ABSTRACT
Violence, property, comfort, cosmopolitanism and estrangement are different (and connected) rhetorics and political strategies through which lesbians and gay men produce themselves as objects and subjects of violence and safety. While our analysis separates them out, in practice their operation is often simultaneous. The boundary is a pervasive spatial trope in our study of safety and security. The recurrence of the theme of the boundary is implicated in the production of these regimes as distinctive and separate. At the same time it works to connect them all, enabling the easy substitution of one for another. In turn, by way of metaphor and metonym their inter-relation also becomes the possibility of the simultaneous operation as both different and the same registers and practices of safety and security. Boundary as metaphor produces their mobility. In many respects it is key to understanding the institutional and conceptual framework of the sexual politics of violence and safety.
