This is the first book to explore sexualities from a geographical perspective. The nature of place and notions of space are of increasing centrality to cultural and social theory. Mapping Desire presents the rich and diverse world of contemporary sexuality, exploring how the heterosexual body has been appropriated and resisted on the individual, community and city scales. The geographies presented here range across Europe, America, Australasia, Africa, the Pacific and the imaginary, cutting across city and country and analysing the positions of gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and heterosexuals. The contributors ring different interests and approaches to bear on theoretical and empirical material from a wide range of sources. The book is divided into four sections: cartographies/identities; sexualised spaces: global/local; sexualised spaces: local/global; sites of resistance. Each section is separately introduced. Beyond the bibliography, an annotated guide to further reading is also provided to help the reader map their own way through the literature.

This is the first book to explore sexualities from a geographical perspective. The nature of place and notions of space are of increasing centrality to cultural and social theory. Mapping Desire presents the rich and diverse world of contemporary sexuality, exploring how the heterosexual body has been appropriated and resisted on the individual, community and city scales. The geographies presented here range across Europe, America, Australasia, Africa, the Pacific and the imaginary, cutting across city and country and analysing the positions of gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and heterosexuals. The contributors ring different interests and approaches to bear on theoretical and empirical material from a wide range of sources. The book is divided into four sections: cartographies/identities; sexualised spaces: global/local; sexualised spaces: local/global; sites of resistance. Each section is separately introduced. Beyond the bibliography, an annotated guide to further reading is also provided to help the reader map their own way through the literature.

Winner, 2021 Glenda Laws Award given by the American Association of Geographers The first lesbian and queer historical geography of New York City Over the past few decades, rapid gentrification in New York City has led to the disappearance of many lesbian and queer spaces, displacing some of the most marginalized members of the LGBTQ+ community. In A Queer New York, Jen Jack Gieseking highlights the historic significance of these spaces, mapping the political, economic, and geographic dispossession of an important, thriving community that once called certain New York neighborhoods home. Focusing on well-known neighborhoods like Greenwich Village, Park Slope, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Crown Heights, Gieseking shows how lesbian and queer neighborhoods have folded under the capitalist influence of white, wealthy gentrifiers who have ultimately failed to make room for them. Nevertheless, they highlight the ways lesbian and queer communities have succeeded in carving out spaces—and lives—in a city that has consistently pushed its most vulnerable citizens away. Beautifully written, A Queer New York is an eye-opening account of how lesbians and queers have survived in the face of twenty-first century gentrification and urban development.

How does a subculture appropriate space within the dominant culture? What is the city's relationship to the body? Geographers from England and New Zealand apply queer theory in their consideration of the human body as a vehicle for understanding relationships between people and place. These provocative essays examine the body as an entity constricted by gender, sexuality, race, class, nationality, and disability. They also look at sexual identity as it relates to communities, and how humans "do" gender through regulated practices such as heterosexuality. Pleasure Zones tackles topics such as the politics of gay men's health; the relationship of sex and death to the city; erotic urban landscapes, and how public policy labels lesbians. Each essay attempts to reconcile queer theory and social and cultural theory with the discipline of geography. The result is an illuminating and accessible look at the formation of personal and collective identities. Building on two decades of geography that recognizes the body as a politicized site of struggle, and applying the perspective of the sexual dissident, Pleasure Zones brings a fascinating variety of human experiences into sharp relief.

A largely unexplored area, this is an innovative and original examination of bisexual spaces as places that are defined by both geographical boundaries and cultural significance. Hemmings applies the ideas of queer theory as well as social and cultural geography in her fascinating investigation into the spaces and places of bisexual life. Specifically focusing on Northhampton, MA and San Francisco, she draws on interviews with community members and the town histories showing how and why they have developed into safe places for the gay, lesbian, and bisexual communities. By mapping out a space of bisexuality, Bisexual Spaces provides a new and provocative understanding of the concept.

"A remarkable and sorely needed synthesis of the best of traditional historiographical documentation and critically astute analysis and contextualization. Cartographies complements and, frankly, exceeds any of the English language monographs on similar topics that precede it, and it represents significant contributions to several fields outside of East Asian history, including literature, gender studies, lesbian and gay studies, and cultural studies."—Earl Jackson Jr., author of Strategies of Deviance: Studies in Gay male Representation and Fantastic Living: The Speculative Autobiographies of Samuel R. Delany

Comprehensive and authoritative, this state-of-the-art review both charts and develops the rich sub-discipline geographies of sexualities, exploring sex-gender, sexuality and sexual practices. Emerging from the desire to examine differences and exclusions as a key aspect of human geographies, these geographies have engaged with heterosexual and queer, lesbian, gay, bi and trans lives. Developing thinking in this area, geographers and other social scientists have illustrated the centrality of place, space and other spatial relationships in reconstituting sexual practices, representations, desires, as well as sexed bodies and lives. This book reviews the current state of the field and offers new insights from authors located on five continents. In doing so, the book seeks to draw on and influence core debates in this field, as well as disrupt the Anglo-American hegemony in studies of sexualities, sexes and geographies. This volume is the definitive collection in the area, bringing together many international leaders in the field, alongside scholars that are well-established outside the Anglophone academy, and many emerging talents who will lead the field in the decades to come.