ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how sexuality contributes towards our understanding of urban life. Specifically, I wish to focus my discussion on queer theory and politics and to consider how queer can contribute towards urban theory. The chapter examines four key themes, which I suggest are key in progressing understanding of the relationship between sexualities and urban life; first, the institutional politics of urban studies that govern the possibilities for urban research on sexualities; second, the potential of queer politics and theory to transform understanding of the city; third, the value of the material and economic in understanding the queer politics of urban space; and fourth, recognition of the value of transnational approaches to the study of the sexual politics of the city and the limitations of ‘methdodological nationalism’ in studies of sexualities and urban space (see Chapter 8, this volume). I do not mean to suggest that these are the only issues that are central to thinking through the contemporary state of the field. How one narrates or maps the trajectory of this burgeoning field inevitably means rendering some bodies of work central, and others peripheral or marginal, and this brief examination of the field is far from exhaustive. However, in discussing these four themes, I draw on Bell’s (2001) critique of attempts to frame discussions of queer’s impact on urban geography. Informed by Hemmings’s (2011) assessment of what is at stake in the re-telling, re-imagination and re-narration of the past within contemporary feminism, Bell argues against seeing the development of geographies of sexualities that have been heavily influenced by queer theory purely in terms of progress from absence and repression to success, acceptance and institutionalization.
