Classics in human geography revisited
David Bell and Gill Valentine
(eds) (1995) Mapping Desire:
Geographies of Sexualities.
London and New York:
Routledge
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
Progress in Human Geography
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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 AngloAmerican 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 nonheterosexual 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
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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 coconstitution 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.
Linda Peake
York University, Canada
References
Brown M and Knopp L (2003) Queer cultural geographies:
We’re here! We’re queer! We’re over there, too! In:
Anderson K, Domosh M, Pile S and Thrift N (eds) Handbook of Cultural Geography. London: SAGE, 313–24.
Bunnell T, Yeah S, Peake L, Skelton T and Smith M (2012)
Geographies of friendships. Progress in Human Geography 36(4): 490–507.
Butler J (1993) Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. London: Routledge.
Morrison CA, Johnston L and Longhurst R (2013) Critical
geographies of love as spatial, relational and political.
Progress in Human Geography 37(4): 505–521.
Peake L (2013) Heteronormativity. In: Sharpe J, Kuus M
and Dodds K (eds) Companion to Critical Geopolitics.
Farnham: Ashgate, 89–108.
Puar J (2007) Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in
Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
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Authors’ response: Navel gazing
It’s always difficult to look back, to see past
mistakes – whether those of youthful optimism
or naivety – and also to feel the strange sense of
nostalgia – half warm glow, half shudder – of
dim recollection, laced with introspection and
only half recognition. Linda Peake has written
a very generous reflection on Mapping Desire,
which is 20 years old in 2015. She has definitely
made us reflect on the book’s origins, its
impacts and its legacy, though perhaps not
making us want to turn back time . . .
Thinking about looking back, we began
scouting around for guides to help us understand
what it means to look back. Two different
guides came quickly to mind. One is Heather
Love’s (2007) Feeling Backward, a book about
loss and queer history that asks what parts of the
past get lost in the telling of a ‘success story’
about queer culture. The second is Mark Turner’s (2003) Backward Glances, a book about
cruising. Here looking back takes on a different
meaning; it is freighted with possibility. We
want to try to hold on to both these senses of
looking back, these backward turns – to combine Love’s sense of the difficulty of talking
about the past with Turner’s sense of the potential latent in the backward glance – in our own
moment of retrospection.
Taking the book down from the shelf, we are
similarly reminded of its physicality, though it’s
now a little faded and dog-eared (but then,
aren’t we all?). That cover. The square format.
The weight of it. We’re transported back to a
visit to Routledge HQ and a posh lunch
(expenses paid) in a swanky London eatery,
with Tristan Palmer, then commissioning editor
for geography at the publishing house. When
the real story of the ‘cultural turn’ in geography
gets written, Tristan needs to be celebrated for
his role in encouraging authors and editors, for
pushing designers and printers, for embracing
the spirit of a postmodern, poststructuralist,
queer time. (For critics, it probably equally
symbolizes all that’s wrong with the excesses
of this period, and Routledge’s use of ‘cultural
studies as accumulation strategy’; see Barnett,
1998.) The format and cover were both Tristan’s
idea, and both seemed to us perfect: the format is
unusual, eye-catching (it stands proud on the
shelf) but also a bit troublesome to handle; and
the cover, as Linda so beautifully writes, is a
seduction, a dare – a provocation.
Linda remembers the ‘frisson of pleasure’ in
daring to open it up, and for us, right now, looking inside is no less of a Proustian moment: we
are transported back to not only the excitement
of finding all these people doing amazing work,
but also to the sheer hard work of assembling the
volume. It’s important to remember all that
labour, from writers and editors, and from those
who actually make the book – each finished
volume is a product of huge effort.
It’s interesting to track how Mapping Desire
has been positioned in the story of human geography nowadays, variously pegged as allied
to feminist geography, or a key marker of the
‘cultural turn’, or as embodying the excesses
of postmodernism (see, for example, Nayak and
Jeffries, 2011; Peet, 1998). And it’s true, the
book is a product of its time, now a period piece,
positively antique in places. Today, Butler is
taught to (some) undergraduates, but back then
it was really hard going trying to grapple with
newly emerging queer theory. We first met, in
fact, at a one-day conference in London, with
both Butler and Sedgwick on the bill. We
emerged with heads pounding and adrenaline
pumping, exhilarated and – to use a perfect
term – mind-fucked by what we’d seen and
heard. And the influence of those ideas is
clearly traceable in Mapping Desire, sitting
sometimes oddly alongside more ‘social-sciencey’
approaches.
Looking back is also always about the present, about understanding the world we are in
by retelling how we got here. Clare Hemmings
(2011) shows this most eloquently in her
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exploration of how academic feminism stories
itself. Like Love and Turner, in her account
there’s a mixture of loss and regret, possibility
and promise in looking back. As George
Michael put it: ‘Turn a different corner, and
we never would have met’. Edited books are like
that, too – driven by chance encounters, glances
returned (or not). The names on the pages of
Mapping Desire all have their own stories to tell,
too – some of success (measured in very different
ways), some of tragedy and loss.
In looking back to think about the present, to
take stock of the world that Mapping Desire
contributed in some small way to making, Linda
concludes that the book succeeded in bringing
‘a queer sensibility to geography’, opening up
the discipline to new thoughts and words and
deeds, clearing a path for others to follow, and
deviate from. Looking forwards – for thinking
about past and present must point us to the
future – she sees the book as a ‘portent of what
was to come’, though she ends with a cautionary
note that we too would echo: ‘we still need to go
much further in being boldly queer’. And it is gratifying to see others taking up that challenge – and
it is still a challenge, despite the ‘mainstreaming’
of at least some of this work in the discipline, and
indeed beyond it. While queer theory and sexuality studies never managed to fully unsettle disciplinary boundaries, there remains to this day an
enjoyable promiscuity to much work in these
fields.
Linda points out one promise largely unfulfilled in the pages of Mapping Desire: attention
to the geographies of sex itself. While she
enjoys noting that terms like ‘buggery’ and ‘cottage’ entered the geography lexicon with its
publication, she’s right that we largely shied
away from the ‘messy materiality’ of sex.
Thankfully, again, others have risen to this challenge and have taken geography into numerous
sexualized sites and scenes. She notes too that
the pages of the book are mainly about white
western queers – but largely absolves us of
responsibility, mindful of context. Again, we are
happy to say this is not the case today, with – to
name only a couple from the many published
studies – geographies of sexualities taking us
to interwar brothels in India (Legg, 2014) and
to intersections of race, class and sex in contemporary Cape Town (Tucker, 2008). As
ever, there is much work still to do here, and
whole worlds of sexual geographies still to be
explored.
Mapping Desire stands at a key moment in
various ‘turns’ in human geography, and had its
own role to play in making things and people
turn. And Linda is generous too on the extent
of these turns, percolating beyond the ‘new’ cultural geography, affecting (or infecting) many
corners of the discipline. We’ll end by flagging
an interesting ongoing ‘turn’ that is beginning to
take hold in geography, having emerged across
a range of scholarly (and activist) contexts: the
queering of the line between human and nonhuman. We see this as particularly promising – and
threatening – for a discipline that divides largely
along a human/physical axis. Given queer’s
celebrated boundary blurring and breaching, it
is great to see notions like ‘queer ecology’ taking hold (though, it has to be said, the traffic is a
bit one-way here, and many physical geographers are still playing hard to get; see Gandy,
2012; Mortimer-Sandilands and Erikson,
2010). This is one of the things that makes geography such an interesting place to work from:
there is a frisson of excitement, no less than the
one Linda felt when flirting with Mapping
Desire, that what lies within will be sometimes
surprising, sometimes shocking, but always
sexy.
David Bell
University of Leeds, UK
Gill Valentine
University of Sheffield, UK
References
Barnett C (1998) The cultural turn: Fashion or progress in
human geography?Antipode 30: 379–394.
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Gandy M (2012) Queer ecology: Nature, sexuality, and
heterotopic alliances. Environment and Planning D:
Society and Space 30: 727–747.
Hemmings C (2011) Why Stories Matter: The Political
Grammar of Feminist Theory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Legg S (2014) Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale,
Governmentalities, and Interwar India. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Love H (2007) Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of
Queer History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Mortimer-Sandilands K and Erikson B (eds) (2010) Queer
Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire. Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press.
Nayak A and Jeffries A (2011) Geographical Thought: An
Introduction to Ideas in Human Geography. London:
Pearson.
Peet R (1998) Modern Geographical Thought. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Tucker A (2008) Queer Visibilities: Space, Identity and
Interaction in Cape Town. Chichester: Wiley.
Turner M (2003) Backward Glances: Cruising the Queer
Streets of New York and London. London: Reaktion Books.
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