research in Manchester’s gay village shows, the
attraction for straight women is that they do not
have to endure the pickup routines of straight
bars. Also they appreciate the style of the gay
male clientele.
In Skeggs’ research it became apparent that
this straight invasion into queer space has reper-
cussions on the queerness of identified queer
space. In an interesting way, she argues that
gender returns to trouble sexuality. This is espe-
cially so in regard to the relations between
straight and gay women in queer space. Simply
put, straight women may be attracted to gay men
in terms of a non-threatening relationship that is
still based in a gendered opposition of same–
other. However, their relation to lesbians is quite
different. To be blunt, lesbians are more threat-
ening because they exist in a same–same yet
different relationship to straight women. Hetero-
sexual women may worry that they could be the
object of desire for lesbians in ways that are
impossible or at least less likely in their relation-
ships with gay men. Conversely, Skeggs has also
found that lesbians don’t like the ways in which
straight women appropriate space. There is an
erasure of the fact of lesbians within queer space,
as the space gets structured in terms of gay men
to gay men, and straight women to gay men. This
plays out in little but significant ways: for
instance, Skeggs’ lesbian informants complained
that the toilets get filled with straight women
doing their hair and makeup, and looking
askance at the lesbians. Given the fact that les-
bians have historically found it much more diffi-
cult than gay men to assert their sexuality outside
of private spheres, this limits the free expression
of sex in space. For instance, while public sex is
accepted practice amongst gay men, what would
the straight girls do if a couple of lesbians were
having sex in the toilets?
This may seem like a trivial question but it
does go to the heart of how space and subjectiv-
ity mutually interact. One of the defining divi-
sions in our culture is that of private versus
public space. In general, women have been only
recently allowed to incorporate public space into
their sense of self. Where one gets to do what
with whom is therefore an important point.
While it is often argued that the public penetrates
more and more into the private, it is less common
to hear how individuals’ subjectivities are
affected by the movement into the public or con-
versely into the private. In Kathy Ferguson’s
(1993) terms, this is why it is important to think
about the mobility of subjects. She states that she
has ‘chosen the term mobilerather than multiple
to avoid the implication of movement from one
stable resting place’ (1993: 158). In other words,we need to conceptualize subjectivities in terms
of not just the multiple positions we all hold, but
how they get configured across space and places.
In terms of the above discussion of sexuality and
space, it’s important not to conclude that there
are hermetic spaces designated as queer and
others as straight. There are places which act as
nodes, or meeting points, but it’s not as if we take
off an identity as lesbian once we venture beyond
them. As Geraldine Pratt argues, ‘there is a deep
suspicion about mapping cultures onto places,
because multiple cultures and identities
inevitably inhabit a single place (think of the mul-
tiple identities performed under the roof of a
family home)’ (1998: 27).
One of the important aspects of Pratt’s work is
the way she navigates between the excesses of
seeing subjectivity as completely fragmented and
errant, and a perspective that would place subjec-
tivity as a side-effect of place. Pratt’s research has
focused on how migrant workers in North America
inhabit their working spaces. In this sense, the
workplace ‘not only enable[s] but exact[s] the
performance of particular gender, class, and racial
identities’ (1998: 28). In other research Pratt
studied women employed in so-called non-skilled
white-collar jobs. She argues that ‘these women
literally move through class locations during the
day. At their jobs they are working class, at home
they are middle class’ (1998: 34). What close
ethnographic work reveals is the fact that most
individuals seek to anchor their senses of them-
selves. The women in Pratt’s study obviously
have an investment in both their jobs and their
middle-class identities at home. Against much of
the highly abstracted theoretical work on frag-
mentary, floating subjectivities, this returns us to
the idea that we may be hailed by different ideo-
logical apparatuses, but we also seek some coher-
ence even in the face of multiple interpellations.
Speaking in terms of our increasingly multi-
cultural and differentiated living conditions, Pratt
states: ‘It seems to me that efforts... are not
advanced by representations that conceive of
cities as blurred, chaotic, borderless places.’ I
would add that our efforts to understand subjec-
tivities also need to avoid celebrating subjectivity
and identity as amorphous and as essentially
boundless. Rather, as Pratt puts it, ‘one must
understand the multiple processes of boundary
construction in order to disrupt them’ (1998: 44).
At first sight this emphasis on boundaries
seems to go against the prevalent direction in
cultural geography that insists on the chaotic –
on the fact that ‘there is always an element of
“chaos” in space’ (Massey, 1999: 284). Doreen
Massey, one of the more influential writers on
space, defines this chaos as resulting296 PLACING SUBJECTIVITIES3029-ch14.qxd 03-10-02 10:54 AM Page 296