valentine, 1996). Yet the sexuality of space tends only to be noticed, and named as
such, when it is not heterosexual/straight. Gay spaces are marked as different and named as
'gay', but this is not the case for straight spaces. What this means is that sexualities remake
everyday spaces, often as 'normal' (where normal means straight and adhering to gender
norms). People using these spaces can conform to the norms of the spaces. As a result, they
are not subject to violence, looks or comments. Their 'normality' remains unremarked and
invisible. In this way places also remake people's lives, identities and bodies.
Initially, geographies of sexualities focused on the activities and experiences of gay
men, before then considering the lives of lesbians, and then bi/bisexual and trans people.
Including trans people under the label 'sexualities' is problematic, because trans is not a
sexual identity; it is related to gender/sex. For this reason, this book explores sex, as it is
related to categorizations of man/woman, male/female, as well as the practices of gender
that make sexed bodies. Because geographies of sexualities are often presumed to be about
other sexualities, 'normative heterosexuality' or the places that Phi! Hubbard (2008) calls
'unsexy spaces' often get overlooked. Sexualities are key to the social relations which
produce these 'unsexy spaces' (such as supermarkets, homes and nights out with friends),
but because these social relations often go unnoticed and are not considered to be 'sexual',
such spaces are often overlooked even by geographers of sexualities (see, however, Meth,
2009; Morrison, 2012a, 2012b; Thomas, 2004; Waitt, Jessop and Gorman-Murray, 2011). The
predominance of studies of lesbian and gay spaces by geographers of sexualities also means
that there continues to be a lack of geographical work on asexuality, polyamory, kink and
BDSM (see Binnie, 1994; Herman, 2007; Klesse, 2007, 2014a, 2014b; Wilkinson, 2009a, 2011).
The term 'queer' has emerged as a dominant conceptual force in Global North
considerations of sexualities and sexes, as well as other normative forms of social relations.
Queer has diverse definitions. For our purposes, we understand that sorne people use queer
as an identity to move beyond lesbian, gay, bisexual and/or trans (G. Brown, 2007a), whilst
others see queer as a mode of thinking that questions how social norms are formed and
created (see Giffney, 2004; Browne, 2006; Browne and Nash, 2010; Oswin, 2008; Podmore,
2013a). Queer has questioned the normalization of certain genders (male/female) and
also sexualities, including sorne forms of lesbian and gay sexualities (what can be termed
homonormativities - see below).
Whilst there have been many important insights into how bodies and identities question
the rigid binaries of gender and sexualities, queer theory's emergence through textual
analysis has at times overlooked the lived experience of marginalization, exclusion and self-
determination - that is, what it feels like to be other/different and punished in everyday
spaces for this. Nonetheless, queer allows us to question the ways in which desire, categories,
identities and practices are created, rather than presuming that there is a necessary link
between your gender identity, the gender that you are attracted to and what your sexual
practices are. Queer, then, allows us to see sexuality and lived experiences as dynamic.
Despite its predominance and analytical potential, there are limits to tying geographical
work on sex and sexualities to only queer theory. Doing so encourages us to go about
addressing questions in particular ways, when other ways might also be productive (see, for
example, Green et al., 2010 for work that does not primarily use queer methodologies). It can
also negate the importance of examining sexualities through the identities that continue to
matter in people's lives. Given that such identities can mean that people become the target
of discrimination and that these identities are important for the creation of community

2
 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE GEOGRAPHIES OF SEX AND SEXUAL/TI ES

and belonging, they can be a resource for mobilizing collective activism. For example,
mapping LGBT places and histories illustrates the ways in which geographies and politics
are inherently intertwined, both critiquing and using identities as a mode of analysis (see
Brown and Knopp, 2006).
Moreover, queer modes of analyses are not predominant everywhere, and indeed can
be seen as reproducing Anglo-American hegemonies in ways that would be at odds with
how queer seeks to question ali norms. One of the difficulties is the way in which queer
travels to different places, as well as the presumption that queer ideas and concepts can
be used in identical fashion everywhere (Browne and Nash, 2010). Queer thinking has
emerged through Anglo-American linguistic contexts, and the word 'queer' itself and the
ideas behind it do not translate easily (see, for example, Pustianaz, 2010).
Thus, for this collection, although many of the chapters might be described as being
'queer geographies', we have chosen not to name the book in this way. Instead, we focus the
book on geographies of sexualities and sex, recognizing both the importance and limitations
of queer, and seeking a diversity of geographies that investigate sexual lives, desires,
identities, bodies and practices.
What follows is a short introduction to sorne key areas of geographies of sex and
sexualities, public/private, urban/rural, Global North/Global South. Such an Introduction,
and indeed even the section introductions, cannot cover everything written in geographies of
sex and sexualities over the last 40 years. This chapter is designed to give a reader unfamiliar
with the area a chance to understand sorne of the core building blocks of the subdiscipline.
lt uses three binaries to introduce sorne of the key ideas in geographies of sexualities. Each
of these is developed in further depth in the section introductions and then the chapters
that follow.

Public/Private
The public/private divide is a key way through which geography scholars have explored
sexual politics, including visibilities and exclusions (Brown, 2000; Tucker, 2009a). Here,
we take two paths through this literature, first exploring the role of the state in promoting
heteronormative (and, in sorne cases, homonormative) values and then examining the ways
in which everyday spaces are negotiated in relation to the public/private binary. Indeed,
sorne scholarship questions the solidity of the binary itself as the private can become public
and what is public is becoming increasingly private. As is the case for many geographers,
we are interested in how this and other binaries were used from the nineteenth century
onwards to regulate the lives of whole populations through 'public health' and 'birth
control' campaigns, and later to encourage people to regulate their own sexual lives (in
private). The politics of regulating life in this way is known as 'biopolitics' (see Chapters 29
and 30 for further discussion of this).
Regulating the (real and imagined) relationship between disease and certain forms of sex
has been a key form of biopolitics over the last century. Associations between sex and disease
are also key areas of research for geographers interested in sexualities. In this context the
medicalization and associated demonization of certain sexual acts (see Kearns, Chapter 30 in
this volume) is related to shame, and this can encourage the privatization of certain sexual
behaviours (as well as associated identities, such as prostitute or gay man). However, public
health agendas often intersect with supposedly private sexual lives, as has been the case
with diseases such as syphilis, HIV and AIDS when they became key public health concerns
(see Brown, 1997a; Legg, 2009, 2012, 2014; Phillips, 2002). However, as Taylor (Chapter 31

3
THE ROUTLEDGE RESEARCH COMPANION TO GEOGRAPHIES OF SEX AND SEXUALITIES

in this volume) attests, it is not only public health, but also corporations that have an interest
in 'private' sexual lives and the regulation of sexual behaviours. The regulation of sex and
sexualities has implications for the individual and collective lives of those who fail to conform
to the 'normal' and that includes mental health and suicide (Lewis, 2014b). In this and many
other ways, the intersections of health and sexualities extend far beyond sexual health.
Across the globe, nation-states monitor and seek to control sexualities in various ways,
including: the govemance of reproductive rights; access to marriage; tax and welfare
benefits for married couples; and the (unequal) legal regulation of certain sexual acts
and identities. Currently, state engagement with sexualities can be classified in terms of
heteronormativity and homonormativity, although this distinction soon breaks down. It can
be tempting to simply think about heteronormativity in relation to repressive legislation that
seeks to condemn and punish 'homosexuality'. Where such legislation has been enacted,
it has often driven sexual minorities 'underground' so that they only feel safe expressing
their sexualities in private spaces. This, in tum, strengthens a spatial binary between public
and private space, whereby ali expressions of sexuality become associated with private
space. At the same time, this sociospatial division tends to promote sorne expressions of
heterosexuality as not only normal in everyday spaces, but as also key to the development
and protection of the state itself. By, for example, outlawing 'unnatural' sexual acts (often
sodomy and oral sex) and 'deviant' identities, preventing service in state institutions such
as the military and confining the recognition of relationship forms only tomen and women,
the state itself is sexualized as heterosexual. It is not only by outlawing particular acts that
this occurs; the state is also heterosexualized by the ways in which it offers recognition and
preferential treatment to sorne heterosexual relationship forms (Bell, 1994, 1995a; Bell and
Binnie, 2000; Richardson, 1996a).
Since the 1990s increasing numbers of countries, such as South Africa, the UK, Brazil
and Canada have instigated equalities and human rights legislation that creates protections
and rights for sorne gay men and lesbians. These changes include same-sex marriage, equal
employment rights and the right to serve in the military. Seeing state-led sexual politics
only in terms of heteronormativity is now problematic (Oswin, 2007a). Yet, to frame ali
sexual politics in terms of a desire for 'equality' can be problematic as well, and the assertion
that ali sexual minorities only want equality is inaccurate. Indeed, a group called Against
Equality (http://www.againstequality.org) critique mainstream gay and lesbian politics
for overlooking the forms of classed and racialized inequalities within lesbian and gay
communities that are overlooked by standard equality claims. Rubin (1984) suggests that
society prioritizes sorne expressions of sexuality over others. This is a dynamic process:
as new groups are welcomed into the 'charmed circle' of social approved sexualities, so
others are pushed out of the circle. The public recognition and hierarchization of sorne
sexual identities, relationships and forms over others continues. The instigation of these
rights has seen sorne queers 'left out in the cold' (Sears, 2005), whilst others, mainly white,
monogamous, coupled, middle-class gay men (and, toan extent, lesbians) benefit from these
changes. The term 'homonormativity', coined by Duggan (2002) has been used to describe
how sorne people who were once considered 'sexual deviants' have become normalized
through these legislative and cultural shifts, whilst others, including queer migrants, queers
of colour, disabled queers, those who are poor, non-monogamous or single continue to be
demonized and excluded (Isoke, 2014; Nast, 2002; D. Richardson, 2004, 2005; Platero, 2012;
Taylor, 2007a; Taylor, Hines and Casey, 2011; Wilkinson, 2013). An engagement with the ways
in which normalizations are formed not only by gender/sex, but also by other intersecting
identities, including class, race, ethnicities and disabilities, is key to understanding sexual
lives, practices, identities and power relations.

4
 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE GEOGRAPHIES OF SEX AND SEXUALITIES

Nonetheless, there has been a push-back against the necessary association of white,
middle-class gay men with privilege (Elder, 2002; Sothem, 2004). The assumptions that there
can be a pure separation of (self-identified) queer lives and politics from the state has also
been queried, where scholars have argued that such ideological divisions cannot be realized
and that such an argument overlooks the productive possibilities of an LGBT politics that
engages overtly with state equalities processes (see Andrucki and Elder, 2007; Brown, 2009;
Browne and Bakshi, 2013a; Oswin, 2004). In this way, the desires for equality and freedom are
both problematic and have limitations. It is important, then, to look critically at how sexual
'liberation' is understood and attained, given the political and social choices being pursued.
State interventions that seek to eliminate certain sexual acts, practices and relationship
forms from public life, can instead privatize them within domestic (prívate) spaces. The
home has been a significant site of geographical research for decades. Initially, humanities
research celebrated the positive sense of place associated with home spaces. However,
geographers interested in gender and sexualities have queried these assertions (Blunt
and Dowling, 2006; Gregson and Lowe, 1995), and architects have explored how housing
design presumes certain relationship forms and gendered divisions of labour (Matrix, 1984;
Colomina, 1992; Betsky, 1997). The home can also be a place of oppression, where lesbians
and gay men experience alienation and discrimination from their families of origin, and
other household residents. Moreover, even where same-sex couples live together, they
may develop strategies to hide their relationships when certain people come to visit (such
as pretending to use two bedrooms) (Johnston and Valentine, 1995). In contrast, when
heterosexual family pictures are displayed and shared, there is a celebration of ideal family
f9rms (Rose, 2010). Research on domestic violence has also noted how the associations of
privacy and safety with the home can deflect attention from the need to investigate violence
and the home (Brickell, 2012; Meth, 2014; Warrington, 2001). Scholars have also noted how
homes can be spaces of empowerment and self-expression, including for LGBTQ people
(Gorman-Murray, 2007, 2008; Kentlyn, 2008). Paying attention to the mundane practices of
making a home together (such as cooking or DIY) can revea! much about the role of homes
in the intimate lives of people of ali sexualities (Gabb et al., 2013; Meah, 2014, Morrison,
2012a, 2012b).
In contrast to the privacy of the home, as the 'best place for families and reproduction',
public spaces for the expression of altemative sexualities and sex itself can be extensively
regulated (Browne ahd Nash, 2014a; Nash and Browne, 2015). Sex itself is policed in relation
to 'public decency' that reiterates a public/private divide. In addition to street based sex
work, that challenges the public/private divide, numerous studies have documented gay
men's/men who have sex with men's use of (semi-) public spaces (including beaches,
cemeteries, parks, toilets and bathhouses/saunas) to engage in sex with casual partners (see
Brown, 2008; Gandy, 2012; Ingram et al., 1997; Kramer, 1995; McGlotten, 2013). Less well
understood are women's use of public space for sex, although there has been sorne work
on queer women's bathhouses (Bain and Nash, 2007; Nash and Bain, 2007). Nonetheless,
in public space 'a kiss is not justa kiss' when two women kiss in public spaces, and LGBT
people continue to feel unsafe and fear discrimination when displaying affection in public
space (Blidon, 2008a; Cattan and Clerval, 2011; Ferreira, 2011; Ferreira and Salvador, 2015).
Digital technologies are increasingly altering the ways in which sexual encounters
are mediated, sex work is undertaken, blurring established divisions between public and
prívate space. Applications ('apps') such as Grindr and Tinder, enable individuals to find
sexual partners in 'cyberspace' without needing to use public or semi-public spaces. It is
worth remembering that these applications rely on their geolocative and other functions.
This is explored in Section 7 along with the many other ways that digital worlds are

5
THE ROUTLEDGE RESEARCH COMPANION TO GEOGRAPHIES OF SEX AND SEXUALITIES

recreating spatial-sexual relations (see Ferreira and Salvador, 2015 and chapters by Albury,
Mowlabocus, and Nash and Gorman-Murray).

Urban/Rural
The shift from rural communities to large urban conurbations during industrialization in the
Global North contributed to the emergence of the sexual subcultures and identities that we
recognize today. Placing people into closer proximity and loosening the ties of community
and family was key to creating new social and sexual forms (Hubbard, 2011). Geographies
of sexualities began by looking at gay ghettos and other urban areas where gay men claimed
territories in the form of shops, bars, clubs and places to live (Lauria and Knopp, 1985;
Knopp, 1987, 1990, 1992). These studies showed the importance of proximity and territory
in establishing collective identities and also in claiming political power. For example, in San
Francisco these areas were able to elect gay politicians, such as Harvey Milk, because of the
clustering of gay men around the Castro area (Castells, 1983; Armstrong, 2002; Forest, 1995).
This preliminary scholarship focused primarily on the visible experiences of a particular
group of white gay men who were often understood to have disproportionate amounts
of disposable income (even if their apparent 'affluence' has continues to be contested).
Challenging this Gill Valentine (1993a, 1993b, 1993c, 1995), Linda Peake (1993), Julie Podmore
(2001, 2006) and Catherine Nash (2006), amongst others noted the ways in which lesbian
geographies queried and contested the territorial assumptions in the literature focused on
gay men. Time-space compartrnentalization was used to explore how lesbians express their
sexual identities differently at different times, and in different spaces, (Valentine, 1993b).
We would suggest that just as lesbians do cluster, gay and bi men also use time - space
compartmentalism as a way of managing different aspects of their lives and identities. This
literature has questioned the idea the sexual identities were necessarily territorially based,
nor that they needed to be. lndeed Julie Podmore (2001) explored how lesbians found each
other in public (heterosexual spaces) through particular dress codes, hair styles, walks and
other actions (see Browne and Ferreira, forthcoming).
The focus on gay men is also contested in research examining prostitution and sex work
which notes how red light districts in urban areas are facilitated and policed (Hubbard,
1997, 1998, 2001; Hubbard and Whowell, 2008; Laing, Smith and Pilcher, 2015). Seeing sex
work as inherently spatial, brings a discussion of heterosexuality to the fore when examining
marginalized sexual spaces. Work in this field looks beyond (potentially) marginalized 'red
light districts' to consider how new forms of 'adult entertainrnent' are increasingly central
to the economies of man y cities (Hubbard, 2011 ).
Explorations of Bi and Trans lives also question sorne of the findings in early literatures
about sexualities and urban space (Hemmings, 2002; Klesse, 2007). Hemmings (2002) noted
that bisexuals have always been present in (and involved in the creation of) both gay and
straight spaces despite the fact their presence has largely been visible or unacknowledged.
Authors such as Petra Doan (2007, 2009, 2011) and Nash (2011) have noted how supposedly
inclusive lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans scenes and urban spaces can be highly marginalizing
and spaces of discrimination for trans people. This is similar to findings regarding how
lesbians experience LGBT spaces, which are often seen as more friendly to gay men,
reproducing a need for lesbian specific space (Chetcuti, 2010; Corlouer, 2013; Ferreira, 2011).
It was not only differing identities that lent complexity to early engagements with urban
spaces. Recently, the continuing existence of 'gay ghettos' has been called into question as
recent research questions whether major cities in the Global North are witnessing the end

6
 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE GEOGRAPHIES OF SEX AND SEXUALITIES

of the fixity of gay ghettos (Ruting, 2008) and 'gaybourhoods' as certain gay (and lesbian)
identities move into the mainstream (Brown, 2014; Kanai and Kenttamaa-Squires, 2015;
Nash and Gorman-Murray, 2014; forthcoming). Ghaziani (2014, pp. 245-59) has argued that
'gaybourhoods' are dynamic and that different clusters of gay businesses and residences
come and go over time. In recent years, a combination of more tolerant social attitudes in
Europe and North America (along with the growth of online dating apps) has seemingly
reduced the need for gay/LGBT people to congregate in particular neighbourhoods for
safety and companionship. Many more LGBT people are now choosing to live in the suburbs
and smaller cities (Brown-Saracino, 2011; Kirkey and Forsyth, 2001). As more lesbian and
gay people have children and other out or semi-visible LGBT populations are ageing, they
now look for other services and atmospheres in the places where they choose to live. Even
so, traditional gay neighbourhoods continue to be material and symbolic places of safety
and freedom for LGBT youth, trans and gender-variant people, as well as others who may
find it harder to create a safe space for themselves elsewhere (Gorman-Murray and Nash,
2014; Leroy, 2009). As part of this diversification of residential and leisure options for LGBT
people, sorne researchers ha ve noted the emergence of new 'queer' neighbourhoods which
seek to distinguish themselves from older 'gay villages' aesthetically and in terms of the
types of consumption opportunities they offer and the 'diversity' of people they claim to
include (see Andersson, 2009, 2011; Compton and Baumle, 2012; Nash, 2013a, 2013b; Nash
and Gorman-Murray, 2014; Nash and Gorman-Murray, Chapter 22 in this volume). Whether
these spaces are more inclusive than older gay neighbourhoods or whether they produce
altemative configurations of exclusion will require further research over the coming years.
However, it is important not to forget that increasing rent prices and gentrification also
means that sorne LGBT people may not have a 'choice' of living in these neighbourhoods
at ali, as was contended from the outset of investigations into these areas (Castells, 1983;
Collins, 2004a).
Gaybourhoods are not only being questioned in the Global North. Elsewhere they have
been critiqued asan Anglo-American spatial formation that resulted from the confluence of
various factors, including specific forms of planning cultures. In other contexts, this urban
form has never appeared or has assumed completely different forms. This can vary from city
to city, as well as internationally (Peixoto Caldas, 2010; Martinez and Dodge, 2010). In other
words, geographers should be wary of assuming that these models are universally applicable
(Visser, 2013). Concerns over the decline of 'the gaybourhood' and claims that these are no
longer necessary are based on specific Anglo-American assumptions (Lewis, 2013a).
Central to discussions of geographies of sexualities from the 1990s has been the urban/
rural divide. Research on migration initially focused on urban to rural migrations. Speaking
to those who had moved away from rural areas, urban areas were seen as the only place
that it was possible to come out, engage with same-sex sexual partners and actively
create community (Weston, 1995). When examining heterosexualities in rural areas, the
normalization of certain forms of heterosexuality has often been read through associations
linking nature and romance, as well as 'wholesome' family life (Little, 2003, 2007). This
has meant that others (including racial and urban others) are excluded and marginalized
from rural space. Indeed, sorne authors equate the urban with sexual diversity and promise
because of the proximity of people to each other. Rural researchers, however, contest
the presumption that gay and lesbian sexualities are confined to urban areas (Phillips et
al., 2002). Kramer (1995), for example, demonstrated how gay and bisexual men in rural
Dakota developed specific sites and forms of mobility in order to meet men like themselves.
Valentine (1997a) showed how US lesbian separatist women used rural areas to challenge
man-made urbanities and create alternative communities (see also Browne, 2011). Smith
and Holt (2005) showed that a small town in a rural area in the North of England had also

7
THE ROUTLEDGE RESEARCH COMPANION TO GEOGRAPHIES OF SEX ANO SEXUALITIES

developed into a lesbian haven. Finally rural spaces are used in subversive heterosexual
ways, including practices of dogging (Bell, 2006).
The urban/rural divide continues to pervade not only geographical literatures, but also
popular consciousness about where sexual identities can be performed. Yet there have been
sorne challenges to this. Research demonstrates how migration patterns are not linear and
final, even where the initial move is from the rural to the urban (Waitt and Gorman-Murray,
201 la). People move into and out of different areas, they return to places where they
grew up and move again (Knopp and Brown, 2003; Lewis, 2014a, 2014b). Many different
spaces can be used to find safety and freedom to express gender and sexual identities (see
Doan, Chapter 27 in this volume). Of course, these mobilities are not available to all, and
the assumption that all sexual and gender minorities can move to urban areas to escape
repression in their home towns, has been contested (Gorman-Murray, 2009a; Gray, 2009).
Moreover, these studies were often based in the USA, and often focused on coastal cities in
that country (Murphy et al., 2010, with notable exceptions including Gorman-Murray, 2013
and Lewis, 2014a). Not only <loes this fail to account for the diversity of urban spaces in
the USA, but it also cannot account for the different experiences of migration that lesbians,
gay men, bi and trans people have across the world, including experiences of intemational
diasporas and refugee status (see Blidon, Yue, Raj, Rouhani, Chapters 23, 24, 25 and 26 in
this volume). The section on mobilities in this volume explores movements including, but
not limited to, migration.

Global North/Global South

In the introduction, the example of same sex-couples holding hands was used to discuss
how space is heterosexualized. Whilst this might be out of place in the Global North, in
many places in the Global South, it would be men and women holding hands in public
that would be seen as disrupting the norms of the sexualities of space. Indeed in sorne
places, men holding hands is an acceptable sign of male friendships. As geographies of
sexualities has grown and diversified from its initial beginnings in the study of US cities,
the unexamined applicability of concepts developed in these cities about sex and sexualities
to other locations has been contested. 1 Three will be introduced here and others can be
found in Section III. The three addressed here are: 1) that sexual identity categories and
the man/woman binary are universally applicable in ali places, at all times; 2) how studies
originating in the Global North tend to assume pattems of progress and development that
emerge from particular world cities will be replicated in other places; and 3) the geographies
of knowledge about sex and sexualities itself.
Gay and LGBT identities are largely associated with specific values located in the Global
North, including ideals associated with coupled family forms that differ from other forms of
extended kinship. These are not always easily applied to other contexts (Adam et al., 1992;
Plummer, 1992; Drucker, 2000; Grewal and Kaplan, 2001; Platero Mendez, 2009; G. Brown
et al., 2010; Moussawi, 2013; Cattan and Vanolo, 2014). This means that the assumptions of
unidirectional and the unproblematic acceptance of Western gay and lesbian identities in the

This is not to suggest that writing on the Global South is nota feature of geographies of sexualities
(see, for example, Oswin, 2005, 2007a, 2013; Legg, 2009, 2012, 2014; Tucker, 2009a); instead, it
is to note how this subdiscipline has been hegemonically constituted through Global North
understandings of sex and sexualities, as well as particular practices of scholarship.

8
 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE GEOGRAPHIES OF SEX ANO SEXUALITIES

Global South have also been critically analysed (see, for example, Povinelli and Chauncey,
1999; Cruz-Malavé and Manalansan, 2002, Kulpa and Mizieliñska, 2011).
The presumption of universal models of gender that see it only through man/woman
or male/female binaries has long been disrupted by the existence of 'third sexes' in various
parts of the world. Examples of third sexes include Hijras in India, Samoan Fa'afafine and
Two-Spirited lndigenous Americans (Hutchings and Aspin, 2007). These 'third sexes' and
gendered roles associated with them challenge the binaries of Western thought in relation
to sex and gender. Moreover, understandings of trans/transgender/transsexual that are
articulated in relation to particular models of transitioning and 'gender reassignment' can
also be queried beyond the Global North. For example, as Silva and Omat (Chapter 37 in
this volume) demonstrate, travestí <loes not equate to transgender and transgender can be
rejected as an identity by travestís themselves.
Alongside the ways in which sorne cultures beyond the Global North can be classified
as being 'more progressive' with regard to gendered lives beyond male/female binaries,
the presumption that the Global North leads the way in sexual equality agendas is also
questionable. These assertions often focus on the 'progress' made in specific cities and
the acceptance of sorne gay men (and lesbians). However, discussions of world cities and
ordinary cities (see Kanai, 2014; Oswin, 2015; and the chapters by Muller-Myrdahl, Johnston
and Longhurst, and Visser in this volume), show that as geographers we are critica! of
models that see sorne cities as 'world leaders' and others as followers. Instead, each city and
the lives within them need to be explored on their own terms, recognizing the potentials and
limitations of each (see also Robinson, 2006).
However, it is not just the object of examination - that is, 'gay', 'LGB! or 'heterosexual'
men/women - that has been brought into question by critically reflecting on Anglophone and
Eurocentric assumptions within the geographies of sexualities. As the editors and authors
note in Section III of this book (see the chapters by Hutta, Zarate, and Silva and Omat), the
very way in which knowledge about geographies of sex and sexualities has been created
is related to the Global North positioning/identities of scholars. Creating knowledges that
move beyond Anglo-American hegemonies not only diversifies the objects of study beyond
Global North categories of sexualities and sexed difference; it also can be used to question
the premises on which this work is built.

About this Book

The Companion is structured around seven themed sections that profile the distinctive
contributions geographers make to the study of sexualities: urban sexualities (which also
addresses small towns and the urban/rural divide); sexual politics; decolonizing sexualities;
mobile sexualities; sexual health; commercial sexualities; and, digital sexualities. Each
section brings different ways of thinking that considerably widen the geography of analysis,
and conversely push the thinking in sexualities/LGBTQ studies. Each section begins with
an introductory chapter authored by the section editor(s), reviewing the core concepts
and debates in that specific field of geographic inquiry. Many of these introductions also
identify gaps or problems in the field and suggest how scholarship might develop over the
years to come. Sections 1 and 11 <leal with urban sexualities and sexual politics as a frame
for how geographical work about sexuality initially developed. We then disrupt this order
by explicitly contesting the Anglo-American hegemony within geographies of sexualities
through Section III, 'Decolonising Sexualities'. We then move to consider other ways of
engaging with sexual geographies through mobilities, sex work and sexual health (an area

9
THE ROUTLEDGE RESEARCH COMPANION TO GEOGRAPHIES OF SEX AND SEXUALITIES

that has dominated work on sexualities beyond geographies). We conclude by exploring

digital sexualities. This is an emerging area that reworks considerations of spatialities in
part through the technological reworking of the physical embodiment of gay territories in
urban areas.
In this way the Companion seeks to provide scholars and graduate students with a
comprehensive overview of the current research in geographies of sexual and gender/sex
difference. This breadth suggests multiple and diverse, even divergent, paths for future
inquiry and developments in the area and beyond into geographies, sexualities, gender
identities and queer thinking.

10
 SECTION 1
Urban Sexualities
Gavin Brown, Tiffarw Muller Myrdahl
and Paulo Jorge Vieira (editors)
 Chapter 2
Urban Sexualities: Section Introduction
Gavin Brown, Tiffany Muller Myrdahl, Paulo Jorge Vieira

From the beginning, geographical work on sexuality (and particularly sexual minority lives)
has been completely entangled with the study of urban space (Hubbard, 2011). Because
sexual identities, as we currently understand them, have been so significantly shaped by
urban life, we start the Companion with a set of chapters that examine urban sexualities. We
review sorne well-established themes, but also start to look differently at urban sexualities.
This introduction reviews the linked trajectories of the geography of sexualities and
urban geography. In doing so, it acknowledges more recent work on rural and suburban
sexualities - recognizing that such work (and the spaces it studies) usually exists in a
relationship to urban space and urban-based scholarship.
There are two key slippages in the geographical literature on urban sexualities that this
section identifies and addresses. First, for nearly two decades there has been a frequent
elision between the study of urban sexualities and the study of gay space within the city.
Geographers have been so busy researching and debating the changing experiences of gay
men (and, less frequently, lesbians and bisexuals) in the city that many have overlooked
the ways in which other people's sexualities shape their experience of urban life (and shape
the city itself). This leads to the second slippage, which is that the study of urban gay space
remains focused on those 'homonormative' gay male identities that are lived through the
commercial gay centres of major cities in Europe, North America and a handful of other
national settings. This work has become caught in a trap of concentrating on the production
of gay identities and spaces within small areas of a relatively small set of 'global' cities,
such as New York, San Francisco and London against which ali other spaces are implicitly
assessed. Whilst this section does not ignore (lesbian and) gay lives in metropolitan urban
centres in the Global North, it broadens its perspective to include other sexualities, in other
types of cities (and work written in languages other than English).

Origins in the Gay 'Ghetto'

Many writers have associated the development of modem homosexualities with the
expansion of urban populations over the last two centuries (Abraham, 2009; Bech, 1997).
Throughout the 1970s clusters of gay businesses and residential gay populations became
more visible in sorne major cities in Australia, Europe and North America. The earliest
geographical work on homosexualities (and, by extension, sexual minorities) attempted to
map and examined the growth of these 'gay ghettos', arguing that lesbians and gay men
congregated in specific neighbourhoods of US cities for safety, mutual support and to avoid
attack (Lyod and Rowntree, 1978).
THE ROUTLEDGE RESEARCH COMPANION TO GEOGRAPHIES OF SEX AND SEXUALITIES

Much of this work used directories of lesbian and gay bars to locate and map 'gay
communities' (Weightman, 1980, 1981). These studies have subsequently been critiqued
for their 'patronising, moralistic and "straight" approach to lesbian and gay social
and sexual relations' (Bell and Valentine, 1995a, p. 5). It was not until the 1990s that
geographers began to publish more sympathetic and 'sex-positive' studies of lesbian and
gay venues, drawing on interviews with their clients and extended participant observation
within them (Binnie, 1995; Bell, 2001; Rothenberg, 1995). As a result, this work was more
nuanced - for example, Brown (2000) argued that the presence of gay bars in the urban
landscape was not simply liberating, but could also serve as a 'closet space' that concealed
and regulated homosexuality. In many cities, clusters of gay bars initially developed in
semi-derelict, industrial or post-industrial districts that were relatively deserted at night,
so that gay men could visit the bars discreetly and without embarrassment (Bell, 2001;
Ingram et al., 1997).
Geographers examined how gay neighbourhoods were influencing urban politics and
reshaping the fabric of US cities (Castells, 1983; Knopp, 1987, 1990; Lauria and Knopp, 1985).
In San Francisco, Castells and Murphy (1982) identified an area of 'gay territory' which
was simultaneously a residential space, the centre of social and political life, and a focus
for business activity. Controversially, in subsequent work, Castells dismissed the prospects
for 'lesbian territory' (1983, p. 140). Due to the gendered inequality between men's and
women's incomes, he argued, lesbians had more restricted choices in the housing markets
(compared to gay men) and this limited the possibilities for lesbian residential enclaves
to develop. Despite Castells's predictions, geographers have found evidence of lesbian
residential clusters in a number of cities (Adler and Brenner, 1992; Rothenberg, 1995; Doan
and Higgins, 2011).
The debate over the existence of 'lesbian territory' raises more fundamental questions
about how sexual minority spaces are studied. Podmore (2001) and others (Peace, 2001;
Ferreira and Salvador, 2015) argue that the problem lies in the ways in which gay urban
geography has tended to focus on territoriality and gay men's attempts at visibility within
the urban landscape. Precisely because lesbians (as women) have traditionally had more
restricted housing choices, this results in more dispersed residential pattems and social
networks that are stretched across space rather than clustered together (Valentine, 1995).
Domestic spaces, rather than bar scenes, can be crucial to the articulation of lesbian social
networks (Podmore, 2001; however, compare Kennedy and Davis, 1994).
Larry Knopp (1990, 1992, 1995) developed the first major theorization of the relationship
between capitalism, sexuality and the production of urban space. This work built on his
earlier studies of gay men' s involvement in gentrifying urban neighbourhoods (Knopp, 1987,
1990; Lauria and Knopp, 1985). He placed the development of contemporary gay identities
within the context of class recomposition and new intemational divisions of labour after the
Second World War. The entry of more women into the workforce in the post-Second World
War period reconfigured gender relations in society and began to undermine the ideological
significance of 'the family' in policing sexual minorities. In particular, Lauria and Knopp
(1985) linked changing gender relations and social attitudes to sexuality to the growth of
city-centre service-sector employment which was less tied to 'traditional' masculinities than
the manufacturing sector and other heavy industries.
Alongside the growing study of gay leisure districts in a wide range of different
cities (Andersson, 2011; Collins, 2006; Giraud 2014; Tucker, 2009a) geographical work on
sexualities quickly expanded to include the study of prostitution, red-light districts and
the geographical spread of adult entertainment services in urban space (Hubbard, 1998,
2000, 2001; Hubbard and Sanders, 2003; Ribeiro and Oliveira, 2011; Ryder, 2006). This new
attention to the moral geographies of sex work expanded the range of sexualities and sexual

14
 URBAN SEXUALITIES: SECTION INTRODUCTION

encounters studied by geographers but consolidated a tendency to focus on once marginal

areas of inner cities.

Beyond the (Inner) City

In recent years many commentators have noted a decline in the vitality of those inner city
'gaybourboods' where (lesbians and) gay men have tended to cluster for residential and
leisure purposes (Ghaziani, 2014; Nash and Gorman-Murray, 2014). Severa! factors have
been identified as contributing to the decline of these neighbourhoods; but chief amongst
these is the acknowledgement that, with increasing social acceptance of sexual minorities
and growing legal equality, lesbians and gay men no longer need to cluster together for
safety and protection (Nash, 2006, 2013a). Increasingly, the presence of lesbians and gay
men has been normalized (Visser, 2008a) in a range of social settings and leisure venues.
At the same time, developments in digital and locative technologies (see Section VII in this
volume) have meant that sexual minorities no longer have to rely on attending specific bars
in order to meet each other (Mowlabocus, 2010a; Nash and Gorman-Murray, 2014).
A key critique of this narrative asks for whom these neighbourhoods are or were ever
accessible. By examining who has been excluded from the 'gaybourhood' and how exclusion
occurs in practice, this work illustrates the ways in which bisexuals (Hemmings, 2002;
Munoz-Laboy, 2004), trans and gender non-conforming people (Nash, 2010), queer people
of colour (Catungal, 2013) and women (Gieseking, 2015) are marginalized within gay spaces
or those that are marked as LGBTQ-friendly. A second critique attends to the ways in which
gaybourhoods have become 'sanitized' as they have been adopted by municipalities for their
fiscal and cultural contributions to the city. That gaybourhoods are embraced by many city
officials is a sign to sorne that gaybourhoods reflecta larger trend towards homonormativity
that has prioritized domesticity, coupledom and privatized consumption over the public
sexual cultures of earlier decades.
The spatialities of homonormativity - where and how it is manifested in and across
cities, suburbs and regions - is thus of interest to geographers of sexualities (G. Brown, 2012).
Here, homonormativity gets more complicated. For while the 'pink dollar' is sought after
(Rushbrook, 2002) and the state is the biggest winner in the push to legalize gay marriage
(Brandzel, 2005), attending to the myriad sites within urban space shows that gay and
lesbian interest in consumption and domesticity is not a recent phenomenon. Sexual and
gender minorities have always lived (and, to sorne extent, been visible) in the suburbs and
smaller cities, as muchas the inner cities of major metropolitan centres. Various oral history
projects (Kennedy and Davis, 1994; Murphy et al., 2010) illustrate suburban domesticity at
work from (before) the 1960s. Of course, it is not just domestic life that is found beyond the
city centre - adult entertainment venues, prostitution and public sex environments can be
found in (sub)urban territories across cities around the world (da Silva, 2011; Maginn and
Steinmetz, 2014).
Ifhomosexuality and other minority sexualities have been strongly associated with urban
life, sorne US-based queer theorists have critiqued the 'metronormativity' (Halberstam,
2005) that informs both popular understandings of gay identities, and the ways in which
they have been theorized (Herring, 2010). In the contemporary USA, Herring (2010) suggests
that there are now two important strands of 'anti-urbanism' in sexual politics. First, there
is a 'deghettoizing' trend which seeks the integration of lesbians and gay men in to the
suburbs and small-town America (Herring, 2010, p. 11). The second expression of 'queer
anti-urbanism' seeks to challenge and critique the ways in which lesbian and gay presence

15
THE ROUTLEDGE RESEARCH COMPANION TO GEOGRAPHIES OF SEX AND SEXUALITIES

in rural areas is erased by the metronormative associations between major cities and the
development of gay identities. This queer anti-urbanism celebrates the lives of those sexual
minorities who have stayed put in rural areas (Kramer, 1995; Phillips et al., 2000), rather than
leaving for the bright lights of a big city (Weston, 1995).
Many studies ha ve charted rural-urban migrations by lesbians and gay menina variety of
national contexts (Di Feliciantonio, 2014a). However, work from Canada (Lewis, 2014a), the
USA (Knopp and Brown, 2003) and Australia (Gorman-Murray, 2007, 2009a) has questioned
the assumption that these migrations flow in only one direction. They suggest that lesbians
and gay men who grew up in rural areas often move back and forth between rural spaces,
small towns and larger cities across their lives as their circumstances change. There are a wide
variety of ways in which sexual minorities make viable lives for themselves in rural areas.
Mostly they create spaces that look and feel very different to urban-based sexual cultures.
These include regular rural festivals (Browne, 2011; Gorman-Murray, Waitt and Gibson,
2012) or experimental land-based communes and intentional communities (Morgensen,
2009; Valentine, 1997a). However, these tend to be more spectacular examples and overlook
the ways in which sorne small rural towns develop reputations as 'gay-friendly' places to
live (Smith and Holt, 2005) or visit on holiday (Gonnan-Murray, Waitt and Gibson, 2012).
Despite their rural locations, sorne rural and coastal resorts develop many of the features of
urban gay life (at least during the holiday season).

Sexualities in a World of Cities

In recent years scholars (G. Brown, 2008, 2012; Browne and Bakshi, 2013a; Muller Myrdahl,
2013) have noted that the same small group of cities - almost ali of them major metropolitan
centres in the Global North - remain the focus for a significant amount of geographical work
on sexualities. Time and again, London (Andersson, 2011; Houlbrook, 2005), New York
(Abraham, 2009; Delany, 1999) and San Francisco (Beemyn, 1997; Castells, 1983) have been
the subject of urban scholars' studies about the lives of sexual minorities. Just as there has
been a call within urban geography to study a wider range of cities, and to study them on
their own terms rather than always in comparison to the 'global cities' that are understood
as the 'command and control centres' of the global economy (Robinson, 2006), geographers
have also been encouraged to study the spatialities of a wider range of sexual cultures, in a
wider range of cities, both large and small.
There is a growing body of work about sexual life in cities outside Europe, North America
and Australasia, which has been written by' geographers of sexualities'. However, in looking
for geographical work about sexuality and sexual identity in the Global South, it is important
to look beyond this specialist subdiscipline (G. Brown et al., 2010). Here, we describe sorne
very different studies of sexual cultures in various cities across the Global South to highlight
the range of work that is currently being produced. We consider a variety of work from
Brazil and a comparative study of the intimate lives of (mostly) young heterosexual women
in Mumbai, Phnom Penh and Taipei (Wills et al., under review).
Work on sexualities in Brazil has developed out of key geographical concepts and
debates about the nature of urban space and territory that have been of fundamental
importance within the Lusophone geographical tradition (Silva et al., 2013; Silva and
Vieira, 2014). The dominant focus within Brazilian geographical research on sexuality in
urban space has been the study of prostitution, analysed through a Marxist framework.
The issue of prostitution was privileged in these studies due to its connection with the
exploitation of the social and economic vulnerability of groups of women and travestis.

16
 URBAN SEXUALITIES: SECTION INTRODUCTION

With the expansion of cultural geography in Brazil in the early 2000s new studies began to
interpret urban space from the perspective of how it shaped the identities and experiences
of sexual minority groups, particularly gay men and travestis. These studies were also
concerned with understanding how, in exercising their sexualities, gay men and travestis
appropriated sections of the city, turning such spaces into their territories, and turning these
territories into a focus for these groups' resistance to their exclusion from heteronormative
society. For example, the geographer Benhur Pinós da Costa (2010a, 2010b, 2010c, 2012a,
2012b, 2012c) studied the relationship between male homoeroticism and urban space,
especially in small towns, introducing the concept of 'micro-territorialization' to describe
the appropriation of parts of the city by homoerotic practice. In this work, da Costa makes
effective use of phenomenology (a philosophical approach that describes things as people
experience them) and symbolic interactionism (an approach, originally from sociology,
which studies how people interact with things based on the symbolic meaning those things
hold for them). These approaches are frequently overlooked by geographers of sexualities
working in Anglophone contexts. His research on male homoeroticism in small cities across
Brazil suggests that the appropriation of urban territory to enable forms of disclosure by
sexual minorities (more than the presence of gay bars) is significant as a form of resistance
to heteronormative constructions of urban space.
Wills et al. (under review) offer a comparison of the spaces of !ove in Cambodian,
Indian and Taiwanese cities. Their study complicates linear narratives of social, cultural and
economic progress in Asian countries. They challenge assumptions that 'modernization'
leads to a move away from arranged marriages in favour of greater sexual, emotional
and spatial freedoms that might further undo rigid social hierarchies. By studying how
and where !ove is experienced and performed in Mumbai, Phnom Penh and Taipei, they
outline a politics of !ove that regulates and governs the spaces through which relations
of !ove are tended. In particular, they examine how public displays of affection by young
heterosexual couples continue to be treated with disapproval in each of the cities. However,
they acknowledge that in each city public displays of affection are more acceptable (or
tolerated) in sorne places than others. In this way, sorne public spaces can offer young
lovers more privacy to be intimate with each other than they might find in densely packed
settlements and overcrowded accommodation. Wills et al. remind geographers to look
beyond 'Western' understandings of !ove when they examine the spatialities of affection,
intimacy and !ove in other contexts. Although they revea! how !ove is regulated in public
spaces, they assert that, through this regulation, love remains a public concern that is seldom
reserved only for private, domestic spaces. lf, in the past, geographical work on sexualities
has sometimes been overconcerned with homoerotic cruising and public homosex, Wills
and her colleagues offer a reminder to also pay attention to the full spectrum of intimacies
and affection (beyond the sexual), including those that are conducted coyly and through the
exercise of personal restraint.

Section Overview
These chapters in the Urban Sexualities section reflect on the ways in which geographers
of sexualities have engaged with urban spaces and urban life. As well as identifying what
geographers have done well in this regard, they also suggest potential shortcomings, lacunae
and challenging new directions for future research.
In her contribution to this section, Julie Podmore unpacks the spatialities of
metronormativity: she argues that this critique, however well intentioned in its efforts to

17
THE ROUTLEDGE RESEARCH COMPANION TO GEOGRAPHIES OF SEX ANO SEXUALITIES

wrest attention away from the gaybourhoods of major metropolitan centres, obfuscates
and oversimplifies the diversity of queer (and particularly lesbian) urban practices. She
highlights the incomplete record of lesbian urbanisms and demonstrates that these gaps are
exacerbated by a proscriptive metronormative narrative. Podmore thus refuses to abandon
attention to LGBTQ urbanism and indica tes that there is much to be gained from a reappraisal
of the particular spatialities that have captured geographers' attention for so long. Doing
so would bring to the fore the lesbian, queer and other spatialities that geographers have
neglected in their efforts to document queer sexualities and include them in the geographic
rendering of the city.
In addition to the more familiar urban spaces of North America, which geographers of
sexualities have frequently written about (and which are the focus of the chapters by Podmore
and Gieseking), the chapters that follow examine sexuality and urban life in Aotearoa/New
Zealand (see Johnston and Longhurst), and South(em) Africa (see Visser). In particular,
Visser's chapter considers how sorne of the central assumptions about sexuality and urban
space developed over the last four decades may need to be retheorized in the light of the (re)
enactment of anti-gay legislation in India, Russia and Uganda (as well as other countries).
Two chapters (Johnston and Longhurst; Muller Myrdahl) address sexual minority lives in
small(er), provincial towns. These considerations of small-town life are important for the
way in which they decentre on the experience of living in major metropolitan urban centres,
which have been the focus of so much geographies of sexualities research over the last four
decades. In contrast to a more traditional conception of 'the rural' as isolated, predominantly
agricultural and 'natural', small towns contain characteristics of both urban and rural space.
They thus enable a consideration of 'urban sexualities' in a wider range of settings than just
'gaybourhoods' in global cities.
The study of urban sexualities needs to expand the range of sexual identities, urban
spaces and, indeed, cities, to which it tums its attention. While the chapters in this section
predominantly address homosexualities, several chapters focus on the (still under-
researched) lives of lesbians and other queer women (see Gieseking; Muller Myrdahl;
Podmore), and the chapter by Johnston and Longhurst examines the lives of two older trans
women living in Hamilton, Aotearoa/New Zealand. This focus not only addresses sexualities
that are 'otherwise', but also looks at the materiality of urban space for the homeless. The
chapters in this section deliberately look beyond the major metropolitan centres of the
Global North to theorize the various ways in which cities of ali kinds shape sexualities and
sexualities shape cities.

Conclusions
Ali the chapters presented here elicit the scope of work that remains for geographers of
urban sexualities. Certainly, as Podmore suggests, there is still considerable work to be
done in studying the complexity of 'gaybourhoods' in major cities of the Global North.
Geographers still have much to offer in terms of historical geographical studies of these
areas' development. As these areas shift in location, function and symbolic significance in
response to changing sexual politics, there is much for geographers to study, particularly
if we stay attuned to the differential impact of these changes on those social groups whose
presence in these areas has often been marginalized, overlooked or erased. As gender and
sexual minority lives come to be understood as increasingly viable (even desirable) in
suburban settings and in smaller towns and cities there are new challenges for geographers
of sexualities. Perhaps a key challenge, in sorne contexts, will be to find new ways of

18
 URBAN SEXUALITIES: SECTION INTRODUCTION

studying urban sexualities that are not automatically shaped by the fault line of a horno/
heterosexual binary. In this way, we might not only begin to see new spaces, but also make
room for the study of emerging sexual and gender identities and practices in urban space -
such as asexuality and polyamory. At the same time, Visser reminds us that the geography
of sexualities literature remains limited in how it can understand the dynamics of sexual
lives in cities in the Global South, if we continue to measure and examine Southem cities
and sexualities through the ontological categories of Euro-American urban sexual politics
(see Section III of this volume).

19
 Chapter 3
Disaggregating Sexual
Metronormativities: Looking Back at
'Lesbian' Urbanisms
Julie A. Podmore

Introduction
In 1995 Kath Weston published 'Get Thee to the Big City', in which she critically examined
the construction of the 'great lesbian and gay migration' to big cities and its role in shaping
narratives of gay and lesbian liberation in North America. While this publication drew
attention to the metronormativity of gay and lesbian studies, it was Halberstam' s (2005) queer
critique that coined and critically advanced the term. At that point, geographers had been
empirically critica! of the lack of attention to sexualities beyond the metropolis for sorne time
(Bel! and Valentine, 1995b; Binnie and Valentine, 1999; Phillips, Watt and Shuttleton, 2000).
Since then, many have taken up the project of studying LGBTQ lives beyond metropolitan
centres by focusing on rural areas (Gorman-Murray, Pini and Bryant, 2013; Gorman-Murray,
Waitt and Gibson, 2008; Smith and Holt, 2005) and, more recen ti y, smaller or 'ordinary' cities
(G. Brown, 2008; Browne, 2008; Muller Myrdahl, 2013). In tandem, metronormativity has
become a central queer critique of lesbian and gay studies, exemplified by works such as
Herring's (2010) examination of the history of American queer anti-urban movements or
Tongson's (2011) relocations of queer life to the landscapes of new suburbia, both of which
demonstrate the limitations and erasures involved in constructing the urbanas the authentic
space of LGBTQ lives and liberations.
While the metronormativity critique has drawn our attention to the power relations
involved in where we look for geographies of sexualities, the spatial binary it draws between
the normative urban and the non-normative elsewhere requires sorne disaggregation and
contextualization. This chapter, therefore, is an attempt to reconsider where and how
lesbian (including dyke and queer-identified 'women') urbanisms in the West have been
implicated in this dualism. Viewing this debate from the perspective of lesbian geographies,
1argue that sorne metronormativities might be less straightforward than others. Moreover, 1
suggest that the metronormativity critique relies on the reduction of the queer metropolitan
in ways that may reinforce the very homonormativities that they seek to undermine. The
chapter begins by asking where lesbians are (epistemologically, spatially and temporally) in
relation to the metronormativities critique. Concluding that lesbian metronormativity is at
best incomplete, 1 then tum to the geography of sexualities literature to disaggregate lesbian
urbanisms from metronormativity. Finding conceptual ambivalence and under-theorization
here, 1 review the geographical literature on urbanism, considering its potential as a
framework for disaggregating metronormativity through the example of lesbian urbanism.
THE ROUTLEDGE RESEARCH COMPANION TO GEOGRAPHIES OF SEX ANO SEXUALITIES

1 hope that such a project can be useful for thinking through the spatialities and experiences
of other LGBTQ populations.

Lesbian Metronormativities?
Is it possible for lesbian urban spatialities, usually described as ephemeral and invisible,
to be associated with the metronormative? Metronormativity is a neologism proposed by
Halberstam (2005) to describe the historically specific spatial and temporal narrative that
equates gay and lesbian liberation with rural to urban migration. Prevalent in US gay and
lesbian histories, this trajectory is intertwined with the culturally specific ideal of 'coming
out' and the joining of 'visible' urban communities as a means by which to constitute sexual
subjectivity. As Halberstam (2005, p. 37) argues:

The metronormative narrative maps a story of migration onto the coming-out

narrative. While the story of the coming-out narrative tends to function as a temporal
trajectory within which a period of disclosure follows a long period of repression, the
metronormative story of migration from 'country' to 'town' is a spatial narrative
within which the subject moves to a place of tolerance after enduring lije in a place of
suspicion, persecution, and secrecy. Since each narrative bears the same structure, it is
easy to equate the physical journey from small town to big city with the psychological
journey from the closet case to the out and proud.

For Halberstam (2005), the concept is useful as it demonstrates the 'devaluation' of the rural
in US spatial discourses about sexual subjectivities and can be extrapolated to the global scale
to understand the neocolonial dynamic surrounding the construction of non-metropolitan
sexualities beyond the urban West. However, like ali dualisms, it is an argument that
requires sorne unpacking, especially with regard to what it suggests for the urban. As the
hegemonic centre in this asymmetrical relationship, the metropolitan West, with its long
history of queer place-making and diversity of queer experiences, is reduced to nothing
more than a metaphorical space that represents a hegemonic cultural ideal.
The reduction of the urban in the metronormativities critique is especially apparent
when it is contextualized and disaggregated by considering where lesbian urbanisms, both
historie and contemporary, might be situated. We might consider the epistemological and
temporal underpinnings of the metronormativity critique. It is specifically a post-millennial
queer cultural studies critique of US gay and lesbian studies in 1980s and 1990s that
seeks to call into question the assumptions of works like D'Emilio's (1983) Sexual Politics,
Sexual Communities, texts that equate the creation of a gay and lesbian rights movement
with the formation of urban gay communities. Certainly, the arguments in many works of
this period did somewhat uncritically depend on classic ecological ideas about urbanism
for their arguments: cities offered sexual liberation from the family economy, the 'critica!
mass' needed to form subcultures and political movements, and the anonymity necessary
for the appropriation of public and semi-public spaces (Wirth, 1938). However, such works
were primarily concemed with understanding post-Stonewall gay community formation,
and, by association, the development of the American gay and lesbian rights movement.
Lesbian experiences, pattems of community formation and liberation movements were not
necessarily structurally central to the 'one-way' linear spatial narratives that such studies
constructed. As Taylor and Whittier (1992) have shown, the American lesbian liberation
movement in the 1970s and 1980s circulated through a set of submerged communications

22
 DISAGGREGATING SEXUAL METRONORMATIVITIES

networks that were not necessarily linked to large urban centres. At least one part of the US
lesbian community formation and liberation story revolved around the creation of rural
lesbian lands and the rejection of 'the patriarchal city' (Browne, 2011; Valentine, 1997b).
Beyond the collective experience, iconic lesbian texts of the temporal joumey towards the
sexual self from this period did not necessarily involve a spatial movement towards the
big city. For example, Audre Lorde's Zami (1982) tells a reverse story: growing up in New
York City, the main character dreams of queer freedom anywhere in Mexico, migrates to
srnaller cities in search of herself, stops briefly in the West Village lesbian community, but
ultimately leaves the city to settle in Connecticut. Whilst this is not a story of a retum to
the rural, it suggests that inter-urban mobility, dropping clown in the urban hierarchy and
even exile from the metropolis have been at least part of the story of finding the lesbian
self. Indeed, the historical record is full of queer sexual liberation stories that contradict the
rnetronormative narrative.
Beyond these epistemological and temporal implications, the spatial components
of the metronormativity critique are more clearly gendered in ways that obscure lesbian
spatialities. Herring's (2010) discussion of metronormativities is instructive here. He begins
by presenting the reader with a phallic image of the Empire State Building that was published
on a 1982 cover of the New York City gay magazine Honcho. He argues that this image
suggests a shift towards metronormativity in that it represents the urbanas the end-point in
a sexual liberation trajectory, the terminus in a one-way movement towards the metropolis:
'Alongside countless other queer productions, it codifies the metropolitanas the terminus of
queer world making as many have come to know it' (Herring, 2010, p. 4). A crude critique of
this choice to represent lesbian and gay metronormativity vía the desires of metropolitan gay
rnen would clearly highlight the gendered aspect of this equation. But the arguments about
the narrative terminus and its cultural production are just as compelling. First, Herring is
elaborating on the ways in which the metropolitan serves asan end-point in the narrative of
sexual liberation. Suggesting that the metronormative narrative ends in visible gay enclaves,
he clearly links this trajectory to actual spaces inside New York City with a discussion of the
Chelsea addresses listed on the cover of Honcho. In other words, the trajectory from rural
private domestic obscurity to the metropolitan ends in the gay village, a place of ambivalence
and exclusion for lesbians. Second, Herring argues that the metronormative is reproduced
through six axes, one of which is the queer aestheticization of the metropolitan. Noting
that gay men have long been considered sophisticates of taste in the urban scene, he argues
that post-Stonewall queer worlding has revolved around the construction of a stylized
cosmopolitan urban norm. Moreover, the cultural production of this version of urbanism,
he argues, 'facilitates the ongoing commodification, corporatization, and depoliticization of
US-based queer cultures in many locales' (Herring, 2010, p. 16). While positioning lesbians
cornpletely outside this version of urbanism and its production would be reductionist, it is
certainly possible to question how central lesbian aesthetics have been to such broad world-
rnaking processes.
Herring's (2010) own work on queer anti-urbanisms disrupts the metronormativity
narrative by providing an array of examples of stylistic and spatial resistances including
lesbian anti-urbanisms. Tongson' s (2011) Relocations, however, takes this critique in directions
that are especially useful for disaggregating lesbian urbanisms from metronormativities.
The spatial emphasis in Relocations is not on making altemative places but on mobility (see
the chapters in Section IV of this volume). Focusing on suburban dyke and queer of colour
cultural productions and imaginings, this work disrupts metronormativity by speaking
from the margins of the metropolis itself, disrupting the territorial and visible with other
rnetropolitan stylings and imaginings. In so doing, Tongson positions dyke urban geographies
alongside a host of altemative and peripheral locations in relation to metronormativity. To

23
THE ROUTLEDGE RESEARCH COMPANION TO GEOGRAPHIES OF SEX AND SEXUALITIES

make this point, she specifically draws on Gates and Ost's (2004) The Gay and Lesbian Alias,
a collection that mapped partnered gay and lesbian households in the 2000 US Census.
Although sceptical of such evidence, Tongson highlights the locational differences between
these households as a means by which to detach a diversity of queer subjectivities from
the more metronormative queer worldings of bourgeois white gay men. By pointing to
the finding that lesbian urban households are more decentred and are often more strongly
concentrated in outer boroughs, Tongson opens the door to resituating lesbians in relation
to metronormativities. She argues that such findings confirm '[w]hat has been common lore
about the spatial circumstances of gays and lesbians - that gays live in hip neighborhoods
in world cities, while lesbians generally have to traverse sorne bridge, tunnel, or undesirable
stretch of freeway to participate in urban life .. .' (Tongson, 2011, p. 52).

Ambivalent Geographies of Lesbian Urbanism

Geographers of sexualities can certainly be accused of reinforcing a metronormative narra ti ve
in terms of the 'object' of our research. While our projects have rarely examined rural-to-
urban migrations (see Waitt and Gorman-Murray, 201 la), we have devoted an exceptional
amount of attention to the terminus of the metronormative trajectory, the gay village in the
urban West (see G. Brown, 2008, 2012; M. Brown, 2013; Visser, 2013). Even as we currently
debate the possible de-gaying of such spaces (G. Brown, 2006; Ghaziani, 2014), investigate
the development of other 'queer-friendly' urban neighbourhoods (G. Brown, 2006; Gorman-
Murray and Waitt, 2009; Nash, 2013b) or examine the place-making practices of LGBTQ
populations in smaller cities (G. Brown, 2008; Muller Myrdahl, 2013; Lewis, 2013a), the gay
village remains relationally central as a point of reference for the analysis of queer place-
making elsewhere. Moreover, attention to homonormativities has refocused our analysis
on gay villages as sites of exclusions for young people, people of colour, lesbians and trans
people (see, for example, Casey, 2004, Doan, 2007; Nash, 2011; Tucker, 2009b; Valentine and
Skelton, 2003), reinforcing the centrality of this most 'visible' form of LGBTQ urbanism. As
a result, the more recent research into lesbian urbanisms has been located here, focusing
on their exclusions from gay villages and scene spaces (Binnie and Skeggs, 2004; Podmore,
2006, 2013b; Pritchard, Morgan and Sedgley, 2002; Ray, 2004), and, in sorne cases, how
gendered exclusions intersect with normative whiteness and classism (Held, 2015; Kawale,
2004; Taylor, 2007a, 2008).
But the study of lesbian urbanisms has a much longer history within the discipline.
Explorations of lesbian community formation and territorial neighbourhood patterns in
the urban West began primarily in response to arguments made by Castells (1983) in his
study of gay neighbourhood territoriality and urban social movements in San Francisco
(Valentine, 2000). Contrasting the territorial organization of gay men in the Castro District
with the more dispersed and network-based community formation process of lesbians,
Castells argued that gender was a central factor in shaping these differences. Key studies
then sought to test these claims: critica! of the gendered assumptions of Castells's argument,
Adler and Brenner (1992) specifically sought to study lesbian urban and political patterns
by replicating his methods and sources; Valentine (1995) used this argument as a starting-
point for her investigation of the distinct ways in which lesbians create neighbourhoods and
institutional spaces; Peake (1993) responded with a more explicitly feminist and intersectional
analysis of urban change; and Rothenberg (1995) examined the factors shaping lesbian
neighbourhood choices and community formation. Later works built on these findings,
further comparing lesbian and gay neighbourhood formation (Anacker and Morrow-Jones,

24
 DISAGGREGATING SEXUAL METRONORMATIVITIES

2005; Bouthillette, 1997; Cattan and Clerval, 2011; Compton and Baumle, 2012; Kenney,
2001; Lo and Healy, 2000), examining how lesbians negotiate and make use of urban public
spaces (Ferreira and Salvador, 2015; Gieseking, 2013, 2015; Podmore, 2001; Rodó-de-Zárate,
2015; Valentine, 1997b) and providing historical studies of lesbian neighbourhood formation
processes over time (Podmore, 200.6; Geiseking, 2013). Sorne of this research even suggested
that dense lesbian networks may develop in specific small urban centres (Brown-Saracino,
2011; Forsyth, 1997a, 1997b) and that, in these contexts, lesbian communities may be more
organized and visible than those of gay men (Nash, 2001).
These findings suggest that lesbian urbanisms might be considered metronormativity's
urban other, an ontology that has been reinforced by research frameworks that also construct
lesbian spatialities as 'not necessarily' or ambivalently urban in a number of key ways. First,
although there are sorne exceptions, until more recently, most case studies of lesbian urban
patterns did not focus on metropolitan centres such as San Francisco, New York, London or
Paris. Instead, they primarily represent an incidental collection of medium and small cities
and boroughs in the USA, Canada and the UK. Second, in the early years, researchers often
had to sacrifice urban context in the interest of the safety of their participants: as Lockard
(1986) had done for her study of a large south-western city, Adler and Brenner (1992) were
required to withhold the name of the US city they studied to avoid directing readers to the
lesbian ghetto; Valentine (1995) adopted the pseudonym 'Melchester' for similar reasons;
and Nash (2001) describes how ardent her subjects were about withholding the name of their
location to ensure their anonymity. As Adler and Brenner (1992) pointed out, hiding the city
meant that they had to sacrifice urban context and comparability. Third, the widespread
exploration of the Castells hypothesis served to reinforce the idea that the urban was
somewhat incidental to lesbian patterns of congregation and place-making. Most studies
refuted the essentialism of Castells's claims by demonstrating that lesbians engaged with
the city by congregating in particular neighbourhoods and circulating through their private
and semi-private spaces. However, the analysis was still informed by a gender dualism
that reinforced the idea that gay men were engaged with public urban processes whereas
lesbians could create their networked and more private form of communality wherever that
they congregated. Finally, and perhaps as a result, beyond comparison to gay men, this
body of literature rarely engages with urban theory. This contrasts significantly with urban
studies of gay men and of LGBTQ populations more broadly. For example, the earliest works
on gay men situate their community formation processes within the gentrification of the
inner city (Knopp, 1990; Lauria and Knopp, 1985). Lesbian geographies, on the other hand -
from Valentine's (1993a, 1993b, 1993c, 1995) early case studies to the more contemporary
discussions of lesbian exclusions from queer scene spaces - have been more social than
urban, with little to say about the dynamics surrounding urban context in which they are set.

Looking for Lesbian Urbanisms

The 'cultural turn' in human geography in the early 1990s is said to ha ve opened the discipline
to the expansion of geographies of sexualities and eventually to queer geographies (Oswin,
2013). It also brought a reworking of the conceptualization of urbanism. The traditional
ecological interpretation urbanism, described by Louis Wirth (1938) as 'a way of life', was
critically reassessed by researchers interested in examining urban diversity and difference
(Jacobs and Fincher, 1998). This 'cosmopolitan' interpretation carne from a number of
different strains, but especially from feminist geographers who were interested in the
intersections of difference in shaping the experience of cities. They were also contextualizing

25
THE ROUTLEDGE RESEARCH COMPANION TO GEOGRAPHIES OF SEX ANO SEXUALITIES

the power relations surrounding cities in light of feminist scholarship that suggested that
the social breakdown embodied by urbanism had created greater possibilities for women's
autonomy than rural life ever had (Wilson, 1991). Another related reworking carne from
poststructural reinterpretations of neo-Marxist arguments. In Social /ustice and the City (1973)
Harvey had used 'urbanism' to advance his arguments about the production of urban space.
Here, urbanism was both a vantage-point from which to view capitalist processes at work
in shaping spatial relations and a part of the mode of production - a process that favoured
the concentration of capital accumulation in urban centres. Such a concentration made the
city the ultimate terrain of class struggle, a place where its contradictions would fuel new
social movements (Castells, 1977; Lefebvre, 1968). With renewed interest in Lefebvre' s (1991)
arguments about the production of space, urbanism was now explored in discursive terms,
understood as a set of competing and overlapping representations. Cosmopolitan urbanism,
for example, was interpreted as the productive ideal of neoliberal urban govemance (Binnie
et al., 2006). 'Revanchist urbanism' was used by Neil Smith (1998) to refer to a new set of
productive representations by middle-class normative interests seeking revenge on other
social groups by taking the city back after leaving it behind.
Such arguments perhaps offer important potential for disaggregating lesbian urbanism
from the metronormative narrative, but the study of lesbian urbanism has rarely been
attempted within these frameworks (see Chisholm, 2005) for a number of reasons. While
poststructuralist feminist reinterpretations did offer new directions by reconsidering the
possibilities of urbanism for sexual subjects - with Munt (1998) even exploring the possibility
of the lesbian Jlfi.neur - more material attempts to investiga te urbanism interpret it in ways
that make lesbian urbanisms difficult to see. When examining competing representations of
urbanism, poststructuralists focused on hegemonic structural processes to which lesbians,
activists and subcultures would rarely have access. For example, as the only works in this
vein to consider the sexualities involved in the production of urbanism, investigations into
cosmopolitan urbanism have primarily examined the ways in which homonormativity has
been reproduced via the promotion of gay village spaces (Binnie and Skeggs, 2004). Smith's
(1998) revanchist urbanism briefly mentions queer sexualities, but largely in terms of their
displacement by neoliberal urban policies. As he argued, revanchist urbanism was grounded
in 'a vendetta against the most oppressed -workers and "welfare mothers", immigrants and
gays, people of color and homeless people, squatters, anyone who demonstrates in public'
(N. Smith, 1998, p. 1). Whilst cosmopolitan urbanism seems to involve the integration of
'gays' in to the processes of neo liberal govemance, revanchist urbanism is responsible for
their displacement with no mention of lesbian subjectivities.
As the review oflesbian geographies has suggested, lesbian urbanism has been considered
primarily within the more ecological framework of forming gendered subcultures initiated
via the Castells hypothesis with little consideration of how lesbian subcultures have been
implicated in the production of urbanism. However, around the same time that Castells was
conducting research on gay men in San Francisco, Elizabeth M. Ettorre (1978) published
the results of her research on a residential lesbian community that formed in the London
Borough of Lambeth in the 1970s. She described how a group of politicized lesbian feminists
created an altemative community by squatting in a vacating row of council flats that would
soon undergo demolition. However, the objective of the article was to situate 'the women's
movement' of the period within urban sociological theory, illustrating these arguments
through a case study of the 'lesbian ghetto'. Critiquing both the urban ecology and the
neo-Marxist interpretations of urbanism (specifically Castells's arguments regarding social
formations), Ettorre called for greater attention to women's issues, politics and social
organization as part of urban processes by recognizing that patriarchy - in addition to
capitalism - is a structural force that results in struggle. Specifically, she frames the women's

26
 DISAGGREGATING SEXUAL METRONORMATIVITIES

movement as an urban social movement that needs to be understood in this context. The
lesbian-separatist movement is then presented as one faction that refused the spatial
separation of women and their assignment to the private sphere. The case study is then used
to illustrate how the ideals of lesbian separatism informed the feminist urban practice of
creating the collective lesbian ghetto in Lambeth.
In retelling this story, I am not suggesting a retum to the study of lesbian-feminist
urbanism or refocusing on lesbians as a social movement. Rather, I want to suggest that our
focus on Castells's gendered gay and lesbian urbanisms to the neglect of Ettorre's arguments
about urban processes and movements could use sorne reassessment. First, one of the
most important aspects of this work is that it focuses on how a lesbian community formed
within an urban framework (see also Peake, 1993). According to Ettorre's interpretation,
this is not incidental: this group sought to disrupt the patriarchal ordering of urban space
by living the city otherwise. This engagement with the city presents an important contrast
with the more accepted gender dualism advanced by Castells and explored by others.
It is a political act that seeks to disrupt the power relations through the performance of
inhabitance (Lefebvre, 1974). Second, rather than focusing on their exclusions, Ettorre seeks
to reposition both ecological and neo-Marxist interpretations of urbanism in ways that make
seeing lesbians as agents of the city possible. The focus is not on normativity and hegemony
of a capitalist, patriarchal or heterosexist urbanism that erases and excludes them, but
rather on an altemate representation of urbanism that a group of lesbians sought to live.
Finally, the urban context in which this altemative community was formed is an important
component of the story itself. The community was temporary, created out of govemment
disinvestment in a neighbourhood about to undergo redevelopment, part of the process of
industrial restructuring. Whilst the creation of a lesbian commune through squatting in the
1970s is perhaps an atypical lesbian urbanism, this story should draw our attention to the
important role of urban processes in shaping how and where lesbians situate themselves
within the city.

Conclusion
The objective of this chapter has been to disaggregate lesbian urbanisms from the reductionist
rural/urban dualism proposed by the metronormativity critique. Uncomfortable with queer
critiques that depict gay and lesbians as normatively anti-rural and ideally cosmopolitan,
I have sought to tum this argument on its head by carefully considering the engagement
between lesbians and urbanism in the urban West. I began by demonstrating that, spatially
speaking, the narrative that metronormativity constructs is quite misplaced and incomplete
when considering lesbian urban geographies, especially in terms of their relationship
to the queer worlding taking place in this narrative's terminus, the commodified and
cosmopolitan gay village, a place that has not necessarily been representative of lesbian
subjectivities and subcultures. Given the incomplete character of lesbian metronormativities
and the lack of attention to their urbanisms, I tumed to the geography and urban studies
literature only to find that, among the many case studies of lesbian community and
neighbourhood formation pattems, our understandings of lesbian urbanism have been
limited by an advancing ambivalence about the urban context in which they are set. While
the invisibility of lesbian neighbourhood pattems and the exclusions of lesbians from gay
villages detailed in this literature do offer important rebuttals for those who would depict
their geographies as metronormative, the discipline's vision of lesbian urbanism is limited
by a lack of theorization of the urban - a requirement for situating lesbians within the

27
THE ROUTLEDGE RESEARCH COMPANION TO GEOGRAPHIES OF SEX AND SEXUALITIES

metronormativities debate. Viewing this literature as incomplete, I turned to poststructural

interpretations of urbanism in the geography literature in order to consider their potential
for the interpretation of lesbian urbanisms. Here, I have argued that an ecological focus on
the gendered comparison between lesbian and gay subcultural neighbourhood formation
patterns has been at the expense of an earlier and more critical understanding of lesbian
urbanism that involved the politics of living, interpreting, and contesting the urban in
context, a disruption of metronormativity itself that requires greater investigation.
Given the multiplicity of lesbian and queer women's identities and the contestation of
gender as part of contemporary queer worldings, I hope that my attempt to disaggregate
lesbians from a broader LGBTQ framework will not appear anachronistic or essentialist. I
would contend that gender, no matter how it is defined or experienced, continues to play
an important role in shaping urban geographies and that this needs to be considered when
describing LGBTQ spatial narratives as metronorrnative. 1 make this argument for many
reasons, but most importantly in response to the sense of erasure involved in the reduction
of the queer urban to a normative experience in relation to a more unexplored rural. Since
few queers find themselves represented by the fiction of the normative, I suspect that many
have similarly responded to the metronorrnativity critique by viewing it as proscriptively
premature. Whilst we have been studying LGBTQ urbanism for decades, the emphasis on
the particular spatialities that represent this urbanism to the neglect of so very many others
should not close the city to our continued investigation.

28
 Chapter 4
Dyked New York: The Space between
Geographical Imagination and
Materialization of Lesbian-Queer Bars
and Neighbourhoods
Jen Jack Gieseking

It's funny- I almost never go to Park Slope [in Brooklyn]. I feel like it's nota lesbian
neighbourhood ... my girlfriend's aunt lived there in the 1970s and when we moved
there in 1989 she was like, 'Oh! It's nota lesbian neighbourhood anymore! Ali of the
Columbus Avenue [implying wealthy, predominantly white elite] people have moved
in' ... ali of the - I don't know like institutions, like, The Rising [Café and Bar],
they've disappeared. [Pauses.] But, I guess it doesn't real/y matter I suppose because
if people feel like something's a lesbian neighbourhood then by dint of their believing
it, it is. (Sarah 1985 (carne out in 1985))

Activist and environmental psychologist Maxine Wolfe wrote, 'That more lesbians go
to bars than to women's centres, and that the women who use them are more diverse in
terms of age, race, and economics emphasizes the major role they still play in lesbian lives'
(1997, p. 315). In a similar vein, my research participant Sarah asserts in her quote that most
roads to lesbian--queer spaces lead back to the lesbian neighbourhood and the dyke bar.
For decades, the geographies of sexuality literature and lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and
queer (LGBTQ) activists alike have often highlighted these key spaces as essential in the
work towards LGBTQ liberation. Even alongside the sea change in LGBTQ acceptance and/
or tolerance, LGBTQ spaces are also marked as untenable and/or unwelcoming for women
often because they work differently for lesbians and queer women (see Valentine 1993b,
1993c; Podmore 2001, 2006; Bain and Nash, 2007). What are we to make of the production of
lesbian--queer spaces, specifically bars and neighbourhoods, which play such a key role in
general LGBTQ life?
As Sarah asserts in her quote, New York's only lesbian neighbourhood seems to be
slipping out of the hands of ea ch subsequent generation of women. Gentrification' s effects of
skyrocketing renta! prices increasingly limit the possibility of making a home there for most
women, especially people of colour, the poor and young people. Given the emphasis on the
roles of bars and parties in lesbian--queer lives before the 1990s per Wolfe, it is revealing
that there were over 60 bars for men on a 2008 Pride map of lower Manhattan, and only two
bars for women (Next Magazine, 2008). There are a myriad other types of places important to
lesbians and queer women, but bars retain a prominence in LGBTQ life across generations
THE ROUTLEDGE RESEARCH COMPANION TO GEOGRAPHIES OF SEX AND SEXUALITIES

that requires close examination. The mobility of lesbian bodies within the city and within
these spaces especially extends Gill Valentine's (1993b) classic idea that lesbians must enact
specific different ways of being and dress in specific spaces at specific times throughout
their day. Whilst lesbians and queer women in my study tended to adopt specific avoidance
behaviours in specific time-spaces, a closer examination of these spaces reveals that these
practices are tied as much to the geographical imagination as the materiality of these spaces.
The setting of the urban is also important to consider. Whilst the city affords women
freedom in their financia! independence and anonymity, it is equally portrayed as a space
of fear and danger for women both in the past and present (Pain and Smith, 2008). Building
from these spaces and their social contradictions, my research of lesbian-queer life in New
York City asks who and what can be leamed from the experiences of lesbian-queer life
over time? These quotes and facts reflect similar sentiments to New York lesbians and queer
women whose description and, then, experiences of these spaces pointed to a disconnect
between their material and imagined qualities.
1 address my participants' ideas and experiences of lesbian-queer neighbourhoods and
bars in order to revea! the overlaps and distinctions in the ways in which these women
imagine and then experience these spaces. This chapter uses a feminist-queer approach
alongside the theoretical concept of the geographical imagination to rethink how the
experience of contemporary lesbians and queer women in New York City from 1983 to 2008
may differ from more dominant narratives of generalized LGBTQ spaces. 1 suggest that
the historical geographic study of lesbian-queer New Yorkers reveals how the geographical
imagination of these women's spaces is as important as their material production. Although
the landscape of the city changed drastically during the contemporary period, the way in
which these women negotiate their bodies' relationships between the bar and neighbourhood
remained consistent. Reading a dyked New York over time sheds light on how gender helps
to produce and limit urban geographies of sexuality, both real and imagined. Broadening
our understandings of the interplay between the geographical imagination and material
manifestations of these spaces offers insights into how lesbians and queer women continue
to produce spaces in the face of even more limited economic, social and political power.

Site, Method and Theoretical Framing

While LGBTQ studies of sexuality are increasingly expanding to examine rural and
suburban spaces, much of urban queer life remains underexplored. Beyond being a global
epicentre of financia!, political and cultural capital, New York City remains a worldwide
hub of LGBTQ activisms, arts and culture. The city was the location of the 1969 Stonewall
riot, which has been attributed with inspiring the modem LGBTQ movement in the USA. In
the 1970s and 1980s the city's crime rates allowed LGBTQ people to formalize a gay ghetto
in the historically beatnik and always more homosexually-welcoming West Village, as
well as other territories throughout New York City and other US, Canadian and European
metropoles. New York City eventually became more sanitized, neoliberalized, financialized
and, eventually, militarized after 9/11, further limiting the ability to get by for women,
people of colour, the working and middle classes, and youth (Delany, 1999). Throughout my
period of study (1983--2008), the landscape of the city changed drastically, although 1 will
show that the relationship between the bar and the neighbourhood remained consistently
interdependent. With only one history of gay New York written to date (Chauncey, 1994)
and no historical studies of lesbians or contemporary LGBTQ history in New York City, this
metropolis is an advantageous site for the study of LGBTQ life.

30
 DYKED NEW YORK

This chapter draws from a larger historical geography of contemporary lesbian and
queer society, culture and economies in New York City from 1983 to 2008. My research
works across the disparate moments of this period, which range from the beginning of the
AIDS epidemic to the rise of intemationally syndicated television drama The L Word. The
project included multi-generation group interviews with 47 self-identified lesbians and
queer women. Participants carne out (understood broadly and in self-defined ways) between
1983 and 2008, and spent the majority of that time in New York City, which afforded cross-
generational dialogue. 1 simultaneously examined archiva! records from this period at the
Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn, New York, the largest collection of materials by,
for and about lesbians in the world. In this chapter, 1 foremost draw on themes 1 developed
frorn group interview conversations.
This study <loes not use age as a primary marker of generation but rather the year in which
participants 'carne out'. A participant's coming-out year is denoted after each participant's
narne. A total of 10 women were black, Latina or mixed race, and the remainder were white
or white Jewish; almost ali participants identified as middle class or working-middle class,
and had attended sorne college or received further education. 1 use 'lesbians and queer
wornen' to reference my participants' own naming of their identities and 'lesbian-queer'
to describe the experiences of these women as a group while also recognizing that such
identity formations may be much more varied (see Browne and Nash, 2009).
1 tum to the geographical imagination as the analytic too! to address this gap between the
material and imagined spaces of everyday lesbian-queer life. David Harvey (1973, 2005)
originally theorized the geographical imagination to spatialize and politicize C. Wright
Mills's (1961) 'sociological imagination', which is the examination of personal biographies
in dynamic relation to the social history in which they are situated. The concept of the
geographical imagination has broadened into a too! to describe and analyse both the
literal and metaphorical ways people imagine and render space (see Gregory, 1994; Said,
2000). With regard to how the imaginary plays out in LGBTQ communities, scholars have
often drawn upon Benedict Anderson's (1983) concept of 'imagined communities', which
describes how communities form in image rather than comprehensive knowledge. For
exarnple, Anderson highlights nationalism which presupposes a sense of long-distance
cornmunion with other citizens who one may or can never know (see Rothenberg, 1995;
Valentine, 1995; Weston 1995). Geographer Larry Knopp (2007) has called for a queering
of the geographical imagination to afford more multiple LGTBQ spatial ontologies and
political actions that promote difference. 1 take a feminist and queer approach in using the
more spatialized geographical imagination, which 1 deploy as a too! to register how these
participants negotiate the fissures between material and imagined spaces with their bodies.

Who are the People in your Neighbourhood, Really?

Whilst LGBTQ people have always existed in urban areas (Aldrich, 2004), LGBTQ spaces
were most clearly articulated in neighbourhoods (Chauncey, 1995; Weston, 1995). Even
toda y, prominent 'gaybourhoods' su ch as Greenwich Village, the East Village, Lower East
Si de, Chelsea and Park Slope are key spaces in US and global LGBTQ geographic imaginaries.
Of these neighbourhoods, Greenwich Village is the most well known. The area also hosts
or has hosted many LGBTQ bars, as well as businesses, restaurants, non-profit agencies,
cruising grounds and the New York City LGBT Center. Participants in my study felt a great
sense of attachment to the Village as a shared destination of ali LGBTQ people across racial,
class and cultural backgrounds.

31
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 “What sort of play-stuff is all this?” said the Boatswain, gruffly. “If
you have any thing to tell us, say it in a word, like a man.”
“Howsomdever,” said Fletcher, “I always think Jack Bunce speaks
like a man, and acts like a man too—and so, d’ye see”——
“Hold your peace, dear Dick, best of bullybacks, be silent,” said
Bunce—“Gentlemen, in one word, the Captain is in love.”
“Why, now, only think of that!” said the Boatswain; “not but that
I have been in love as often as any man, when the ship was laid up.”
“Well, but,” continued Bunce, “Captain Cleveland is in love—Yes—
Prince Volscius is in love; and, though that’s the cue for laughing on
the stage, it is no laughing matter here. He expects to meet the girl
to-morrow, for the last time; and that, we all know, leads to another
meeting, and another, and so on till the Halcyon is down on us, and
then we may look for more kicks than halfpence.”
“By —,” said the Boatswain, with a sounding oath, “we’ll have a
mutiny, and not allow him to go ashore,—eh, Derrick?”
“And the best way, too,” said Derrick.
“What d’ye think of it, Jack Bunce?” said Fletcher, in whose ears
this counsel sounded very sagely, but who still bent a wistful look
upon his companion.
“Why, look ye, gentlemen,” said Bunce, “I will mutiny none, and
stap my vitals if any of you shall!”
“Why, then I won’t, for one,” said Fletcher; “but what are we to
do, since howsomdever”——
“Stopper your jaw, Dick, will you?” said Bunce.—“Now,
Boatswain, I am partly of your mind, that the Captain must be
brought to reason by a little wholesome force. But you all know he
has the spirit of a lion, and will do nothing unless he is allowed to
hold on his own course. Well, I’ll go ashore and make this
appointment. The girl comes to the rendezvous in the morning, and
the Captain goes ashore—we take a good boat’s crew with us, to
row against tide and current, and we will be ready at the signal, to
jump ashore and bring off the Captain and the girl, whether they will
or no. The pet-child will not quarrel with us, since we bring off his
whirligig along with him; and if he is still fractious, why, we will
weigh anchor without his orders, and let him come to his senses at
leisure, and know his friends another time.”
“Why, this has a face with it, Master Derrick,” said Hawkins.
“Jack Bunce is always right,” said Fletcher; “howsomdever, the
Captain will shoot some of us, that is certain.”
“Hold your jaw, Dick,” said Bunce; “pray, who the devil cares, do
you think, whether you are shot or hanged?”
“Why, it don’t much argufy for the matter of that,” replied Dick;
“howsomdever”——
“Be quiet, I tell you,” said his inexorable patron, “and hear me
out.—We will take him at unawares, so that he shall neither have
time to use cutlass nor pops; and I myself, for the dear love I bear
him, will be the first to lay him on his back. There is a nice tight-
going bit of a pinnace, that is a consort of this chase of the
Captain’s,—if I have an opportunity, I’ll snap her up on my own
account.”
“Yes, yes,” said Derrick, “let you alone for keeping on the look-
out for your own comforts.”
“Faith, nay,” said Bunce, “I only snatch at them when they come
fairly in my way, or are purchased by dint of my own wit; and none
of you could have fallen on such a plan as this. We shall have the
Captain with us, head, hand, and heart and all, besides making a
scene fit to finish a comedy. So I will go ashore to make the
appointment, and do you possess some of the gentlemen who are
still sober, and fit to be trusted, with the knowledge of our
intentions.”
Bunce, with his friend Fletcher, departed accordingly, and the two
veteran pirates remained looking at each other in silence, until the
Boatswain spoke at last. “Blow me, Derrick, if I like these two
daffadandilly young fellows; they are not the true breed. Why, they
are no more like the rovers I have known, than this sloop is to a
first-rate. Why, there was old Sharpe that read prayers to his ship’s
company every Sunday, what would he have said to have heard it
proposed to bring two wenches on board?”
“And what would tough old Black Beard have said,” answered his
companion, “if they had expected to keep them to themselves? They
deserve to be made to walk the plank for their impudence; or to be
tied back to back and set a-diving, and I care not how soon.”
“Ay, but who is to command the ship, then?” said Hawkins.
“Why, what ails you at old Goffe?” answered Derrick.
“Why, he has sucked the monkey so long and so often,” said the
Boatswain, “that the best of him is buffed. He is little better than an
old woman when he is sober, and he is roaring mad when he is
drunk—we have had enough of Goffe.”
“Why, then, what d’ye say to yourself, or to me, Boatswain?”
demanded the Quarter-master. “I am content to toss up for it.”
“Rot it, no,” answered the Boatswain, after a moment’s
consideration; “if we were within reach of the trade-winds, we might
either of us make a shift; but it will take all Cleveland’s navigation to
get us there; and so, I think, there is nothing like Bunce’s project for
the present. Hark, he calls for the boat—I must go on deck and have
her lowered for his honour, d—n his eyes.”
The boat was lowered accordingly, made its voyage up the lake
with safety, and landed Bunce within a few hundred yards of the old
mansion-house of Stennis. Upon arriving in front of the house, he
found that hasty measures had been taken to put it in a state of
defence, the lower windows being barricaded, with places left for
use of musketry, and a ship-gun being placed so as to command the
entrance, which was besides guarded by two sentinels. Bunce
demanded admission at the gate, which was briefly and
unceremoniously refused, with an exhortation to him, at the same
time, to be gone about his business before worse came of it. As he
continued, however, importunately to insist on seeing some one of
the family, and stated his business to be of the most urgent nature,
Claud Halcro at length appeared, and, with more peevishness than
belonged to his usual manner, that admirer of glorious John
expostulated with his old acquaintance upon his pertinacious folly.
“You are,” he said, “like foolish moths fluttering about a candle,
which is sure at last to consume you.”
“And you,” said Bunce, “are a set of stingless drones, whom we
can smoke out of your defences at our pleasure, with half-a-dozen of
hand-grenades.”
“Smoke a fool’s head!” said Halcro; “take my advice, and mind
your own matters, or there will be those upon you will smoke you to
purpose. Either begone, or tell me in two words what you want; for
you are like to receive no welcome here save from a blunderbuss.
We are men enough of ourselves; and here is young Mordaunt
Mertoun come from Hoy, whom your Captain so nearly murdered.”
“Tush, man,” said Bunce, “he did but let out a little malapert
blood.”
“We want no such phlebotomy here,” said Claud Halcro; “and,
besides, your patient turns out to be nearer allied to us than either
you or we thought of; so you may think how little welcome the
Captain or any of his crew are like to be here.”
“Well; but what if I bring money for the stores sent on board?”
“Keep it till it is asked of you,” said Halcro. “There are two bad
paymasters—he that pays too soon, and he that does not pay at all.”
“Well, then, let me at least give our thanks to the donor,” said
Bunce.
“Keep them, too, till they are asked for,” answered the poet.
“So this is all the welcome I have of you for old acquaintance’
sake?” said Bunce.
“Why, what can I do for you, Master Altamont?” said Halcro,
somewhat moved.—“If young Mordaunt had had his own will, he
would have welcomed you with ‘the red Burgundy, Number a
thousand.’ For God’s sake begone, else the stage direction will be,
Enter guard, and seize Altamont.”
 “I will not give you the trouble,” said Bunce, “but will make my
exit instantly.—Stay a moment—I had almost forgot that I have a slip
of paper for the tallest of your girls there—Minna, ay, Minna is her
name. It is a farewell from Captain Cleveland—you cannot refuse to
give it her?”
“Ah, poor fellow!” said Halcro—“I comprehend—I comprehend—
Farewell, fair Armida—

‘’Mid pikes and ’mid bullets, ’mid

tempests and fire,
The danger is less than in hopeless
desire!’

Tell me but this—is there poetry in it?”

“Chokeful to the seal, with song, sonnet, and elegy,” answered
Bunce; “but let her have it cautiously and secretly.”
“Tush, man!—teach me to deliver a billet-doux!—me, who have
been in the Wits’ Coffee-house, and have seen all the toasts of the
Kit-Cat Club!—Minna shall have it, then, for old acquaintance’ sake,
Mr. Altamont, and for your Captain’s sake, too, who has less of the
core of devil about him than his trade requires. There can be no
harm in a farewell letter.”
“Farewell, then, old boy, for ever and a day!” said Bunce; and
seizing the poet’s hand, gave it so hearty a gripe, that he left him
roaring, and shaking his fist, like a dog when a hot cinder has fallen
on his foot.
Leaving the rover to return on board the vessel, we remain with
the family of Magnus Troil, assembled at their kinsman’s mansion of
Stennis, where they maintained a constant and careful watch against
surprise.
Mordaunt Mertoun had been received with much kindness by
Magnus Troil, when he came to his assistance, with a small party of
Norna’s dependants, placed by her under his command. The Udaller
was easily satisfied that the reports instilled into his ears by the
Jagger, zealous to augment his favour towards his more profitable
customer Cleveland, by diminishing that of Mertoun, were without
foundation. They had, indeed, been confirmed by the good Lady
Glowrowrum, and by common fame, both of whom were pleased to
represent Mordaunt Mertoun as an arrogant pretender to the favour
of the sisters of Burgh-Westra, who only hesitated, sultan-like, on
whom he should bestow the handkerchief. But common fame,
Magnus considered, was a common liar, and he was sometimes
disposed (where scandal was concerned) to regard the good Lady
Glowrowrum as rather an uncommon specimen of the same genus.
He therefore received Mordaunt once more into full favour, listened
with much surprise to the claim which Norna laid to the young man’s
duty, and with no less interest to her intention of surrendering to
him the considerable property which she had inherited from her
father. Nay, it is even probable that, though he gave no immediate
answer to her hints concerning an union betwixt his eldest daughter
and her heir, he might think such an alliance recommended, as well
by the young man’s personal merits, as by the chance it gave of
reuniting the very large estate which had been divided betwixt his
own father and that of Norna. At all events, the Udaller received his
young friend with much kindness, and he and the proprietor of the
mansion joined in intrusting to him, as the youngest and most active
of the party, the charge of commanding the night-watch, and
relieving the sentinels around the House of Stennis.
 CHAPTER XX.
Of an outlawe, this is the lawe—
That men him take and bind,
Without pitie hang’d to be,
And waive with the wind.
The Ballad of the Nut
Brown Maid.

Mordaunt had caused the sentinels who had been on duty since
midnight to be relieved ere the peep of day, and having given
directions that the guard should be again changed at sunrise, he had
retired to a small parlour, and, placing his arms beside him, was
slumbering in an easy-chair, when he felt himself pulled by the
watch-cloak in which he was enveloped.
“Is it sunrise,” said he, “already?” as, starting up, he discovered
the first beams lying level upon the horizon.
“Mordaunt!” said a voice, every note of which thrilled to his
heart.
He turned his eyes on the speaker, and Brenda Troil, to his joyful
astonishment, stood before him. As he was about to address her
eagerly, he was checked by observing the signs of sorrow and
discomposure in her pale cheeks, trembling lips, and brimful eyes.
“Mordaunt,” she said, “you must do Minna and me a favour—you
must allow us to leave the house quietly, and without alarming any
one, in order to go as far as the Standing Stones of Stennis.”
“What freak can this be, dearest Brenda?” said Mordaunt, much
amazed at the request—“some Orcadian observance of superstition,
perhaps; but the time is too dangerous, and my charge from your
father too strict, that I should permit you to pass without his
consent. Consider, dearest Brenda, I am a soldier on duty, and must
obey orders.”
“Mordaunt,” said Brenda, “this is no jesting matter—Minna’s
reason, nay, Minna’s life, depends on your giving us this permission.”
“And for what purpose?” said Mordaunt; “let me at least know
that.”
“For a wild and a desperate purpose,” replied Brenda—“It is that
she may meet Cleveland.”
“Cleveland!” said Mordaunt—“Should the villain come ashore, he
shall be welcomed with a shower of rifle-balls. Let me within a
hundred yards of him,” he added, grasping his piece, “and all the
mischief he has done me shall be balanced with an ounce bullet!”
“His death will drive Minna frantic,” said Brenda; “and him who
injures Minna, Brenda will never again look upon.”
“This is madness—raving madness!” said Mordaunt—“Consider
your honour—consider your duty.”
“I can consider nothing but Minna’s danger,” said Brenda,
breaking into a flood of tears; “her former illness was nothing to the
state she has been in all night. She holds in her hand his letter,
written in characters of fire, rather than of ink, imploring her to see
him, for a last farewell, as she would save a mortal body, and an
immortal soul; pledging himself for her safety; and declaring no
power shall force him from the coast till he has seen her.—You must
let us pass.”
“It is impossible!” replied Mordaunt, in great perplexity—“This
ruffian has imprecations enough, doubtless, at his fingers’ ends—but
what better pledge has he to offer?—I cannot permit Minna to go.”
“I suppose,” said Brenda, somewhat reproachfully, while she
dried her tears, yet still continued sobbing, “that there is something
in what Norna spoke of betwixt Minna and you; and that you are too
jealous of this poor wretch, to allow him even to speak with her an
instant before his departure.”
 “You are unjust,” said Mordaunt, hurt, and yet somewhat
flattered by her suspicions,—“you are as unjust as you are
imprudent. You know—you cannot but know—that Minna is chiefly
dear to me as your sister. Tell me, Brenda—and tell me truly—if I aid
you in this folly, have you no suspicion of the Pirate’s faith!”
“No, none,” said Brenda; “if I had any, do you think I would urge
you thus? He is wild and unhappy, but I think we may in this trust
him.”
“Is the appointed place the Standing Stones, and the time
daybreak?” again demanded Mordaunt.
“It is, and the time is come,” said Brenda,—“for Heaven’s sake let
us depart!”
“I will myself,” said Mordaunt, “relieve the sentinel at the front
door for a few minutes, and suffer you to pass.—You will not protract
this interview, so full of danger?”
“We will not,” said Brenda; “and you, on your part, will not avail
yourself of this unhappy man’s venturing hither, to harm or to seize
him?”
“Rely on my honour,” said Mordaunt—“He shall have no harm,
unless he offers any.”
“Then I go to call my sister,” said Brenda, and quickly left the
apartment.
Mordaunt considered the matter for an instant, and then going to
the sentinel at the front door, he desired him to run instantly to the
main-guard, and order the whole to turn out with their arms—to see
the order obeyed, and to return when they were in readiness.
Meantime, he himself, he said, would remain upon the post.
During the interval of the sentinel’s absence, the front door was
slowly opened, and Minna and Brenda appeared, muffled in their
mantles. The former leaned on her sister, and kept her face bent on
the ground, as one who felt ashamed of the step she was about to
take. Brenda also passed her lover in silence, but threw back upon
him a look of gratitude and affection, which doubled, if possible, his
anxiety for their safety.
 The sisters, in the meanwhile, passed out of sight of the house;
when Minna, whose step, till that time, had been faint and feeble,
began to erect her person, and to walk with a pace so firm and so
swift, that Brenda, who had some difficulty to keep up with her,
could not forbear remonstrating on the imprudence of hurrying her
spirits, and exhausting her force, by such unnecessary haste.
“Fear not, my dearest sister,” said Minna; “the spirit which I now
feel will, and must, sustain me through the dreadful interview. I
could not but move with a drooping head, and dejected pace, while I
was in view of one who must necessarily deem me deserving of his
pity, or his scorn. But you know, my dearest Brenda, and Mordaunt
shall also know, that the love I bore to that unhappy man, was as
pure as the rays of that sun, that is now reflected on the waves. And
I dare attest that glorious sun, and yonder blue heaven, to bear me
witness, that, but to urge him to change his unhappy course of life, I
had not, for all the temptations this round world holds, ever
consented to see him more.”
As she spoke thus, in a tone which afforded much confidence to
Brenda, the sisters attained the summit of a rising ground, whence
they commanded a full view of the Orcadian Stonehenge, consisting
of a huge circle and semicircle of the Standing Stones, as they are
called, which already glimmered a greyish white in the rising sun,
and projected far to the westward their long gigantic shadows. At
another time, the scene would have operated powerfully on the
imaginative mind of Minna, and interested the curiosity at least of
her less sensitive sister. But, at this moment, neither was at leisure
to receive the impressions which this stupendous monument of
antiquity is so well calculated to impress on the feelings of those
who behold it; for they saw, in the lower lake, beneath what is
termed the Bridge of Broisgar, a boat well manned and armed, which
had disembarked one of its crew, who advanced alone, and wrapped
in a naval cloak, towards that monumental circle which they
themselves were about to reach from another quarter.
“They are many, and they are armed,” said the startled Brenda,
in a whisper to her sister.
 “It is for precaution’s sake,” answered Minna, “which, alas, their
condition renders but too necessary. Fear no treachery from him—
that, at least, is not his vice.”
As she spoke, or shortly afterwards, she attained the centre of
the circle, on which, in the midst of the tall erect pillars of rude
stone that are raised around, lies one flat and prostrate, supported
by short stone pillars, of which some relics are still visible, that had
once served, perhaps, the purpose of an altar.
“Here,” she said, “in heathen times (if we may believe legends,
which have cost me but too dear) our ancestors offered sacrifices to
heathen deities—and here will I, from my soul, renounce, abjure,
and offer up to a better and a more merciful God than was known to
them, the vain ideas with which my youthful imagination has been
seduced.”
She stood by the prostrate table of stone, and saw Cleveland
advance towards her, with a timid pace, and a downcast look, as
different from his usual character and bearing, as Minna’s high air
and lofty demeanour, and calm contemplative posture, were distant
from those of the love-lorn and broken-hearted maiden, whose
weight had almost borne down the support of her sister as she left
the House of Stennis. If the belief of those is true, who assign these
singular monuments exclusively to the Druids, Minna might have
seemed the Haxa, or high priestess of the order, from whom some
champion of the tribe expected inauguration. Or, if we hold the
circles of Gothic and Scandinavian origin, she might have seemed a
descended Vision of Freya, the spouse of the Thundering Deity,
before whom some bold Sea-King or champion bent with an awe,
which no mere mortal terror could have inflicted upon him. Brenda,
overwhelmed with inexpressible fear and doubt, remained a pace or
two behind, anxiously observing the motions of Cleveland, and
attending to nothing around, save to him and to her sister.
Cleveland approached within two yards of Minna, and bent his
head to the ground. There was a dead pause, until Minna said, in a
firm but melancholy tone, “Unhappy man, why didst thou seek this
aggravation of our woe? Depart in peace, and may Heaven direct
thee to a better course than that which thy life has yet held!”
“Heaven will not aid me,” said Cleveland, “excepting by your
voice. I came hither rude and wild, scarce knowing that my trade,
my desperate trade, was more criminal in the sight of man or of
Heaven, than that of those privateers whom your law acknowledges.
I was bred in it, and, but for the wishes you have encouraged me to
form, I should have perhaps died in it, desperate and impenitent. O,
do not throw me from you! let me do something to redeem what I
have done amiss, and do not leave your own work half-finished!”
“Cleveland,” said Minna, “I will not reproach you with abusing my
inexperience, or with availing yourself of those delusions which the
credulity of early youth had flung around me, and which led me to
confound your fatal course of life with the deeds of our ancient
heroes. Alas, when I saw your followers, that illusion was no more!—
but I do not upbraid you with its having existed. Go, Cleveland;
detach yourself from those miserable wretches with whom you are
associated, and believe me, that if Heaven yet grants you the means
of distinguishing your name by one good or glorious action, there
are eyes left in those lonely islands, that will weep as much for joy,
as—as—they must now do for sorrow.”
“And is this all?” said Cleveland; “and may I not hope, that if I
extricate myself from my present associates—if I can gain my
pardon by being as bold in the right, as I have been too often in the
wrong cause—if, after a term, I care not how long—but still a term
which may have an end, I can boast of having redeemed my fame—
may I not—may I not hope that Minna may forgive what my God
and my country shall have pardoned?”
“Never, Cleveland, never!” said Minna, with the utmost firmness;
“on this spot we part, and part for ever, and part without longer
indulgence. Think of me as of one dead, if you continue as you now
are; but if, which may Heaven grant, you change your fatal course,
think of me then as one, whose morning and evening prayers will be
for your happiness, though she has lost her own.—Farewell,
Cleveland!”
 He kneeled, overpowered by his own bitter feelings, to take the
hand which she held out to him, and in that instant, his confidant
Bunce, starting from behind one of the large upright pillars, his eyes
wet with tears, exclaimed—
“Never saw such a parting scene on any stage! But I’ll be d—d if
you make your exit as you expect!”
And so saying, ere Cleveland could employ either remonstrance
or resistance, and indeed before he could get upon his feet, he
easily secured him by pulling him down on his back, so that two or
three of the boat’s crew seized him by the arms and legs, and began
to hurry him towards the lake. Minna and Brenda shrieked, and
attempted to fly; but Derrick snatched up the former with as much
ease as a falcon pounces on a pigeon, while Bunce, with an oath or
two which were intended to be of a consolatory nature, seized on
Brenda; and the whole party, with two or three of the other pirates,
who, stealing from the water-side, had accompanied them on the
ambuscade, began hastily to run towards the boat, which was left in
charge of two of their number. Their course, however, was
unexpectedly interrupted, and their criminal purpose entirely
frustrated.
When Mordaunt Mertoun had turned out his guard in arms, it
was with the natural purpose of watching over the safety of the two
sisters. They had accordingly closely observed the motions of the
pirates, and when they saw so many of them leave the boat and
steal towards the place of rendezvous assigned to Cleveland, they
naturally suspected treachery, and by cover of an old hollow way or
trench, which perhaps had anciently been connected with the
monumental circle, they had thrown themselves unperceived
between the pirates and their boat. At the cries of the sisters, they
started up and placed themselves in the way of the ruffians,
presenting their pieces, which, notwithstanding, they dared not fire,
for fear of hurting the young ladies, secured as they were in the
rude grasp of the marauders. Mordaunt, however, advanced with the
speed of a wild deer on Bunce, who, loath to quit his prey, yet
unable to defend himself otherwise, turned to this side and that
alternately, exposing Brenda to the blows which Mordaunt offered at
him. This defence, however, proved in vain against a youth,
possessed of the lightest foot and most active hand ever known in
Zetland, and after a feint or two, Mordaunt brought the pirate to the
ground with a stroke from the but of the carabine, which he dared
not use otherwise. At the same time fire-arms were discharged on
either side by those who were liable to no such cause of
forbearance, and the pirates who had hold of Cleveland, dropped
him, naturally enough, to provide for their own defence or retreat.
But they only added to the numbers of their enemies; for Cleveland,
perceiving Minna in the arms of Derrick, snatched her from the
ruffian with one hand, and with the other shot him dead on the spot.
Two or three more of the pirates fell or were taken, the rest fled to
their boat, pushed off, then turned their broadside to the shore, and
fired repeatedly on the Orcadian party, which they returned, with
little injury on either side. Meanwhile Mordaunt, having first seen
that the sisters were at liberty and in full flight towards the house,
advanced on Cleveland with his cutlass drawn. The pirate presented
a pistol, and calling out at the same time,—“Mordaunt, I never
missed my aim,” he fired into the air, and threw it into the lake; then
drew his cutlass, brandished it round his head, and flung that also as
far as his arm could send it, in the same direction. Yet such was the
universal belief of his personal strength and resources, that
Mordaunt still used precaution, as, advancing on Cleveland, he asked
if he surrendered.
“I surrender to no man,” said the Pirate-captain; “but you may
see I have thrown away my weapons.”
He was immediately seized by some of the Orcadians without his
offering any resistance; but the instant interference of Mordaunt
prevented his being roughly treated, or bound. The victors
conducted him to a well-secured upper apartment in the House of
Stennis, and placed a sentinel at the door. Bunce and Fletcher, both
of whom had been stretched on the field during the skirmish, were
lodged in the same chamber; and two prisoners, who appeared of
lower rank, were confined in a vault belonging to the mansion.
 Without pretending to describe the joy of Magnus Troil, who,
when awakened by the noise and firing, found his daughters safe,
and his enemy a prisoner, we shall only say, it was so great, that he
forgot, for the time at least, to enquire what circumstances were
those which had placed them in danger; that he hugged Mordaunt
to his breast a thousand times, as their preserver; and swore as
often by the bones of his sainted namesake, that if he had a
thousand daughters, so tight a lad, and so true a friend, should have
the choice of them, let Lady Glowrowrum say what she would.
A very different scene was passing in the prison-chamber of the
unfortunate Cleveland and his associates. The Captain sat by the
window, his eyes bent on the prospect of the sea which it presented,
and was seemingly so intent on it, as to be insensible of the
presence of the others. Jack Bunce stood meditating some ends of
verse, in order to make his advances towards a reconciliation with
Cleveland; for he began to be sensible, from the consequences, that
the part he had played towards his Captain, however well intended,
was neither lucky in its issue, nor likely to be well taken. His admirer
and adherent Fletcher lay half asleep, as it seemed, on a truckle-bed
in the room, without the least attempt to interfere in the
conversation which ensued.
“Nay, but speak to me, Clement,” said the penitent Lieutenant, “if
it be but to swear at me for my stupidity!

‘What! not an oath?—Nay, then the world

goes hard,
If Clifford cannot spare his friends an
oath.’”

“I prithee peace, and be gone!” said Cleveland; “I have one

bosom friend left yet, and you will make me bestow its contents on
you, or on myself.”
“I have it!” said Bunce, “I have it!” and on he went in the vein of
Jaffier—
 “‘Then, by the hell I merit, I’ll not leave
thee,
Till to thyself at least thou’rt reconciled,
However thy resentment deal with me!’”

“I pray you once more to be silent,” said Cleveland—“Is it not

enough that you have undone me with your treachery, but you must
stun me with your silly buffoonery?—I would not have believed you
would have lifted a finger against me, Jack, of any man or devil in
yonder unhappy ship.”
“Who, I?” exclaimed Bunce, “I lift a finger against you!—and if I
did, it was in pure love, and to make you the happiest fellow that
ever trode a deck, with your mistress beside you, and fifty fine
fellows at your command. Here is Dick Fletcher can bear witness I
did all for the best, if he would but speak, instead of lolloping there
like a Dutch dogger laid up to be careened.—Get up, Dick, and speak
for me, won’t you?”
“Why, yes, Jack Bunce,” answered Fletcher, raising himself with
difficulty, and speaking feebly, “I will if I can—and I always knew you
spoke and did for the best—but howsomdever, d’ye see, it has
turned out for the worst for me this time, for I am bleeding to death,
I think.”
“You cannot be such an ass!” said Jack Bunce, springing to his
assistance, as did Cleveland. But human aid came too late—he sunk
back on the bed, and, turning on his face, expired without a groan.
“I always thought him a d—d fool,” said Bunce, as he wiped a
tear from his eye, “but never such a consummate idiot as to hop the
perch so sillily. I have lost the best follower”—and he again wiped
his eye.
Cleveland looked on the dead body, the rugged features of which
had remained unaltered by the death-pang—“A bull-dog,” he said,
“of the true British breed, and, with a better counsellor, would have
been a better man.”
 “You may say that of some other folks, too, Captain, if you are
minded to do them justice,” said Bunce.
“I may indeed, and especially of yourself,” said Cleveland, in
reply.
“Why then, say, Jack, I forgive you,” said Bunce; “it’s but a short
word, and soon spoken.”
“I forgive you from all my soul, Jack,” said Cleveland, who had
resumed his situation at the window; “and the rather that your folly
is of little consequence—the morning is come that must bring ruin
on us all.”
“What! you are thinking of the old woman’s prophecy you spoke
of?” said Bunce.
“It will soon be accomplished,” answered Cleveland. “Come
hither; what do you take yon large square-rigged vessel for, that you
see doubling the headland on the east, and opening the Bay of
Stromness?”
“Why, I can’t make her well out,” said Bunce, “but yonder is old
Goffe, takes her for a West Indiaman loaded with rum and sugar, I
suppose, for d—n me if he does not slip cable, and stand out to
her!”
“Instead of running into the shoal-water, which was his only
safety,” said Cleveland—“The fool! the dotard! the drivelling, drunken
idiot!—he will get his flip hot enough; for yon is the Halcyon—See,
she hoists her colours and fires a broadside! and there will soon be
an end of the Fortune’s Favourite! I only hope they will fight her to
the last plank. The Boatswain used to be stanch enough, and so is
Goffe, though an incarnate demon.—Now she shoots away, with all
the sail she can spread, and that shows some sense.”
“Up goes the Jolly Hodge, the old black flag, with the death’s
head and hour-glass, and that shows some spunk,” added his
comrade.
“The hour-glass is turned for us, Jack, for this bout—our sand is
running fast.—Fire away yet, my roving lads! The deep sea or the
blue sky, rather than a rope and a yard-arm!”
 There was a moment of anxious and dead silence; the sloop,
though hard pressed, maintaining still a running fight, and the
frigate continuing in full chase, but scarce returning a shot. At length
the vessels neared each other, so as to show that the man-of-war
intended to board the sloop, instead of sinking her, probably to
secure the plunder which might be in the pirate vessel.
“Now, Goffe—now, Boatswain!” exclaimed Cleveland, in an
ecstasy of impatience, and as if they could have heard his
commands, “stand by sheets and tacks—rake her with a broadside,
when you are under her bows, then about ship, and go off on the
other tack like a wild-goose. The sails shiver—the helm’s a-lee—Ah!
—deep-sea sink the lubbers!—they miss stays, and the frigate runs
them aboard!”
Accordingly, the various manœuvres of the chase had brought
them so near, that Cleveland, with his spy-glass, could see the man-
of-war’s-men boarding by the yards and bowsprit, in irresistible
numbers, their naked cutlasses flashing in the sun, when, at that
critical moment, both ships were enveloped in a cloud of thick black
smoke, which suddenly arose on board the captured pirate.
“Exeunt omnes!” said Bunce, with clasped hands.
“There went the Fortune’s Favourite, ship and crew!” said
Cleveland, at the same instant.
But the smoke immediately clearing away, showed that the
damage had only been partial, and that, from want of a sufficient
quantity of powder, the pirates had failed in their desperate attempt
to blow up their vessel with the Halcyon.
Shortly after the action was over, Captain Weatherport of the
Halcyon sent an officer and a party of marines to the House of
Stennis, to demand from the little garrison the pirate seamen who
were their prisoners, and, in particular, Cleveland and Bunce, who
acted as Captain and Lieutenant of the gang.
This was a demand which was not to be resisted, though Magnus
Troil could have wished sincerely that the roof under which he lived
had been allowed as an asylum at least to Cleveland. But the
officer’s orders were peremptory; and he added, it was Captain
Weatherport’s intention to land the other prisoners, and send the
whole, with a sufficient escort, across the island to Kirkwall, in order
to undergo an examination there before the civil authorities,
previous to their being sent off to London for trial at the High Court
of Admiralty. Magnus could therefore only intercede for good usage
to Cleveland, and that he might not be stripped or plundered, which
the officer, struck by his good mien, and compassionating his
situation, readily promised. The honest Udaller would have said
something in the way of comfort to Cleveland himself, but he could
not find words to express it, and only shook his head.
“Old friend,” said Cleveland, “you may have much to complain of
—yet you pity instead of exulting over me—for the sake of you and
yours, I will never harm human being more. Take this from me—my
last hope, but my last temptation also”—he drew from his bosom a
pocket-pistol, and gave it to Magnus Troil. “Remember me to—But
no—let every one forget me.—I am your prisoner, sir,” said he to the
officer.
“And I also,” said poor Bunce; and putting on a theatrical
countenance, he ranted, with no very perceptible faltering in his
tone, the words of Pierre:

“‘Captain, you should be a gentleman of

honour:
Keep off the rabble, that I may have
room
To entertain my fate, and die with
decency.’”
 CHAPTER XXI.
Joy, joy, in London now!
Southey.

The news of the capture of the Rover reached Kirkwall, about an

hour before noon, and filled all men with wonder and with joy. Little
business was that day done at the Fair, whilst people of all ages and
occupations streamed from the place to see the prisoners as they
were marched towards Kirkwall, and to triumph in the different
appearance which they now bore, from that which they had formerly
exhibited when ranting, swaggering, and bullying in the streets of
that town. The bayonets of the marines were soon seen to glisten in
the sun, and then came on the melancholy troop of captives,
handcuffed two and two together. Their finery had been partly torn
from them by their captors, partly hung in rags about them; many
were wounded and covered with blood, many blackened and
scorched with the explosion, by which a few of the most desperate
had in vain striven to blow up the vessel. Most of them seemed
sullen and impenitent, some were more becomingly affected with
their condition, and a few braved it out, and sung the same ribald
songs to which they had made the streets of Kirkwall ring when they
were in their frolics.
The Boatswain and Goffe, coupled together, exhausted
themselves in threats and imprecations against each other; the
former charging Goffe with want of seamanship, and the latter
alleging that the Boatswain had prevented him from firing the
powder that was stowed forward, and so sending them all to the
other world together. Last came Cleveland and Bunce, who were
permitted to walk unshackled; the decent melancholy, yet resolved
manner of the former, contrasting strongly with the stage strut and
swagger which poor Jack thought it fitting to assume, in order to
conceal some less dignified emotions. The former was looked upon
with compassion, the latter with a mixture of scorn and pity; while
most of the others inspired horror, and even fear, by their looks and
their language.
There was one individual in Kirkwall, who was so far from
hastening to see the sight which attracted all eyes, that he was not
even aware of the event which agitated the town. This was the elder
Mertoun, whose residence Kirkwall had been for two or three days,
part of which had been spent in attending to some judicial
proceedings, undertaken at the instance of the Procurator Fiscal,
against that grave professor, Bryce Snailsfoot. In consequence of an
inquisition into the proceedings of this worthy trader, Cleveland’s
chest, with his papers and other matters therein contained, had
been restored to Mertoun, as the lawful custodier thereof, until the
right owner should be in a situation to establish his right to them.
Mertoun was at first desirous to throw back upon Justice the charge
which she was disposed to intrust him with; but, on perusing one or
two of the papers, he hastily changed his mind—in broken words,
requested the Magistrate to let the chest be sent to his lodgings,
and, hastening homeward, bolted himself into the room, to consider
and digest the singular information which chance had thus conveyed
to him, and which increased, in a tenfold degree, his impatience for
an interview with the mysterious Norna of the Fitful-head.
It may be remembered that she had required of him, when they
met in the Churchyard of Saint Ninian, to attend in the outer isle of
the Cathedral of Saint Magnus, at the hour of noon, on the fifth day
of the Fair of Saint Olla, there to meet a person by whom the fate of
Mordaunt would be explained to him.—“It must be herself,” he said;
“and that I should see her at this moment is indispensable. How to
find her sooner, I know not; and better lose a few hours even in this
exigence, than offend her by a premature attempt to force myself on
her presence.”
Long, therefore, before noon—long before the town of Kirkwall
was agitated by the news of the events on the other side of the
island, the elder Mertoun was pacing the deserted aisle of the
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