Call for papers for a session (sponsored by SSQRG):
"Beyond the homonormative gayboorhood - ordinary (homo)sexualities in ordinary cities"
RGS-IBG 2012 Annual Meeting,
Tuesday 3 July 2012 to Thursday 5 July 2012, University of Edinburgh
Session abstract:
There are two key slippages in the geographical literature on urban sexualities that this session seeks to identify and address. 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. Undoubtedly, the number of studies of heterosexualities, as they are formed and practiced within urban space, has increased over this time, but the primary focus of most published work on urban sexualities remains the spaces created by gay men (and, to a lesser extent, lesbians, bisexuals and trans folk). 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 metropolitan centres and ‘world cities’ in much of Europe, North America, and a handful of other national settings. Consequently, these studies have largely remained wedded to the neighbourhoods where commercial gay venues are clustered in the city or gay involvement in gentrification can been identified.
This session seeks to emphasize research on urban sexualities that focuses beyond ‘gaybourhoods’ and red light districts. It seeks to foster new dialogues between the geographies of sexualities and debates about comparative urbanism and the ‘ordinary cities’ paradigm. In particular, it seeks to bring the whole city back into view and to consider the specific spatialities of sexual life in small and medium sized cities. In doing so, it seeks to rethink the theoretical and methodological approaches that might allow the distinctiveness of urban sexualities in all cities to be better understood, without overlooking the asymmetrical relationships between networks of cities or the power of representations of certain forms of identity construction over others.
Discussion might touch upon, but is not limited to, issues of:
• Geographies of sexualities in small and medium size cities.
• Extending the ‘ordinary cities’ paradigm to the study of urban sexualities.
• Urban (homo)sexualities beyond the gayboorhood.
• Sexualities and the city-region – rethinking the scale of geographies of sexualities.
• The spatial clustering of sexual minority groups in non-gentrifying neighbourhoods.
• Historical geographies of local sexual cultures and/or sexual politics outside metropolitan centres.
• Methodological innovations for the (comparative) study of urban sexualities that do not privilege the experience of metropolitan centres.
Please send abstracts of not more than 250 words to Gavin Brown ([log in to unmask] ) and Paulo Jorge Vieira ([log in to unmask]) by 13 January 2012.
Dr Gavin Brown
Lecturer in Human Geography
Department of Geography
F57, Bennett Building
University of Leicester
Leicester LE1 7RH
Tel.: 0116 252 3858
Staff profile: http://www.le.ac.uk/gg/staff/academic_brown.html
Research blogs: http://nonstopagainstapartheid.wordpress.com/
http://placeofaspirations.wordpress.com
ESRC Seminar Series: http://www.sustainabilitytransitions.info
Chair of the Space, Sexualities and Queer Research Group of the RGS-IBG: www.ssqrg.net
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