Mobile sexualities : section introduction

The exploration of the mobility issues and experiences of sexual and gender minorities is a relatively recent addition to geographies of sexualities. Such work arguably found its scholarly catalyst in Kath Weston's 1995 article 'Get Thee to a Big City: Sexual Imaginary and the Great Gay Migration', a (now) highly cited piece that examined the internal migration of lesbians and gay men to San Francisco in the post-Second World War period. Migration is an important dimension of human mobility, but the growing field of 'mobilities studies', which is especially prominent in (and draws together) contemporary geography, sociology, anthropology and cultural studies, encourages researchers to expand their notions of mobility and to consider how different modes of mobility are operable in society and culture (Cresswell and Merriman, 2011). Mobilities studies encompass a diverse range of physical movements and systems of circulation, including, inter alia, transport systems, travel, commuting, asylum, locative media, diurnal movements, diaspora and migration (Cresswell, 2010). Mobilities studies also underline the dialectic between fixity and motion, mooring and movement, and ask us to consider the experience and meaning of sites and moments of rest and stillness within mobility systems (Adey, 2006; Bissell and Fuller, 2011).