ABSTRACT
Compared with the geography of, say, the 1980s, human geography now seems more than just a little queer. Indeed, one could follow Halperin’s line of argument to suggest that far from being of marginal concern to human geographers, queer theory has attained the status of a normalised discourse within the discipline. Witness, for example, the inclusion of an entry on queer theory in the most recent Dictionary of Human Geography, the way that revised editions of established student texts often incorporate material on queer approaches (e.g. Knox and Pinch 2001; Cloke et al. 2005) and the widespread citation of the book that arguably did most to introduce geographers to the possibilities of queer (Bell and Valentine’s (1995) Mapping Desire). The Sexuality and Space speciality group of the Association of American Geographers may not be particularly well subscribed, but it is certainly well-established and is a vibrant part of the AAG landscape. This is not to say that resistance to queer has not persisted in some quarters, or to deny the fact that many undergraduate students are not exposed to anything but the straightest of straight geographies; but, certainly, queer approaches have moved (or been moved) from the margins towards the centre in a quite remarkable series of ways (see Oswin 2005).
