ABSTRACT

The Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting in San Francisco, 1994 turned out, sometimes incongruously, to be a rather queer time and place. Though my recollections of it are patchy at best, I want to use this essay to reflect on that time and place, on the life of a paper from that meeting – my paper, which started life as ‘Fucking Geography’ – and the on-going trouble of talking about fucking in geography, a trouble that that paper sought to confront, but which it also fell foul of. Let me start with the story…

Getting to go to the AAG in San Francisco was an amazing opportunity, and lots of UK geographers made the trip. The AAG is one of those astounding academic mega-events: held in swanky hotels, attracting hundreds upon hundreds of people, most of them presenting and listening to short papers in countless parallel streams for days on end. It’s overwhelming, giving a sense of the sheer bulk of the discipline and something of its diversity – or, at least, the version of diversity manifest in a US, mainstream academic context. It’s a fascinating occasion to ponder what geography looks like, and – or so it seemed to me and my contemporaries, all postgrads or very junior faculty – a golden opportunity to push at the boundaries of the discipline.