Lesbian Geographies: Gender, Place and Power

Contexts, 2015

When we think about gay neighborhoods, many of us are not immediately imagining lesbians. But like gay men, lesbians also have certain cities, neighborhoods, and small towns in which they are more likely to live. In this essay, I explain why this happens.

Lesbian relationships have largely been excluded from the geographical agenda. This paper focuses on women currently in a relationship with another woman and examines particular geographies of lesbian relationships through a conceptualisation of the 'betweeness of space'.

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 tog...

2014

On-going research for my MPhil in sociology describes, documents and analyses self-identified non-heterosexual women (bisexual, lesbian, pan-sexual) from various parts of Trinidad, and how they construct an image of "Home", "Work", physical place and virtual space. This paper interrogates the cultural geographies of space and place. In particular how material cultures and social histories get grafted onto spaces to create a physical geography of place, as it relates to lesbian identity and citizenship. My ongoing aim is to illustrate the subjectivities created for LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) women within certain places and spaces. Through the women's experiences, addressing the intersections of gender, identity and ethnicity with space, I examine the sexing of spaces and the pervasive nature of heteronormativity in Trinidadian society.

On-going research for my MPhil in sociology describes, documents and analyses selfidentified non-heterosexual women (bisexual, lesbian, pan-sexual) from various parts of Trinidad, and how they construct an image of "Home", "Work", physical place and virtual space. This paper interrogates the cultural geographies of space and place. In particular how material cultures and social histories get grafted onto spaces to create a physical geography of place, as it relates to lesbian identity and citizenship. My ongoing aim is to illustrate the subjectivities created for LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) women within certain places and spaces. Through the women's experiences, addressing the intersections of gender, identity and ethnicity with space, I examine the sexing of spaces and the pervasive nature of heteronormativity 1 in Trinidadian society.

Progress in Human Geography, 2008

Scholarship on queer geographies has called attention to the active production of space as heterosexualized and has levelled powerful critiques at the implicit heterosexual bias of much geographical theorizing. As a result, critical geographers have begun to remark upon the resistance of gays, lesbians and other sexual subjects to a dominant heterosexuality. But such a liberal framework of oppression and resistance is precisely the sort of mapping that poststructuralist queer theory emerged to write against. So, rather than charting the progress of queer geographies, this article offers a critical reading of the deployment of the notion of 'queer space' in geography and highlights an alternative queer approach that is inseparable from feminist, materialist, postcolonial and critical race theories.

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

Antipode, 2017

What is the relationship between cities and sexualities? Is the Pride parade dead as a form of politicalexpression? How does urban governance influence sex work? These are the kinds of questions raised at the intersection of geography and sexuality, and they bring with them debates from queer theory, sociology, and science and technology studies.The Routledge Research Companion to Geographies of Sex and Sexualities functions as something of a coming-of-age text for the geographical study of sex and sexualities.

The Open Geography Journal, 2008

By focusing on often neglected lesbian geographies, this paper deconstructs the urban/rural divide which has pervaded discussions of (sexual) geographies. In particular, the paper addresses the intersections between imaginings of urban idylls (what could be termed the urban gay) and how these places 'beyond' can, in part, (in)form everyday lives in small towns (what could be termed the lesbian rural). In doing this, the paper furthers lesbian geographies by examining how fantasises and imaginings of cities become important to 22 lesbians women who live in a small town in the South West of England. The problematic assumptions of visible sexual expressions and 'gay' territories as central defining features of lives outside heterosexuality are contested. The paper examines the messy interstices, movements and interactions between towns and cities in the UK, through lesbian negotiations and understandings of everyday life.

In a brief period of time Portugal has experienced considerable progresses in equality legislation concerning discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation. Notwithstanding these significant legal changes towards equality, social discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation is a pervasive reality, lesbian and gay visibility in public spaces remain residual, and individuals still endure a great deal of distress. In this paper I investigate the multidimensional dynamics of visibilities of lesbians and gays in public spaces in Portugal, exploring same-sex public displays of affection and analysing physical and online spaces of lesbian and gay visibility. In doing so, I explore the dynamics of power associated with the implicit codes of behaviour in public spaces that discriminate homosexual visibility.