The Dictionary of Human Geography

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subject-position conferred by archaic Roman

lawon those whose lives and deaths were

deemed to be of no consequence. This dismal

figure has come to be of considerable signifi-

cance in contemporary politicalphilosophy

andhuman geography. People placed in this

position could not be sacrificed (because they

were outside divine law – their deaths were of

no value to the gods) and they could be killed

with impunity (because they were outside jur-

idical law – their lives were of no value to their

contemporaries). Agamben (1998) argues that

homo saceremerges at the point at whichsov-

ereign powersuspends the law, whose ab-

sence falls over a zone of abandonment. The

production of this space – the space of excep-

tion (seeexception, space of) – is central to

his account of modernbiopolitics. Critics

have dismissed Agamben’s retrieval ofhomo

saceras extravagant (Fitzpatrick, 2005) and

even mythical – certainly Agamben does noth-

ing to recover the wider cultural constructions

of death in early Roman society, and the ways

in which (for example) figures such as the

gladiator were also exposed to death – but his

purpose is not primarily historical or exeget-

ical: it is, rather, to projecthomo sacerinto the

present as a cipher forbare life. Agamben

does so in order to claim that sovereign

power has so aggressively reasserted itself

that the state of exception is increasingly be-

coming the rule and that, in consequence, we

are all potentiallyhomines sacri. These argu-

ments have been important for debates around

human rightsand the very definition of ‘the

human’, where geographers have insisted on

the uneven and differential distribution of vul-

nerability:homo saceris marked byclass,gen-

der,sexualityand ‘race’ (Gregory, 2004b;

Sanchez, 2004; Pratt, 2005). These analyses

also reveal the importance of thebody:homo

saceris thus transformed from a metaphysical

sign into a corporeal materialization of polit-

icalviolence. dg

Suggested reading

Fitzpatrick (2005); Pratt (2005).

homophobia and heterosexism Though

interrelated, these terms refer precisely to dif-

ferent exercises of oppression. Homophobia

refers to the fear of lesbians and gays, the

existence of ‘homosexuality’, and sometimes

other dissident or non-normative sexualities,

bodily performances or political struggles. The

term is used diffusely aroundqueer theory,

however, to describe sentiments ranging from

the disciplining, distancing, unease, disgust or

hatred towards a queer other (who may be an

embodied other or a dimension of the self:

seeabjection;psychoanalytic theory). By

contrast, heterosexism (also calledhetero-

normativity) refers to structures or agencies

insocietythat privilege and normalize male–

female sexual relations over same-sex (or

queered) ones, as well as the genderedper-

formances that accompany them (see

performativity). The terms may refer to

structural barriers, or tohuman agency, con-

sciousness or subjectivity. Most if not all re-

cent work across queer geography and

sexuality-and-space studies explore, docu-

ment or critique the panoply of forms that

either homophobia or heterosexism can take.

There are at least two ways thatgeography

is implicated in these terms. The first is that the

topical interests of geographers, especiallyspa-

tialityandnature–culturerelations, are di-

mensions through which critical geographers

are exposing and critiquing homophobia and

heterosexism. For example, the popular spatial

metaphorof ‘the closet’ to describe the con-

cealment, denial, or erasure of gays and les-

bians has been spatialized to show how

homophobia and heterosexism work through

spatial arrangements and practices (Brown,

2000). Scales of analyses have ranged from

the body (how sexuality functions as a

performative, and its spatial situatedness af-

fects performance), to the global (as in ques-

tions of internationaltourism,migrationand

refugees, and post-colonial legacies; e.g. Puar,

2002). Both place and movement can be as-

sessed as heteronormative or homophobic.

The second way of conceiving the links be-

tween geography and homophobia involves

the discipline’s long and under-exposed his-

tory of internal homophobia and heterosex-

ism, which has certainly been associated with

itsmasculinism. Yet the discipline has long

been populated by lesbians, gays, bi- and

omni-sexuals, even transgendered and trans-

sexual people, some in quite prominent posi-

tions, with stellar reputations. These

geographers have often experienced damaging

and painful repercussions because of their sex-

ual identities or practices (e.g. homophobia

was implicated in the closure of the Harvard

geography department; see also Valentine,

2000). The widest array of charges of homo-

phobia and heterosexism have been brought

by Binnie (1997), who has detected strains,

not simply in conventionalpositivistbranches

of the discipline, but also in allied critical areas

such as marxist geography andfeminist

geography. mb

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HOMOPHOBIA AND HETEROSEXISM