On the Relationship Between Queer and Feminist Geographies

Abstract

Despite their diverse and contested characters, queer and feminist geographies have much in common historically, theoretically, empirically, and politically. Following a brief discussion of their connections and divergences, I discuss the distinctive contributions of queer geographies and their potential, in continuing conversation and alliance with feminist geographies, to enliven and enrich geographical inquiry more broadly. I focus particularly on the potential of feminist-inspired and allied queer geographies to rethink a variety of spatial (and other) ontologies, including space, place, placelessness, movement, gender, homophobias and heterosexisms, generational cultures, and cultural politics.

Key Words:

• feminist geographies
• gender
• queer geographies
• sexuality
• spatial ontologies

Feminist and queer geographies are extremely diverse and contested arenas. Arguably, each grew out of a set of social exclusions based on essentialized constructions of gender and sexuality, respectively, and responses to these exclusions in academic geography (Monk and Hanson 1982; McNee 1984). ¹ These constructions were, and largely remain, features of social systems predicated on hierarchies of difference that also include class, race, ethnicity, physical “ability” and “disability,” and age, inter alia. Hence feminist geographies are products, substantially, of feminist theories and politics of women's oppression, and of gender, as taken up by geographers, whereas queer geographies are products of queer theories and politics of sexual subjects' oppression and of sexuality, again as interpreted by geographers.

The two fields are far from coequal, however. Feminist geographies, as a whole, have much longer histories and, consequentially, have at least as much theoretical and political diversity (and internal tensions) as queer geographies. Moreover, as queer geographies have evolved, they have (until recently, anyway) relied much more heavily on many of the tools that feminisms and feminist geographies have provided than vice versa.

A thorough review of feminist geographies' rich histories and numerous inflections is far beyond the purview of this article; but, at the risk of grossly oversimplifying what has in fact been an extremely sophisticated and nuanced collection of perspectives from the start, it is probably fair to say that feminist geographies evolved from a set of often-competing frameworks (whether inspired by liberal, radical-structuralist, or humanistic imaginations and epistemologies) in which the categories “woman” and “gender,” though essentialized, ² were interrogated in important, critical ways. ³ Over time many feminist geographies have become influenced by postmodern and postructuralist deconstructions of these categories (and other closely related ones, such as “sex” and “sexuality”; Domosh and Seager 2001). The result has been an explosion of feminist and feminist-inspired deconstructions of all sorts of geographical phenomena, including, for example, imbrications of social constructions of race, “ability/disability,” and gender in the structuring of urban space (e.g., see Kobayashi and Peake 1994; Chouinard 1997).

Queer geographies are newer and in many ways represent a similar “turn” growing out of geographical studies of gay and lesbian experiences and, later, studies of the relationship between sexuality and space more broadly. Gay and lesbian geographies began appearing in the 1970s and 1980s and were typically grounded in either liberal-individualist or, more commonly, structuralist frameworks of one kind or another in which essentialized (but otherwise theoretically diverse) feminist analyses of gender, gender relations, sex, sexual relations, and the family were drawn on quite heavily (cf. Ketteringham 1979, 1983; Weightman 1981; and McNee 1984; Lauria and Knopp 1985). As the range of empirical and theoretical questions that those concerned with gay and lesbian experiences broadened to include questions of “sexuality” more generally, and as feminist and other critical approaches to social science became more influenced by postmodernist and postructuralist perspectives, what became known as sexuality and space studies emerged, and the various essentialisms underlying much of the existing scholarship were critically deconstructed. It is out of this deconstructionist project, in which issues of sexuality and desire are foregrounded but consciously not essentialized, that queer geographies (and queer theory generally) have emerged.

Thus feminist and queer geographies have had similar trajectories in some respects but are hardly analogous. Indeed, their relationships have been and continue to be characterized by tensions as well as alliances. There have been, for example, fairly contentious debates surrounding issues of patriarchy in queer geographies and homophobia in feminist geographies (Binnie 1997; Anonymous 2002; Bachetta 2002; Blum 2002; Elder 2002; Nast 2002a,; 2002b; Popadopoulos 2002; Valdes 2002; Sothern 2004). Most fundamentally, though, feminist and queer geographies differ with respect to what they foreground ontologically. Even avowedly antiessentialist feminist geographies, to the extent that they remain committed to the label “feminist,” tend to examine the world through a lens that foregrounds women's experiences and issues of gender; meanwhile, queer geographies traditionally foreground issues of sexuality and desire. There are other divergences as well, including queer geographies' forays into “queering” generally (see the next section, The Distinctive Contributions of Queer Geographies), which doesn't really have a parallel in most feminist geographies and can at times be at odds with a coherent political project, something that has traditionally been central to almost all feminisms and feminist geographies.

Still, overall feminist and queer geographies have been and are engaged in ongoing, complementary, and highly productive conversations. Queer geographies clearly could never have existed without the tools that feminism and feminist geographies have provided—most notably a focus on gender and sexual relations at multiple spatial scales, from the body and family to the state and beyond. Today, however, queer geographies are informing feminist geographies as well, as Gibson-Graham's (1996) work on queering capitalism demonstrates quite vividly. Moreover, feminist and queer geographies, despite their multiple forms and many tensions, share basic political commitments to social justice, equity, and the dismantling of power structures producing injustice and inequity.

The Distinctive Contributions of Queer Geographies

As is suggested above, queer geographies are often conflated with sexuality and space studies and/or gay and lesbian geographies. In fact, these are distinct (though overlapping) fields. Their subject matter and approaches do often overlap, but sexuality and space studies examine a wide range of issues pertaining to sexuality and space from a variety of theoretical, philosophical, and even disciplinary perspectives, whereas gay and lesbian geographies traditionally focus on issues pertaining to sexual minority experiences from a geographical perspective. Queer geographies initially carved out a very particular niche within these other two fields and have since expanded beyond them. Their initial distinctive contribution was the application of specifically postmodern and/or poststructuralist perspectives to sexuality and space studies, especially gay and lesbian geographies. This meant rethinking those studies in ways that critiqued the taken-for-granted categories and essentialisms of structuralist thought (and modernist thought generally) as these have been applied to the fields of sexuality and space and gay and lesbian geographies. As a project, queer geographies have been deconstructive and critical, and suspicious of certainties, universal truths, and ontological imaginations about the way the world works that are mechanistic or instrumental. Arguably, they are also part of a larger project, shared by some strains of contemporary feminist geography, of critically drawing on humanistic philosophies and epistemologies and redefining human geography in ways that seek to bridge the division between social scientific and other approaches to the study of human phenomena. ⁴

One of the first and most important ways in which queer geographies began this project was by highlighting the hybrid and fluid nature of sexual subjectivities, and rethinking the geographical dimensions of these accordingly. Gay and lesbian geographies took a back seat to the broader and expanding field of sexuality and space studies, and the focus in both shifted from reified phenomena such as “gay gentrification” and “gay neighborhoods” (which also tended to be celebrated) to understanding more fluid, ambiguous, and contingently sexualized spatialities such as circuits and fields (cf. Ketteringham 1979, 1983; Weightman 1981; Lauria and Knopp 1985; Bell et al. 1994; Phillips, Watt, and Shuttleton 2000).

Queer geographies have not stopped there, however. Their adherents have taken some of their most powerful insights—about the significance of sexuality in human social life and institutions, about multiple, hybrid, and fluid sexual spatialities—and applied these to other realms of geography. One of the most ambitious and persuasive of these is Gibson-Graham's work on applying queer notions to economic geography (Gibson-Graham 1996). But queer geographers these days seem to be queering just about everything, from the body to the state to cyberspace (Bell et al. 1994; Brown 1994, 1997,; 2000; Longhurst 1995; Johnston 1996; Wincapaw 2000; Knopp and Brown 2003).

Still, there is much more that queer geographies, in conversation and alliance with feminist geographies, could do. Such work could have the important effect of queering the geographical imagination itself, something that would open up a world of possibilities in virtually every realm of geography. By rethinking a wide range of issues, but especially spatial (and other) ontologies, new ways of acting in the world might become possible, such that various of the political as well as more narrowly academic goals of feminist and queer geographies could be better served. Ontologies of space, place, placelessness, and movement in particular could be reconceptualized in very productive ways. In addition to these, however, I focus here on homophobias and heterosexisms, generational cultures, and cultural politics, due to their timeliness (in a contemporary political sense) as well as their traditional centrality to feminist and queer geographies and politics.

Space, Place, Placelessness, and Movement

Feminist geographers have provided a foundation for work on space, place, placelessness, and movement in at least three ways. First, and most fundamentally, they have forced a consideration of gendered spaces and the spatiality of gender. This line of inquiry includes pathbreaking deconstructive work on the spatial dichotomies of “public-private” and “home-workplace” but also reconceptualizations of particular spaces and places such as the home, the city, commuting fields, and links between these spatialities and exercises of power, including connections to race and ethnicity (Mackenzie and Rose 1983; England 1993, 1994; Peake 1993; Kobayashi 1994; Kobayashi and Peake 1994; Pratt and Hanson 1994; Stiell and England 1999). Second, feminist geographers have looked at space and gendered power relations in terms of the control of women's movements and bodies through coercion, fear, and violence (e.g., Valentine 1989). Third, they have forced reconceptualizations of boundaries, borders, and other spatial demarcations and related movements in terms of their roles in constructing socially meaningful group differences and categories. The work of Geraldine Pratt (1998) that focuses on border crossing, travel, and movement as these affect identity formation and world views is an excellent example.

However many queers' experiences—admittedly, more so those of privileged queers than others, but also often of less-privileged queers as well (e.g., queer immigrants and refugees)—complicate these feminist conceptualizations. Like many women, ⁵ queers frequently are suspicious, fearful, and unable to relate easily to the fixity and certainty inhering in most dominant ontologies of space and place, due to the vulnerability that accompanies being visible and locatable. In addition, though, many queers actively seek out movement and other liminal experiences (e.g., placelessness) as part of larger identity quests (Knopp 2004). Furthermore, pleasure, as well as safety and security, is frequently central to such quests. ⁶

One example of how queer geographies might recognize and draw on this queer reality is my own work on queer diffusions and queer identity quests (Knopp and Brown 2003; Knopp 2004). I argue there that a focus on the intersections of movement with identity quests, in combination with Whatmore's (1998) and Thrift's (1996, 1998) uses of actor-network and nonrepresentational theories, shows particular promise for “doing” queer geography as well as for “queering” geography more generally. The approach I advocate features a radical notion of agency, which can very fruitfully be conceptualized, à la actor-network theory, as “relational achievements” involving human and nonhuman discursive, material, semiotic, technological, institutional, and other forces (Whatmore 1998, 26), as well as an associative, topological imagination, and humble aspirations and ethics, all of which speak to many queers' lived experiences, which are typically quite conscious of and sensitive to both the pleasures and challenges of fluid, ambiguous, multiple, and contingent spatialities (Valentine 1993a, 1993b).

From this perspective, “places” can be productively thought of as elusive, ephemeral, and always in the process of both becoming and disintegrating (Thrift 1998). They are constituted by ever-changing practices and purposes that are both informed by and generative of all kinds of lingering legacies, including myriad intended and unintended consequences. Many of these legacies are themselves products of the interactions between human beings, their material and semiotic creations, and nonhuman forces, in complex networks and relationships (such as those embodied in technologies, institutions, and infrastructures). All of this resonates with both queer experiences and queer theoretical projects, not the least of which is “coming out,” itself a heretofore problematic notion, ontologically, for the vast majority of geographers, due to its seemingly contradictory grounding in both movement (boundary-crossing, identity quests) and fixity (the teleology and essentialism of identity).

Similarly, “placelessness” can be productively reconceptualized as something other than just an absence or lack. Thinking of it as an embodied and material practice, one that offers certain pleasures and other benefits (such as security) through its various perceived qualities (homogeneity, temporariness, anonymity, cosmopolitanism), allows it to be a much more ontologically meaningful concept, and one that again resonates with the lived experiences of many queers.

Finally, the various ways we think ontologically about movement—even in self-consciously “queer” musings about, for example, diffusion—still conceive of it in terms primarily of autonomous actors and objects circulating among and through vectors and nodes. Pathways and flows are not seen, generally, as carrying the same ontological “weight” as the places they connect, and are rarely seen as complexes of social practice, much less as reflexive ones. From a queer perspective, pathways and flows, like more traditional sites, can be thought of as contingent and fluid practices of reflection and even reinvention, which again speaks quite eloquently to many queers' experiences, including, notably, identity quests.

The key here is rethinking spatial ontologies in ways that address their emotional and sentimental meaning and significance, and their embodied materiality, along with other aspects of their meanings and materialities. Accordingly, spatialities of gender, of homophobias and heterosexisms, of generational change, and of struggles over cultural meanings, all of which feature prominently in feminist and queer experiences and politics, are natural candidates for queer reconceptualizations in geography (and beyond).

Queering the Spatialities of Gender, Homophobia, Heterosexism, Generational Cultures, and Cultural Politics

Queer spatialities of gender could enhance understanding and activism through focuses on transgender spatialities, drag and gender performativity, and resistances to gender regimes. Ki Namaste (1996) has begun to look at transgender spatialities of gender by analyzing the punishment of so-called “gender outlaws” in public space, through what Namaste calls “gender-bashing.” Browne (2004) has studied the anxieties and hostilities that gender-ambiguous bodies provoke in certain other kinds of spaces, particularly sex-segregated bathrooms. Other spatialities that might be looked at in relation to transgender bodies and practices, and to which a queer geographical perspective could contribute enormously, include the impacts on the architectures of family relationships, home, and community when individuals undergo sex changes (e.g., how does transgender subjectivity affect membership in, say, heterosexual, lesbian, or gay communities when one member of a marriage or partnership transitions); the different spatialities associated with essentialized versus nonessentialized transgender practices (e.g., “genderfuck,” a deliberately playful and eroticized form of androgyny, as opposed to sex changes); and the implications of transgender practices for citizenship, border-crossing, and immigration.

With respect to drag and gender performativity, Bell et al. (1994), in their famous paper on gay skinheads and lipstick lesbians in public space, raised numerous important questions about intentionality, authorship, authenticity, consumption, and spatial context when it comes to the relationships between gender performance, erotic desire, and social power. One very elemental one is under what spatial conditions drag and performativity are recognized as such, rather than as simply the norm; another has to do with the implications of drag for sexual subjectivity: how, when, and where do heterosexual and homosexual subjectivities survive gender transgressions, and where do they not?

In terms of resistance to gender regimes, geographers need to look at how various spatial strategies might render conservative ideologies of gender untenable. The performance artist Kate Bornstein and the social commentator and activist Leslie Feinberg both actively try to create new spaces (or “counterpublics”; Fraser 1995) that do this. But their strategies, which involve public speaking and performance, are not self-consciously spatial. What other forms of activism and resistance might challenge the hegemony of current gender regimes? Is cyberspace a potentially productive field for transgender activism? What about effectively queering gender in the formal political arena, or in more mundane spaces of daily life? How can this be done in ways that do not provoke bashing responses of the sort Namaste (1996) discusses? And what might a less transphobic world look like spatially?

In a similar vein, queer geographies might help us to better understand (and resist) homophobias and heterosexisms. Heidi Nast (1998, 2002a) and Tiffany Muller (2007a, 2007b) are exploring this through examinations of the ways in which socially constructed and deconstructed desire are policed in different kinds of spaces. Muller (2007a, 2007b) is doing this through her study of homophobia and heterosexism in the spaces of women's sport, and Nast has looked at how male desire (even “deconstructed” desire) in both gay male consumer spaces and spaces of academia is policed through deep-seeded material practices and cultures of patriarchal power. There is much more that could be done in this regard, including examinations of spaces of pornography and the gendered and sexed urban (and cyber) political economy of the pornography industry; spatialized representations of desire in media more generally; the role of travel and movement in policing, rather than unleashing, erotic desire; and the policing of reconfigured desire in carceral spaces.

Feminists have, of course, been particularly interested in deconstructing desire, but, as Jon Binnie (1997) has argued, in ways that are sometimes quite problematic from the perspectives of queer people. Further analyses and inquiries into the dynamics of deconstructed desire in women's and feminist spaces—particularly forays into the links between homophobias, heterosexisms, and feminist spatial practices—would be touchy, but are probably necessary (though they would probably best be done by queer feminists!).

Deconstructing the closet-ghetto dichotomy is another way of queering our spatialized notions of homophobia and heterosexism. One of the most insidious manifestations of both homophobia and heterosexism is the persistance of a closet-ghetto dichotomy to describe the world of gay and lesbian (and even, to some extent, queer) spatialities. Yet it is the dominant terminology used to describe these spatialities even today. Michael Brown and I are currently trying to debunk this, in collaboration with a community-based gay and lesbian history group in Seattle, through a mapping project on the historical geography of that city's gay and lesbian communities (Brown and Knopp 2005). We are trying to show how omnipresent and widespread gay and lesbian people and spaces have always been in that city, how indistinguishable from broader “straight” environments (and hence “queer”) these have sometimes been, and in the process how homophobias and heterosexisms work through the closet-ghetto dichotomy. No doubt there are ways other than mapping to do this, such as by looking at connections between representations and material policing of “perverse” spaces.

A queer sensibility will be crucial to extending knowledge and empowering interventions in the realm of generational change as well. Generational cultures and change embody, in many ways, the kind of hybridity and fluidity that is at the heart of many queer experiences. They are products and producers of what Thrift (1998) calls “lingering legacies” and at the same time of powerful and passionate forms of agency. They reproduce, reinvent, and transgress almost all social and theoretical boundaries, from bodies to beliefs. Generational cultures are also among the chief destabilizers of social categories, including gender and sexuality. One cohort's radical social change is its successor's mundane, taken-for-granted reality. How does this happen, and under what spatial conditions? Why, for example, are attitudes of U.S. young people about gay sex and gay rights so different from those of their parents? How does this vary across space (e.g., with generational attitudes in other societies in both the developed and developing worlds)? More generally, how does spatial context intersect with time to produce these changes?

In light of the crisis of relevance, which, arguably, feminism now faces, ⁷ at least in the minds of many young people (including many young women), one must also ask about generational dialectics within (and beyond) feminist and queer geographies. How are new generations of scholars positioning themselves in relation to earlier cohorts of feminist and queer geographers? And how do generational cultures diffuse? Complex discursive-material regimes clearly shape and define generational worldviews and cultures. Queer insights into the shaping of other regimes could help inform this question.

The so-called “culture wars” are also plainly queer. They are conflicts in which the stakes are nothing less than the social construction of reality. ⁸ A queer geographical approach to the culture wars might, as a start, look at their spatialities in terms of the framing of debates (see, e.g., Brown, Knopp, and Morrill 2005). How are space, place, and environment implicated in the framing of so-called “cultural issues”? What topics get placed on the table, what ones do not, and why? And how are the issues framed differently from place to place? Secondly, how might we understand, using the tools of queer geography, “moral landscapes”? That is, how do some moralities come to dominate some spaces and places, what are their contradictions and dialectics, and how are they related to other moralities in other places? Furthermore, how do these landscapes change? On a somewhat different note, we might also look at specifically queer forms of politics from a spatial perspective. In what kinds of places are a politics of queering likely to be practiced, in what kinds of places are they likely to be successful, and what might a queer spatial practice look like? Finally, given how balkanized the West, at least, is becoming culturally and politically, what might a queer approach be able to do for us in terms of understanding the various camps or “fortresses” that have come to characterize so much of the cultural and political landscape? How might we use the tools of queer geography to make sense, for example, of gated communities, gay resorts, Promise Keeper rallies, new nationalist movements, global as well as local-scale cultural resistances to globalization, or neo-Nazi and anti-immigration movements in the EU and North America?

Conclusion: Queering the Geographical Imagination

What I am advocating here is a fairly radical project of queering the geographical imagination. This is an argument as much about ethics as it is about theory, and about epistemology as much as ontology, even though I have concentrated more on theory and ontology here. At the heart of this new imagination are the following five goals or values:

The first may seem obvious, but is, in my view, far too much preached and far too little practiced. I refer to a geographical practice in which the material is always understood as discursive and the discursive always material. Though humanists and social scientists have been talking about this in terms of the “material/discursive divide” for some time now, examples in practice of transcending this divide are uncommon. I contend that queer geographies, in continued conversation and alliance with feminist geographies, are particularly well positioned to model such a practice.

The second has to do with the epistemological implications of the first. The kind of geographical practice alluded to above implies taking seriously the body, sentiment, emotion, and desire as coequal sources of knowledge, and ones that are not only equal in value to reason, rationality, and the mind, but are integral parts of them (Widdowfield 2000; Anderson and Smith 2001; Parr 2001; and Davidson and Milligan 2004 make this argument in the context of “emotional geographies”; Rani 2004 does so in the context of lesbian and bisexual women's experiences). Some might see this as naïve romanticism or clever rhetoric, but it is in fact part of an epistemology and ethic that is grounded in the messy realities of the human experience, including the key feminist insight that all knowledge is situated, partial, and incomplete—and that that is something to celebrate rather than bemoan.

Third, geography needs to expand its empirical terrain to include more of these messy realities, including fluidity, hybridity, incompleteness, moralities, desire, and embodiment. Again, Thrift (1998) and Whatmore (1998) offer inspiring articulations of how such a project might begin, though, as I have suggested above, theirs serve as more of an inspiration than a singular model for how queer geographies might move forward.

Fourth, we need to temper our intellectual (and other) ambitions with humility, and in particular with a recognition that our practice and the knowledges we produce are themselves always in the process of becoming, rather than complete.

Finally, we need to modify our geographical-ontological imaginations, such that our objects of study are viewed more relationally and topologically than autonomously and discrete, more reflexively than objectively, and more humbly than ambitously. The result will be a geography that is less arrogant and elitist, more hopeful than fear-driven, more possibilistic than deterministic, and more human (and humane) than inhuman (and inhumane).▪

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Notes on contributors

Larry Knopp

A Professor

Notes

¹The precise relationship between academic and political feminisms and queer theories is not a debate I wish to engage in here, in part because I see it as premised on an implied, but in my view false, dichotomy between “material” politics and “discursive” academics. Suffice it to say that feminist and queer theories and activisms have always been integral to each other. As in all social/political projects, activism shapes theory and theory shapes activism.

²Although the binary “essential/not essential” has itself been the object of much critical deconstruction and debate (cf. Fuss 1989; Spivak 1990), I use the terms here to suggest literatures and traditions that are either conscious or unconscious of essentialisms' problematics.

³Pyotr Kropotkin's (arguably grudging) incorporation of some of Emma Goldman's feminist politics into his anarchist-inspired geography is an excellent example (Goldman 1970, 253). So is Alison Hayford's (1974) early analysis of “The Geography of Women.”

⁴Clearly the nature-society binary is also an object of queer (and other) deconstructions (see Whatmore 1998), as is the “human” in humanism (Rose 1993). This is a point of some trouble for queer geographers and theorists, however. The bodies, sexualities, and desires posited by queer scholarship as crucial to understanding the world are always implicitly human.

⁵I do not mean here to essentialize the categories “woman” and “queer,” nor to suggest that women cannot also be queer. I am simply drawing a parallel between the experiences of many women qua (socially constructed) women, regardless of performed or self-styled gender or sexual subject position, and that of many queers qua (socially constructed) queers.

⁶I do not mean to suggest that women don't also engage in spatialized identity quests or that pleasure-seeking is never a part of such quests for women. I do contend, however, that issues of desire are particularly central to queer experiences of space, place, placelessness, and movement, in a way that can be, but is not necessarily, shared by women qua women.

⁷Panel discussions and forums at conferences now routinely feature feminist and allied scholars musing about the stigmatized nature of “the f-word” (feminism) in the minds of many young people, including women, who associate it with previous generations' allegedly hostile, angry, narrowly ideological, anti-male, and now obsolete gender-based political projects.

⁸From this perspective, it should be no surprise that the producers of popular entertainment (e.g., “Hollywood”), lawyers (who trade in multiple and competing “truths”), and political operatives are so reviled in U.S. popular culture. All three lay bare the constructedness of our everyday realities, and most consumers of the realities they produce feel powerless in the face of these elites' perceived hegemonic control over those realities.