Urban (Homo)Sexualities: Ordinary Cities and Ordinary Sexualities

Abstract

This article appraises the current state of research on urban sexualities and suggests some underexamined areas of research that might productively be explored further. This review primarily focuses on studies of gay space and urban homosexualities, as this remains the largest body of work on urban sexualities within geography. I argue that this work has got caught in a trap of concentrating on the production of gay identities and spaces within small areas of a relatively small set of cities, against which all other spaces are implicitly assessed. Drawing on recent post‐colonial debates within urban geography, this article argues that it is time for sexual geographers to expand their horizons and move beyond this hierarchy of metropolitan gay centres, to study a broader range of sexualities and spaces in ‘ordinary cities’ assessed on their own terms. To this end, the article considers work on gay domestic spaces in suburban Australia, and the interaction of local homosexualities with transnational ‘gay’ identity in Chengdu, China. This work offers productive examples of studying gay space across the whole city and attending to urban homosexualities outside of the world cities of the Global North.

The Pedagogical Practices of Québec High School Teachers Relative to Sexual Diversity

“…The Cramer V values are between 0.142 and 0.268, revealing a weak to moderate link between a teacher's sexual orientation and the obstacles to discussing sexual diversity in the classroom. * p ≤ 0.05; * * p ≤ 0.01; * * * p ≤ 0.001 of sexual diversity in larger urban areas (Brown, 2008;Podmore, 2001), as well as the density and cultural diversity (including sexual diversity) of the school population (Banks, 2001). The respondents' level of agreement was determined according to 18 potential obstacles to discussing sexual diversity in the classroom.…”

Governing sexuality and park space: acts of regulation in Vancouver, BC

“…This is not to dismiss, but to build upon, the important and varied work on the relationship between state actors, space, and sexuality. Work on sexuality and public space as problems of governance can continue to explore how the structural characteristics of the state reproduce inequalities and represssion but might also conceptualize the state in a similarly open and potentially empowering way as Brown (2008Brown ( : 1228 hopes sexuality will be understood: 'as frequently being inconsistent, beyond easy classification, and 90 John Paul Catungal & Eugene J. McCann as being immanent and "defined" at the moment of the sex act, flirtation or encounter.' morales que designan cuales practicas sexuales y representaciones de sexualidad está n apropiados.…”

Review 3

“…A dominant historical geographical narrative informs popular understandings of modern LGBT communities, whereby political visibility began in US coastal-metropolitan centres in the 1960s, spread to urban districts in Canada, Europe and Australia in the 1970s and generated a contemporary network of 'global gay cities' (Aldrich 2004)-New York, San Francisco, London, Paris and Sydney-entwining LGBT and metropolitan lifeworlds (Brown 2008). Queer Twin Cities contests this spatial imaginary, advancing Brown's (2008Brown's ( : 1215 challenge for 'sexual geographers to expand their horizons and move beyond this hierarchy of metropolitan gay centres, to study a broader range of sexualities and spaces in "ordinary cities" assessed on their own terms'. In Chapter 1, Ruiz argues that 'local histories are a logical place to turn in undoing these myths' (p. 14), and the contributors demonstrate the importance of understanding the regional specificity of LGBT lives in the Twin Cities, where 'political and personal identity formation was as much-if not more-a matter of local consequence' (p. 15) than beholden to metropolitan influences.…”