Abstract
Commentary
It’s the physicality of this book that first demands attention. Its very heaviness presupposes a hefty tome but its unusual shape speaks more to a (Madonna-ish) coffee table book than a standard academic text. It was difficult to know, back in 1995, what message it was sending out. The front cover design, though, set alarm bells ringing; it was outside any previous image associated with geography. A seductive black vortex, anatomically unrecognizable but undoubtedly of the body, surrounded by glittering flesh, sucked the reader in, helter-skelter, to the world of sex. The book might as well have been bound in latex. ‘Discover the truth about sex in the city (and the country)’, exhorted the back cover blurb. But no accompanying text was needed to let the reader know that by engaging with its interior you were entering into a realm of ‘landscapes of desire’ (p. 1). There was the urge to look over your shoulder in case anyone clocked the frisson of pleasure you experienced in opening it up.
This, anyway, constitutes my remembrance of this book when I first saw it. If nothing else, the book’s (pricy) aesthetic spoke to the publisher’s belief (and marketing ploy) that they were onto a winner. And so they were, with, at time of going to press, 700 citations on Google Scholar alone (sometimes such indices do tell a story worth listening to). But did the book live up to its cover? Did its examination of how the spatial and sexual constitute each other boldly take geography into places and spaces it had not gone before? Did it seek out hidden lives and worlds? More than this, did it fulfill its mission to argue for a queer reading of the discipline (p. 15), of doing geography differently (p. 16)?
Although studies of geographies of sexualities first appeared in print in geography in the late 1970s, it was not until the late 1980s that they started entering the mainstream, and by the early 1990s the field was well established, a result of both the post-structural and cultural turns in geography but also of the simultaneous explosion of work in cultural and sexuality studies (p. 8). Hence, many of the book’s contributors addressed topics already on Anglo-American geographers’ agendas. By the early 1990s these geographers were moving away from a predominantly urban gaze and of defining gay (and, to a degree, lesbian) residential and commercial areas towards a concern with identity politics and the fluidity of sexual identities, hence the recognition of multiple sexualities beyond those of gay and lesbian in the book’s 19 chapters. Other contributions embraced the turn from a focus on non-heterosexual identities to the hegemony of heterosexual social relations in everyday environments and the tensions between lesbians and gay men who wanted to assimilate into society and those who did not. Critical masculinity studies, which made a somewhat late appearance in geography, were also present, as were studies of sexualities that branched beyond the social, cultural and urban to medical, political, economic and rural geographies.
This was the first book to bring these studies of sexuality and space together, highlighting how far the field had come, but also how far it still had to go. It is notable for its own recognition of what it failed to do and, more importantly, of the necessity of addressing these omissions if the field was to thrive and gain critical acceptance. The editors were all too aware of the narrow geographical and racialized range of experiences they addressed (mostly those of white queers in US and UK cities) (p. 10). And although the book did not live up to its cover in addressing in any depth issues relating to bodily acts of sex (or an exploration of love) it did take geography boldly into places it had not yet gone, making it possible to utter words not found before in the geographical lexicon – buggery, cottaging, cruising, masturbation, sadomasochism, and sexual attraction, as well as friendships, intimacy, love, and romance. Paedophilia was also introduced. 20 years on most of those words are still having a hard time being discussed in geography (but see Bunnell et al., 2012; Morrison et al., 2013). And it is still a field predominantly populated by studies of white queers in the Global North, albeit with a now widespread acceptance of the need for a global and racialized take, and from perspectives that do not privilege western hierarchies of identities or of sexualised practices, acts and relations.
The real value added by this book was twofold. It cemented our understanding of the co-constitution of the sexual and the social and the privileging of heteronormatized bodies and their heterosexually encoded sex acts as the bedrock of social relations and their associated spatialities (see also Peake, 2013). Secondly, it fulfilled its mission to bring a queer sensibility to geography. While the term queer is a vexacious one, open to differing interpretations of its political value, in Mapping Desire it meant taking a sex-positive approach, of going beyond homosexual and heterosexual analytical categories, and of offering a critique of the assimilationist bias of some gays and lesbians. And at an epistemological level it meant questioning the pre-discursive constitution of geographical knowledge as heteronormative (p. 15). As such, the book not only gave clout and legitimacy to the field of queer geographies, but was also a strong portent of what was to come, such as, for example, the emergence of the Sexuality and Space Specialty Group of the AAG in 1996 and the widespread acceptance of Butler’s (1993) work on performativity, as well as setting the stage for work such as Puar’s (2007) on homonationalism.
Brown and Knopp (2003: 318) have remarked that sexuality studies are still marginal in geography because the discipline’s ‘traditional corpus has been largely untouched by a queer sensibility’. 12 years on I would be less pessimistic in the outlook for a queer impulse in geography. What re-reading this book has reminded me is that we still need to go much further in being boldly queer, in tearing down the house that heternormativity has built, and in asking for spangles on our book covers.