Mobile Places, Relational Spaces: Conceptualizing Change in Sydney's LGBTQ Neighborhoods

Abstract

Since the 1950s neighborhoods associated with lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) subjects and communities have become part of the urban landscape in many cities of the Global North. In Australia this is evident in Sydney, where particular inner-city suburbs are bracketed with 'gay', 'lesbian', and 'queer' sexualities. These sexual-spatial relations are multiple and changing, with current fears about the decline of 'traditional' gay village spaces coinciding with the emergence of alternative LGBTQ neighborhoods. This paper reinterprets these transformations, departing from notions of the 'demise' of gay spaces, (re)conceptualizing Sydney's LGBTQ neighborhoods as mobile and relational moorings that are not fixed and immutable but repeatedly reconstructed and regrounded from flows of people, knowledge, and capital. Moreover, such mobile practices and representations connect places, symbolically and materially constructing them in relation to each other. Consequently, rather than reading through narratives of 'demise' and 'emergence', we suggest Sydney's LGBTQ landscapes are embedded in, and (re)constituted through, a 'politics of mobility'. We examine the physical displacement, representations of mobility, and embodied mobile practices underpinning these changes in inner-city Sydney. In doing so, our purpose is to make conceptual and practical connections between the significance of 'place making' and 'mobility' to LGBTQ lives, communities, and politics. This discussion encourages geographers of sexualities to consider the multiplicity of LGBTQ mobilities, and equally prompts mobilities scholars to be cognizant of sexual and gender politics in processes and outcomes of mobilities.

LGBT Neighbourhoods and ‘New Mobilities’: Towards Understanding Transformations in Sexual and Gendered Urban Landscapes

“…Given changing identities and self‐understandings, is there a need to reconsider the identifying features of the ‘subject’ for whom the service is proscribed? In Sydney, organizations such as the Australian Federation of AIDS Organizations have relocated from Surry Hills to Newtown, and the Gay and Lesbian Counselling Service from Darlinghurst to Newtown (Gorman‐Murray and Nash, forthcoming). In Toronto, the shift is much less apparent, although AIDS organizations are a bit more dispersed in the downtown core (J.P. Catungal, email 26 January 2012, Toronto).…”

Governmentalities of mobility: The role of housing in the governance of Australian rural mobilities

“…While the notion that mobility is political is far from novel (Massey, 1993;Blomley, 1994aBlomley, , 1994bOng, 1999;Hyndman, 2012), the mobility turn has reinvigorated interest in the political dimensions of mobility by extending these understandings beyond the corporeal to include the communicative, the imaginative, the virtual and the role of the non-human as both mediating and facilitating mobilities, as well as differentiating between having the capacity to become mobile (motility) and to be mobile (Cass et al, 2005;Cresswell, 2006a, b;Adey, 2010;Adey and Bissell, 2010;Cresswell, 2010b;Hague, 2010;Cresswell and Merriman, 2011;Cresswell, 2012;Baerenholdt, 2013;Gorman-Murray and Nash, 2014). This paper brings together the two theoretical developments discussed above around the issue of the governance of rural housing by building on the argument presented by Dufty-Jones (2012) that the politics of mobility developed in the mobility turn can be further extended to include the governmental dimensions.…”

“No queers out there”? Metronormativity and the queer suburban

“…Attention to the “de‐gaying,” decline, and displacement of gay villages also re‐centered the inner‐city (Brown, 2012; Brown, 2014; Podmore, 2013a; Reynolds, 2009; Visser, 2013) with research identifying an array of contributing factors, some intrinsic to the gay village (e.g., consumer mainstreaming, residential gentrification, urban redevelopment, and homonormative entrepreneurialism) and others extrinsic (e.g., virtual networks, “post‐gay” disidentification, queer alternatives, lifestyle, and aspirational changes; Brown, 2006; Collins & Drinkwater, 2017; Doan & Higgins, 2011; Ghaziani, 2014; Kanai & Kenttamaa‐Squires, 2015; Lewis, 2013, 2017; Mattson, 2015; Nash, 2013a, 2013b; Nash & Gorman‐Murray, 2014, 2015b; Ruting, 2008; Usher & Morrison, 2010; Visser, 2014). Even research into new types of queer inner‐city sites re‐centers the gay village through comparison (Andersson, 2009, 2011; Ghaziani, 2014; Gorman‐Murray & Nash, 2014, 2017; Reynolds, 2009).…”