Cultural Geography

human geography as a whole) led to a proliferation

of geographical sexuality studies that were

theoretically anti-structuralist, anti-modernist

and very self-consciously ‘queer’ (for example,

Brown, 1997; 2000; Callard, 1996; Elder, 1999;

Knopp, 1999; 2000; Nast, 1998). Now questions of

representation (and the politics of representation),

performativity (à laButler, 1990; 1993), citizen-

ship/belonging, culture generally, and cultural

politics in sexuality and space studies have all but

supplanted the more traditional subject matter of

social area analysis, social movements and urban

development. However, this diverse array of

topics and approaches has not evolved nearly as

smoothly as the foregoing suggests, and it is in

this context that the contradictions we mentioned

earlier have begun to manifest themselves.

SPACES, SCALES AND THEIR

DISCONTENTS

The languages (and paradoxes) of poststructur-

alism and queer have emerged as particularly

robust in the contexts of the so-called ‘new’

cultural geography. Perhaps the archetypal con-

struct emerging from this field is the closet, and

it is a concept with which we and several others

have worked extensively. As a spatial metaphor

the closet conveys the sense of denial, erasure

and concealment that is at the heart of sexual

oppression. The humanities-based Diana Fuss

(1991) and Eve Sedgwick (1990) have stressed

the need to deconstruct the inside/out dualism

implicit in the metaphor. What they are referenc-

ing is the liminality and non-Euclidean nature of

the lived closet experience. They demonstrate

that one can in fact be simultaneously inside and

outside the closet (for example, in different con-

texts or even ontologically, in the sense that the

closet itself entails an epistemology of ‘knowing

by not knowing’: Sedgwick, 1990). It is also

evidenced by the more material reality that in

escaping one kind of oppression (that which

ensues from having no words or language with

which to name one’s desire) one must engage

with new forms of oppression associated with a

naming of desire that is always partial and to

some degree marginalizing in its capacity to

represent actual lived experience. This point

resonates with the broader theme of this section

of this book that subjectivities are never static

but rather always in the process of becoming.

So it is surprising that the closet has received

so little explicit (and critical) attention from

geographers (but see Davis, 1991; Knopp, 1994;

and most significantly Brown, 2000). Recently

Michael conceptualizes the gay man’s closet as a

spatial practice of power–knowledge, and not

just a metaphor (Brown, 2000). He examines

how the closet is constructed both materially and

discursively at four spatial scales: the body, the

city, the nation and the globe. At the level of the

body, he looks at how the closet is often a space

for the performativity of sexuality. At the level

of the city, he explores the ways in which the

closet allows the commodification of sexual

desire through the construction of commercial

spaces of sexual consumption. National-scale

closeting, meanwhile, is examined through a

study of the effects of the categorizations and

quests for ‘validity’ and ‘reliability’ that neces-

sarily, as features of positivist epistemology,

undergird national censuses. And at the global

scale, he shows that the closet is ‘not so much a

lack, but a productive if occluded space’ (2000: 22).

That is, it is not always a disempowered, abject

artifact, but can also be the setting for creative,

ingenious and transformative sexual, cultural

and political resistances to heteronormativity. In

another piece of our work (Knopp, 1994), Larry

similarly argues that closeting is a patently con-

tradictory collective process of privatization and

alienation as well as of resistance and empower-

ment. It involves the socialization of certain

kinds of experience as ‘private’ and their mark-

ing as ‘alien’. It both protects queer people and

makes us vulnerable, through the development of

subtle codes and cues that can be deployed

strategically by queers as well, potentially, as

homophobes (including queer homophobes).

And because it relies on queers ourselves to police

our own desires, closets are often constructed as

threatening to a heterosexualized dominant

culture, which then justifies heterosexist campaigns

of violence, harassment and intimidation as a

defensive measure.

Queer subjectivities, however, do not exist in

disembodied forms or only in closets. Perfor-

mance artist Kate Bornstein (1998) emphasizes,

by example as well as in writing, the importance

of location to successful gender-bending bodily

performances. Among geographers, Bell et al.

(1994) very provocatively make this point by

considering the capacity of bodies that defy

visual and behavioral expectations to disrupt the

shared meanings of public space. In particular,

they demonstrate how hypermasculine gay men

and hyperfeminine lesbians can ironically sub-

vert the hegemony of the heterosexual presump-

tion in everyday environments. Certain other

geographers, however, caution that the appropri-

ation and parodying of masculinity and feminin-

ity as constructed in/by/for heterosexuality – at

least in the ways described by Bell et al. – do

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