The Dictionary of Human Geography

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political has collapsed into the intimate sphere

of the heterosexual family, such that ‘the fam-

ily sphere [is] considered the moral, ethical,

and the political horizon of national and pol-

itical interest’ (1997, p. 262); this has led to

the intensified regulation of heteronormativ-

ity. Honig (1998) cites the role ofimmigra-

tion in reinforcing heteronormativity.

Geographers have drawn attention to the

many ways in whichspaceis bound up with

the processes through which sexual identities

are constructed, naturalized and contested,

and to the need to study the particularity

of heterosexualities in specific contexts

(Hubbard, 2000). ‘Homonormativity’ has

been identified as a new strand of heteronor-

mativity. It is a politics that emerged in the

1990s, associated with state-sanctioned

same-sex marriages and other rights for gays

and lesbians, and it has been criticized for

upholding, rather than contesting, dominant

heteronormative assumptions and institutions.

Theglobalizationof this trend has led to

criticisms of Western culturalimperialism;

Oswin (2007) questions the geographical as-

sumption that lies behind this critique – that of

thediffusionof ideas from Western to other

societies – and argues for the need to assess the

specificity of homonormativity in context. gp

Suggested reading

Hubbard (2000).

heterotopia Literally ‘another place’ or

‘place of otherness’, a term introduced into

thehumanitiesand social sciences by French

thinker Michel Foucault (1926–84). Foucault

borrowed the term from medicine, and uses it

in opposition to utopia. Whileutopias– ideal-

ized happy places – do not really exist, but

function as fantasies or spaces of hope, hetero-

topias for Foucault are places that do exist.

But in their existing they radically undermine

or challenge existing spatial orderings, they

disturb, they areplacesoftransgressionor

otherness.

Foucault initially uses the term to describe

linguistic or visual challenges, such as the writ-

ings of Jose ́Luis Borges or the paintings of

Rene ́Magritte (Foucault, 1970 [1966], 1983).

For Foucault these examples destroy ‘syntax’ –

not just the syntax we use to make sentences,

but also the syntax that constructs relations

between words and things and allows classifi-

cation and order. Borges’ fictional Chinese En-

cyclopaedia, with its outlandish categories, and

Magritte’s shoes with toes, paintings that are

part of the landscape that they portray and

mirrors that reflect what they conceal, all dis-

rupt and upset the commonplace. In a 1967

lecture, only published in French in 1984,

shortly before his death (in English, see Fou-

cault, 1986), Foucault broadened the analysis

to include places he described as ‘counter-sites,

kinds of effectively enacted utopias’. Although

Foucault suggests that in the modern period

space is characterized by the relation between

sites generally, he concentrates on those sites

that link with and contradict other sites. His

examples include the boarding school or the

honeymoon hotel, where transitions between

stages of life are managed; care homes, hos-

pitals andprisons, where deviation is placed;

and a wealth of other examples, such as travel-

ling fairgrounds, hammams, saunas, brothels,

boats and colonies.

The term has been developed in a number

of English-language writings in human geog-

raphy and related fields (e.g. Marks, 1995;

Soja 1996b). One of the most important and

original analyses is found in the work of

Hetherington (1997b), who understands het-

erotopias as ‘spaces of an alternative ordering’

that must be seen in relation to the sites they

differ from. He uses this understanding, to-

gether with a number of historical readings of

the Palais Royal, Masonic lodges and factor-

ies, to illustrate howmodernityis constituted

throughresistanceanddifferenceas much

as through the process of ordering.

‘Heterotopia’ was also used by the French

Marxist Henri Lefebvre (1901–91), but the

meanings are not entirely congruent with Fou-

cault (see, e.g., Lefebvre, 2003 [1970]).

Lefebvre understood the city through the

three terms of utopia, isotopia (the same

place) andheterotopia(places that are other,

other places, or places of the other). He uses

these terms to understand the uniformity, dif-

ference, contradictions and dialectical rela-

tions of urban space. Indeed, Lefebvre thinks

that urban space in the singular is restrictive,

and needs to be understood as urban spaces,

as the differentiated spaces and the spaces of

difference found in the city (see alsoproduc-

tion of space). se

Suggested reading

Foucault (1986); Hetherington (1997b, Ch. 3).

heuristic A problem-solving procedure,

which may be a set of formal rules (such as

an algorithm) but more likely a pragmatic or

‘short-cut’ approach, such as drawing a dia-

gram or reducing the set of all possible solu-

tions to those that seem most probable. Many

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HETEROTOPIA