Gender and sexuality III: Precarious places

Abstract

This progress report considers precarious geographies of genders and sexualities at a range of intersecting scales. In a time currently characterised as precarious, anxious and insecure, feminist and queer geographers are well placed to examine vulnerable geographiesincluding their own-of bodies, lives and labours. The review considers the ways precarity operates as a concept, condition and experience by first, asking what and where is precarity? Second, a recurring theme throughout feminist and queer precarious geographical literature is the importance of foregrounding relationality, the multiscalar, and marginalised bodies. Ultimately, what it means to feel 'secure' shifts and changes across places, genders and sexualities.

Feminist geographies in Aotearoa New Zealand: cultural, social and political moments

“…Social science is marginalised, and within that broad area, feminist geographies even further. Increased precarity in the academy and its detrimental impacts has furthered the ambiguous relationship many have to the notion of "feminism" (Johnston 2017;Peake 2015). Yet as our analysis of feminist moments above demonstrates, there is a progression of research and teaching that is inclusive, expansive and capable of making meaningful differences, and national politics is shifting.…”

“…The personal is indeed political, and this is the crux of much feminist organising and thought. At the centre of this place-based organising is the fact that gendered and sexed bodies are always 'somewhere', and small, ubiquitous changes can transform such places (Gibson- Articulating a politics of the body is a topic familiar to feminist geographers in Aotearoa New Zealand given the early work of Robyn Longhurst (2001) on bodies and Lynda Johnston (2005) on queer geographies (Johnston 2017(Johnston , 2018. Different bodies are recognised as being enmeshed in different power relations and much of our research seeks to untangle these (Johnston and Longhurst 2010;Longhurst and Johnston 2014).…”

Geographies of sexualities in sub-Saharan Africa: Positioning and critically engaging with international human rights and related ascendant discourses

“…As Brown (2012) has discussed, geographers, and especially geographers focused on the study of sexuality, need to be very mindful of the different way intersectional identities and subjectivities relate to each other and help structure how we wish to go about understanding the options and challenges of different groups (see also Johnston, 2018). While Brown’s excellent review and intervention focuses primarily on the Global North – and explores categories such as race, gender, sexuality, age, (dis)ability and religion – for a region such as sub-Saharan Africa we may also wish to consider how other types of subjectivity are brought into being by both historical and contemporary manifestations of power and subjectification (which in this instance can today be seen to be in part facilitated by different international organisations and policy processes’ interaction with other scales).…”

Rethinking the timescape of home: Domestic practices in time and space

“…The meanings of home and domestic practices are diversified by different dwelling patterns. In recent decades, the deinstitutionalisation of the nuclear family, the growth of Generation Rent/Share and non-familial households 1 (Gilbert et al, 1997; Gunter and Massey, 2017; Heath, 2017; Heath et al, 2018; Holton, 2017; Maalsen, 2018; Gulyani et al, 2018; Wilkinson, 2014), LGBT families (Valentine et al, 2003; Gorman-Murray, 2006a, 2006b, 2007, 2008, 2017; Kentlyn, 2008; Barrett, 2015) and pet ownership (Fox, 2008; Power, 2008; Charles, 2016), the normalisation of moving home and family migration (Holdsworth, 2013, 2019; Chen, 2018; Chen and Bao, 2019), the changing disposition of kinship and friendship (Buzar et al, 2005; Wilkinson, 2014), the visualisation of precarious and unsafe heteronormative homes (Johnston, 2018), the rising of frequency and intensity with which people enter different household situations and the digitalisation of housing and domestic lives (Maalsen, 2018; Strengers and Nicholls, 2017) in Global North and Global South countries make scholars rethink the spatial and temporal imaginations of home and lived domestic experiences. For these scholars, home is not fixed in time and space and is no longer a simple portrait of belonging and intimacy among members of a heterosexual nuclear family.…”