Abstract
The literature on the relationship of sexuality and the city is now significant, having grown from a relative “niche” study of sites of “deviant sex” to a more encompassing consideration of the role of urbanisation in shifting the parameters of sexual life. As has been shown here, at least three key conclusions can be drawn from this literature. The first is that while cities in general are seen as spaces of sexual diversity and experimentation, this liberalism is more associated with the urban than the suburban, and has often been limited to the neighbourhoods that have been labelled as “gay villages” and/or red light zones (Ryder 2004). A second key conclusion is that this patterning reflects both choice and constraint within cities that are overwhelmingly heterosexual and heteronormative, and where regulatory mechanisms serve to police the boundaries between “queer” urban spaces and suburban landscapes that often appear exclusionary to those failing to conform to dominant sexual norms (Hubbard 2011). However, a third conclusion is that shifting morality, coupled with a selective commodification of queer sex, is encouraging an assimilation of gay villages, the emergence of more “mixed” queer-friendly neighbourhoods, and a revision of the sexual landscape in which commercial sex is visible and apparently accepted (Brown 2013; Gorman-Murray and Nash 2014). Here, the alignment of middle-class aesthetics, capital accumulation strategies and sexual normativity is also allowing sexual diversity to be mobilised as a marketing tool in the global battle for investment and tourist consumption across a range of urban spaces (Bell and Binnie 2004). Such conclusions point to an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the ways urban life mediates the “sexual scripts” available to us as we live our sexual lives. Here, moving beyond dominant understandings of urban/suburban has been significant (Tongson 2011), as has the recognition that some heterosexualities are “queered” through processes of spatial exclusion (Hubbard 2000). For all of this, it is clear that literatures on the relations of sexuality and space still fail to address a number of important questions concerning the intersection of class, race and gender with sexuality. For instance, much of the writing on sex in the city remains fixated on the global cities of the West, failing to consider the different inflections of sexuality in non-metropolitan, non-Western and more “ordinary” cities (Brown 2008). Here, queer writing on homonationalism adds new perspectives on the ways that capital accumulation aligns with sexual, racial and class norms to produce particular representations of the sex life of cities (Puar 2006). It is clear from such queer critiques that many of our “mappings” of sex in the city fail to grasp matters of desire and corporeality through methods that are sufficiently alert to the diverse gendered, classed and racialised experiences of sexual space. This implies that much remains to be done in unpicking existing assumptions about sex in the city, providing fuller and more nuanced understandings of how urbanisation is implicated in broader processes of sexual change.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Handbook of the Sociology of Sexualities |
Editors | John DeLatamer, Rebecca F. Plante |
Place of Publication | Switzerland |
Publisher | Springer |
Pages | 287-303 |
Number of pages | 17 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9783319173412 |
ISBN (Print) | 9783319173405 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2015 |
Keywords
- sex
- sexual minorities
- urban geography