During the last quarter-century, disciplinary

orthodoxies in geography have been subject to

devastating criticisms, leaving geography with

less of a center than ever. Sexuality studies and

queer theory have been an especially potent

force amidst projects that challenge the exclu-

sions of geographers’ views and explanations of

the world and its places. Because sexuality is an

enormously diverse and elusive set of lived

experiences, as well as a social construct that

defies, in immediately apparent ways, efforts to

impose order on it, its consideration has led to

new and specifically ‘queer’ ways of thinking

about difference (and related concepts, such as

identity, space and power). Neither ‘objective’

behavioral nor ‘subjective’ psychological appro-

aches, nor structuralist theories, can do sexuality

justice; nor can either strictly cultural or bio-

logical perspectives. Furthermore sexuality is

intimately linked both to profoundly social

exercises of power and to highly individuated

experiences of desire, which themselves are

interlinked and variable across time and space

(Foucault, 1980).

Serious engagements with sexuality, then,

necessitate a careful reconsideration of some

fundamental ontological, epistemological and

methodological issues. These include the rela-

tionship between nature, society and human

agency;^1 the nature of identity;^2 problems of

naming and counting;^3 of drawing inferences and

conclusions;^4 of the roles of qualitative and

quantitative methods in social science (how can

we understand the social consequences of sexua-

lities without understanding them as lived expe-

riences?); objectivity and subjectivity (can

sexualities ever be understood as strictly objec-

tive or subjective phenomena?); and more.

On at least some of these issues consensus

emerged. Sexual identities are now most fruit-

fully seen as culturally and ideologically con-

structed subjectivities and significations that

serve and resist dominant forms of power.

Power, meanwhile, is seen as working through

discourses and representations as much as

through more conventional material practices

(such as coercion backed by violence), such that

even academic work itself becomes highly (and

self-consciously) politicized. And space has been

discovered by academics in a wide variety of

disciplines as a concept (if not always a very

well-theorized one) that helps them to under-

stand and communicate the processes whereby

various forms of difference andpower are onto-

logically constructed, reproduced and resisted.

Yet queer theory, the strand of theorizing that

has emerged from sexuality studies, ironically

tends to question and problematize notions of

consensus, stability or privileged argument. In

this way, its aim to rethink social life from the

standpoint of sexual dissidents is intertwined

with a postmodernism that is deeply suspicious

of metanarratives or Archimedean perspectives.

This built-in contradiction means queer geography

is often difficult to characterize and subject to

internal debate. Nevertheless, as contributors to

this volume our charge is to attempt just that.

Accordingly we showcase here some of the

tensions, contradictions and milestones of this

emerging field within geography and signal their

promise and pitfalls. Our chapter proceeds in

three steps. We first offer a very brief temporal

overview of work in the area. We then shift to a

more in-depth consideration of the particular

spaces and subjectivities that geographers have

considered in this work. These range from the

16

Queer Cultural Geographies – We’re Here!

We’re Queer! We’re Over There,Too!

Michael Brown and Larry Knopp

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