Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

An interdisciplinary field of study which broadly encompasses the intersection of sexuality and space, sexual geographies is primarily the domain of those working in social and cultural geography. However, from its founding – and especially in the past decade – there has been work within the field originating from feminist geographers and those investigating urban, political, economic, and health geographies, along with contributions from other academics outside of the geography discipline, including, but not limited to, sociologists, cultural and social theorists, and media and communications researchers. Originally springing from studies in the 1970s and 1980s seeking to plot the locations and densities of (primarily gay male) enclaves of sexual minorities in North American urban cores, this emerging subdiscipline has expanded quickly from the study of gay (male) gentrification in inner cities to encompass the investigation of multiple sexualities within the context of a variety of spatial scales, ranging from the close proximity of the body to the vast span of transnational migration and international sex tourism. Indelibly shaped by the emergence of queer theory in the 1990s, sexual geographies today address how deviant, normative, dissident, and transitory sexualities are multiply co-constitutive of the material, imagined, and virtual settings in which human experience transpires. ... log in or subscribe to read full text