A curation of articles, essays, book reviews and interviews on critical geographical concerns.
Foregrounding critical, theoretical and political interventions that emerge both from feminist and non-heteronormative perspectives, experiences and geographies. Beyond just identitarian politics, this section provides a platform for writings that explore the social and spatial processes towards which feminist, queer and trans imaginations and politics gesture.
The “Mi(e)s-conception” essay was originally published in 2000, so it is undoubtedly an example of Preciado’s earlier work, but at the same time, it can also be read as the beginning of his trajectory toward more developed thinking on gender, sex, and the built environment, as evidenced in "Pornotopia". The question, for geographers and other spatially-oriented thinkers, is How can this corpus of work be productively adapted to their research?
"Reproductive Geographies: Bodies, Places and Politics" is an edited volume that collects feminist geographical studies of reproduction and seeks to offer a research agenda for reproductive geography as a sub-field. "Xenofeminism" (2018, Helen Hester) is a short manifesto and polemic written as part of the theoretical project of the Laboria Cuboniks collective. Together these two works stage an important conversation about the relationship between feminism, technology, and reproduction.
Beauchamp’s "Going Stealth: Transgender Politics and U.S. Surveillance Practices" accomplishes the best of what we imagine theory to be good for – making sense of our everyday experiences, grounding personal interactions with the state in histories of structural oppression, and illuminating the broader context of our banal negotiations between dignity, resilience, convenience, resistance, politics-in-practice, and privilege.
To help re-direct our attention towards progressive ways of world-making, this three-part essay therefore discusses some of the affective dynamics that have unfolded on the political left in the Brazilian context. My focus, especially in the second part of this essay, is on the connection between affect and territoriality. I pick up here on the discussion of território and territorialidade in Brazilian geography, where these terms, as in other Romance languages, denote not only politically demarcated areas, but also pieces of the world that are inhabited and agentially shaped through everyday practice.
This paper centers fisherwomen’s urban worlds to analyze the uneven legibility of existing spatial patterns. My analysis of the enclosure of urban ecological commons and its gendered dimensions advances a dialogue between intersectional feminist and urban political ecology on colonial–neoliberal continuities, categorical exclusions in public–private binaries, and gendered urban environments.
In this article, Annie M Elledge and Caroline Faria attend to the powerful role of beauty labor, norms, and practices in national development through the Miss Tourism Uganda beauty pageant.
Nina Sahraoui's article uncovers how medical humanitarianism, enmeshed in the border regime, yields gendered constraints from practices of immobilisation to imposed practices of mothering.
In this paper, Jen Jack Gieseking writes that, like stars in the sky, contemporary urban lesbians and queers often create and rely on fragmented and fleeting experiences in lesbian–queer places, evoking patterns based on generational, racialized, and classed identities.
By exploring three memory tropes that emerge in Brixton, Emma Spruce shows that LGBTQ situated memory can be used to claim spatialised belonging, negotiate culpability for gentrification and disturb progress narratives.