The Knitting Circle

Geography Centre: Queers in Space

The geography of sexuality.

Contents

• Places
  
• General information
  
• David Bell and Gill Valentine, "Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities"
  
• Rudi C. Bleys, "The Geography of Perversion"
  
• Joseph A. Boone, et al, (editors), (2000), "Queer Frontiers: Millennial geographies, genders and generations"
  
• John Kerrigan, "The country of the mind"
  
• Lawrence Knopp, (1990), "Social Consequences of Homosexuality"
  
• Gordon Brent Ingram, Anne Marie Bouthilette and Yolanda Retter, "Queers in Space: Communities, Public Places, Sites of Resistance"
  
• Affrica Taylor, "A Queer Geography"
  
• Jeremy Seabrook, (1999), "Love in a Different Climate: Men who have sex with men in India"
  
• Irvin Schick, (1999), "The Erotic Margin: Sexuality and spatiality in alteritist discourse"
  
• Gill Valentine, (1999), "From Nowhere to Everywhere: Lesbian Geographies"
  

See also the sections on lesbian and gay studies and science.

Places

• Bloomsbury
• Tangier

General information

• David Bell and Gill Valentine, (editors), (1995), "Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities", London and New York: Routledge.
  

• Rudi C. Bleys, (1996), "The Geography of Perversion: Male-to-male Sexual Behaviour outside the West and the Ethnographic Imagination, 1750-1918", London: Cassell, 328 pages, ISBN 0-304-33377-8 (hardback), ISBN 0-304-33378-6 (paperback).

  Blurb: "Travel reports and early ethnographic descriptions of cross-gender roles in the Americas, Africa and Asia corroborated the eighteenth-century construction of the 'sodomite' identity; and the late nineteenth-century construction of the 'third sex' provoked anthropological speculation on the 'congenital' versus 'circumstantial' nature of male-to-male sexual relations in the colonies. At the same time, narratives about presumed 'sodomitical' and 'effeminate' behaviour and roles of non-Europeans contributed to a racialist view of indigenous people."

  "With abundant evidence relayed in graphic detail, this historical deconstruction analyses how the ethnographic imagination reinforced the wider European discourse about 'the other'. The book makes a valuable contribution to current postcolonial and queer criticism."

• Joseph A. Boone, et al, (editors), (2000), "Queer Frontiers: Millennial geographies, genders and generations", Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 383 pages, ISBN 0 299 16090 4 (hardcover)/0 299 16094 7 (paperback).

• Gordon Brent Ingram, Anne Marie Bouthilette and Yolanda Retter, (editors), (1997), "Queers in Space: Communities, Public Places, Sites of Resistance", Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 560 pages.

  Reviewed in Sexualities journal, Volume 1, Number 3, August, 1998

  "An ever-expanding body of work on the geography of sexuality has demonstrated that space can no longer be ignored but is in fact central to discussions of the politics of sexuality."

  "In his assessment of Queers in Space, Simon Watney argues that this volume 'provides a welcome return of real life to the usual abstract domain of queer theory."

  "A major strength of these essays is their focus on everyday life and their attentiveness to the political economic underpinnings of sexuality."

  "The book is also valuable in reprinting of a number of significant essays (including those by Maurice van Lieshout, Steve Quilley on Manchester's Gay Village, and Ty Geltmaker on queer activism in Los Angeles in the early 1990s) which may now receive the much wider readership that they deserve."

  "While there is considerable energy in this book, which marks the vitality of the academic growth area of 'sexuality and space', the chapter by the closeted Australian feminist geographer 'Elsie Jay' on the sexualized nature of domestic space all too clearly demonstrates the limits and costs of working in this area in a homophobic discipline such as Geography."

• The country of the mind: Exploring the links between geography and the writer's imagination by John Kerrigan in The Times Literary Supplement, 11th. September, 1998, pages 3-4. A review covering several books.

  • Linda McDowell and Joanne P. Sharp, (editors), "Space, Gender, Knowledge: Feminist readings", Arnold, 468 pages, ISBN 0 340 70019 X.

  • Linda McDowell, (editor), "Undoing Place?: A geographical reader", Arnold, 349 pages, ISBN 0 340 67747 3.

  • Trevor Barnes and Derek Gregory, (editors), "Reading Human Geography: The Poetics and politics of inquiry", Arnold, 520 pages, ISBN 0 340 63208 9.

  • Brian Jarvis, "Postmodern Cartographies: The geographical imagination in contemporary American culture", Pluto Press, 208 pages, ISBN 0 7453 1290 X.

  • Franco Moretti, "Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900", Verso, 206 pages, ISBN 1 85984 883 4.

  "A powerful set of factors, including the growth of postcolonial criticism, is edging geographical material into the literary field, while many geographers seem less interested in the location of the steel industry than in the urban imagination of Baudelaire and Jack Kerouac's sexual politics."

  "There is a heightened awareness that 'geography' means 'earth writing' and that the discipline is bound up with cultural inscription. Books are no longer called Geography and Literature - as though the discourses were distinct - but The City as Text or Writing Worlds. The delayed impact of French theory is only too clear in those titles, and its effects on geography are not always benign. Certainly, when reading influential Gunnar Olsson's sub-Lacanian musings on lines and limits, it is easy to wish that the spatial metaphors which run through post-structuralism did not make its terminology so easy to appropriate. Among Olsson's more thoughtful colleagues, however, there is a careful sifting of such concepts as 'heterotopia' (Foucault) and 'deterritorialization' (Deleuze and Guattari), a willingness to ask how 'nomadism', 'marginality' and similar keywords in theory stand up to inspection when returned to the base in social geography from which they draw their political force."

• Lawrence M. Knopp Jr., (1990), "Social Consequences of Homosexuality", Geographical: The monthly magazine of the Royal Geographical Society, May, volume LXII, No. 5, pages 20-25.
  

  The cover of this issue of Geographical has the banner "Geography of Homosexuality", with a colour collage of lesbian and gay images. The article is about the United States, with the section headings and strap lines "Myriad facets of sexuality", "Complex US gay political geography", "Legislative reform uncertain", "Homosexuality in time and space", "Diverse cultural responses", "Gay communities and gentrification", and "Long-term effects of AIDS"
  

  Also in the same issue in the book review section on page 50 there is mention of "Sex, Politics and Society", by Jeffrey Weeks, "The History of Sexuality" by Michel Foucault, "Perverts in Paradise" by Joao Silverio Trevisan, and "The love of the Samurai", and "Which Homosexuality".

• Affrica Taylor, (1997), "A Queer Geography", in Andy Medhurst and Sally Munt, (editors), "Lesbian and Gay Studies", pages 3-19.

• Jeremy Seabrook, (1999), "Love in a Different Climate: Men who have sex with men in India", Verso, 184 pages, ISBN 1 85984 837 0.

• Irvin Cemil Schick, (1999), "The Erotic Margin: Sexuality and spatiality in alteritist discourse", Verso, 315 pages, ISBN 1 85984 732 3.

  Petting Oroonoko by Kate Teltscher in The Times Literary Supplement, 19th. May, 2000, page 27. "His general thesis - that there was a far greater variability in sexualised representations of the 'Other' than is generally acknowledged in postcolonial studies - is elaborated and reiterated at length. For Schick, sexuality is integral to the construction of spatial difference. Home is the place where one dreams of the world. But far from simply feminizing the 'Orient' (as Edward Said would have it) or homoeroticizing the colonial encounter (as Sara Suleri argues), colonial discourse is polymorphous and perverse."

  "On his erotic tour, Schick introduces us to the female Other in a number of guises: as vulnerable virgin or seductive threat; as the victim of rape or despotic rule; as lesbian or voraciously heterosexual. The male Other is variously potent, effeminate homosexual and omnisexual. Schick argues that this polyvalence is central to 'xenological' discourse; its power is expressed in the ability to pass off mutually contradictory statements as fact. In cataloguing the endless supply of stereotypes (one of the chapters is even called 'Harvesting Clichés'), Schick may prove his point but, here as elsewhere, risks losing his reader."

• Gill Valentine, (1999), "From Nowhere to Everywhere: Lesbian Geographies", Harrington Park Press, 181 pages, ISBN 0-7890-0755-X.

  Blurb: "From Nowhere to Everywhere: Lesbian Geography investigates urban and rural lesbian neighbourhoods worldwide, their locations, and their increasing visibility among more widely recognized communities. Scholars and activists will learn how lesbians' space has changed since the late 1800s, how women's access to and ownership of public land has changed, and how the emergence of lesbian geography has led to an understanding of sexuality and space."

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The Knitting Circle

Last altered 17th. August, 2006