The Knitting Circle
The geography of sexuality.
See also the sections on lesbian and gay studies and science.
"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."
"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."
"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."
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".
"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."
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Last altered 17th. August, 2006