Geographies of sexuality and gender 'Down Under'

Guest editorial: This special issue derives from specialist sessions on ‘Geographies of Sexuality and Gender ‘‘Down Under’’’ at the 2007 Institute of Australian Geographers’ conference (University of Melbourne, 2-5 July), sponsored by the IAG Cultural Geography Study Group. Geographical analysis of gendered and sexualised space emerged in Anglo-American (UK, US and Canadian) geography in the 1980s (Johnston & Sidaway 2004). However, it was not until Dowling and McGuirk’s 1998 special issue in Australian Geographer -Gendered Geographies in Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand and the Asia-Pacific’- that an edition of an Australasian (Australian and New Zealand) geographical journal was devoted solely to geographies of gender.1 Ten years on, while extending the gendered focus, the present issue is also the first Australasian journal explicitly to foreground geographies of sexuality, thus making a key intervention. In this introduction we will not extensively pre-empt the papers - they speak for themselves - but contemplate what this special issue adds to geographical knowledge.