Introduction to special issue “Geographies of Sexualities”

Abstract

In this foreword to the special issue "Geographies of Sexualities," I provide a review of the scholarly discussions about place and sexuality that have occurred in the past 20 years. I highlight five major themes in my synthesis of this scholarship: (1) how narratives about geography and sexuality are co-constitutive; (2) a critical interrogation of these narratives to demonstrate how more nuances exist than these narratives suggest; (3) assessments of the spatial distribution of women in same-sex relationships, comparisons to the spatial distribution of men in same-sex relationships, and analyses of the experiences of women in areas with high concentrations of women in same-sex relationships and urban lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) neighborhoods; (4) comparisons across spaces to address the effect of place on outcomes such as well-being and how mobilities and movements across geographies matter; and (5) discussions as to whether, how, and why the geographies and spaces of lesbian, bisexual, and queer-identified women are shifting. My goal is to highlight these themes in order to contextualize how the articles in this special issue continue discussions and introduce new questions for the field.

The hidden side of migration: Understanding sexuality as an aspiration to migrate

“…The studies in sexuality and space are primarily ethnocentric, and the experiences of sexual minorities are poorly studied (Binnie and Valentine, 1999 ). However, focusing on the nexus of sexuality and space reveals a range of conditions where social forces and boundaries shift across spaces (Brown, 2000 ; Smith, 2012 ; Lizama, 2019 ; Kazyak, 2020 ). As Binnie ( 1997 ) notes, 'space is not naturally authentically “straight” but rather actively produced and (hetero) sexualised' (p. 223).…”