ABSTRACT
What I want to do in this chapter is to consider the place of sexuality and the erotic within geographical knowledge. In doing so I revisit an earlier paper I wrote on this subject (Binnie 1997) that focussed on the relationship of sexuality to ‘the field’ – the sexual and erotic politics of fieldwork and the sexualised construction of geographical knowledge. I consider whether a queer epistemology can come any closer to fruition. I wish to reconsider the difficulties of embodying geography and question the mainstreaming of sexual geographies within the discipline. This discussion seeks to contribute towards theoretical understandings of the geographies of sexualities particularly in relation to the erotic/knowledge divide. A re-thinking of the reasons for the original paper and the re-evaluation of its main arguments are necessary for a number of reasons. There has been an explosion of work on sexuality and space within human geography in recent years, which has meant that epistemological and methodological issues can no longer be sidelined but instead need to be foregrounded. Within critical human geography and elsewhere there has been a reaction against what have been seen as the excesses of the cultural turn. In this context it would be easy to see a concern with sexual transgression and the erotic as trivial or apolitical in the context of the moral turn (Lee and Smith 2004; Smith 2000) and the policy turn (Bell forthcoming; Martin 2001) within human geography. Moreover, within queer/sexuality studies we appear to be witnessing a particular turn away from considering the erotic in favour of wider political concerns such as citizenship, globalisation and economics. While this turn should be welcomed as a corrective to the early 1990s neglect of the social and economic components in sexuality studies, there is a danger that the erotic is again marginalised. In developing this discussion the chapter is constructed in the following way. The first part of the chapter provides an overview of debates on the relationship between sex, sexuality and geographical knowledge. A key concern in this section is the notion of a queer epistemology, and whether we can use the insights of queer theory to re-think how we conduct research on sexuality in human geography. This discussion leads to a consideration of the place of the erotic within queer geographies and methodologies. Having examined the relationship between queer theory, the erotic and the politics of knowledge, I go on to question the stability of the term queer, reflecting criticisms from a postcolonial perspective and from the ‘new queer studies’ that queer theory
suffers from ethnocentrism. Having discussed the desirability and the possibilities for a queer epistemology, the final part of the chapter examines these issues in relation to pedagogy and the disciplinary specificity of geography, arguing that field trips are particularly sexualised spaces – the study of which can offer us insights into the distinctively sexualised nature of geographical knowledge.
