ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the methodological complications that surface in fieldwork including the changing nature of the 'field', the particularities of an 'insider/outsider' status and the production of knowledge. It focuses on how social categories of being, and lived experience, are constituted within certain historical, cultural and spatialized contexts, including normative ideas about what are deemed to be embodied gendered and sexual practices and behaviours. Classical research in geographical studies of gender, sexuality and space considered newly emergent gay and lesbian spaces in urban areas including the distinctive downtown residential and commercial neighbourhoods that support gay and lesbian political, social and economic life. A queer geographical analysis, then, works to deconstruct and decentralise the binaries of male/female, masculine/feminine and heterosexual/ homosexual that structure and organise social categories and relations in specific places as well as 'place' itself. Queer activism seeks to open up spaces across the heterosexual/homosexual divide as locations for non-normative gendered and sexualised practices and identities.
