Lesbians in the City: Mobilities and Relational Geographies

Abstract

This article examines contemporary lesbians’ (and queer women's) urban geographies, drawing from empirical research on Toronto, Canada and Sydney, Australia. Our argument is grounded in research highlighting lesbians’ distinctive urban experiences: lesbians have both participated in gay villages and gay male spaces and, importantly, carved out their own urban places, including commercial and residential concentrations. In this article we use new mobilities scholarship to delineate historical and contemporary relational geographies materializing since World War II, which continue to rewrite lesbians’ and queer women's inhabitation and experiences of urban landscapes in Toronto and Sydney.

KEYWORDS:

• lesbians
• queer women
• mobilities
• place
• Toronto
• Sydney

Notes

¹In this article, we use the term lesbian to refer to those individuals who understand themselves as women and who are interested in intimate relations (including sexual) with other individuals identified as women. “Queer” is used by those subjects who refuse essentialist and fixed notions of gendered, sexualized, and embodied subjectivities and identities. We also use the term “LGBT” to refer to the broader sexual and gendered minority communities.

²The authors have copies of the archival material and interview transcripts, kindly supplied by Leichhardt Municipal Library.

³For male couples, the ten highest suburbs were also in inner Sydney, but only three were in the inner west, while seven were in the inner east, around Oxford Street. Darlinghurst remains the suburb with highest concentration of male couples (17% of all couples, cf. national average = 0.4%).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Catherine Nash

Dr. Catherine Nash is a Professor in the Department of Geography at Brock University. Her research interests include geographies of sexuality/queer/feminist and trans geographies, mobilities, and digital technologies. Dr. Nash is currently working with Dr. Andrew Gorman-Murray on changing LGBT and queer neighborhoods in Sydney, Australia and Toronto, Canada. She has published in a wide range of journals including Acme, Antipode, Area, EPD, Canadian Geographer, Canadian Studies, Geoforum, DAG and IJURR and she is co-editor with Dr. Kath Browne of Queer Methods and Methodologies: Queer Theories in Social Science Research. She is also the co-author of the first Canadian Edition of Human Geography: People, Place and Culture (2012).

Andrew Gorman-Murray

Dr. Andrew Gorman-Murray is a Senior Lecturer in Social Sciences (Geography and Urban Studies) at the University of Western Sydney. His expertise is in gender geographies and in geographies of sexualities. His research interests are sexual minorities’ experiences of belonging and exclusion in everyday spaces, including homes, neighborhoods, suburbs, and country towns. He has published in Environment and Planning A, Environment and Planning D, Geoforum, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Social and Cultural Geography, Geographical Research and Gender, Place and Culture, among other journals. He co-edited Material Geographies of Household Sustainability with Ruth Lane (Ashgate, 2011), Sexuality, Rurality and Geography with Barbara Pini and Lia Bryant (Lexington, 2013) and Masculinities and Place with Peter Hopkins (Ashgate, 2014).