Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
89103
I Queer geographies
Geographical engagements with queer theory
have put the lives of non-heterosexuals on
the disciplinary map. This is a somewhat
paradoxical development since the main
contribution that queer theory has made
to sexuality studies has been a critique of
sexual identity politics. As a poststructuralist
approach, queer theory challenges the idea
of the preconstituted sexual subject and
*Email: geoon@nus.edu.sg
2008 SAGE Publications
DOI: 10.1177/0309132507085213
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focus on purported homosexual acts obscures other forms of gendered violence and
serves a broader racist and sexist, as well as
homophobic, agenda (p. 523). She challenges
dominant gay and lesbian accounts that
privilege the white gay male in the west as
the victim of Abu Ghraib over closeted
and acts-qualified bodies and over bodies
of Iraqi prisoners themselves (2004: 529).
And, again utilizing a queer approach that
goes beyond a narrow focus on homosexual
subjects, she forces us to ask new questions
by pointing out that [r]eports of sodomizing
with chemical light sticks and broomstick
and of Americans inserting fingers into
prisoners anuses also fully implicate the
U.S. guards and raise the specters of interracial and intercultural sex (2004: 531).
Challenging the depiction of the events at
Abu Ghraib as scandalous and exceptional,
Puar demonstrates how these sexualized
events are an intrinsic part of the depravity
of war.
As Elspeth Probyn has stated, sexual
spaces are delineated through coincidence
and not through exclusion (1996: 10). Rather
than clinging to the fiction that we can locate
queer spaces that exist in coherent opposition to heterosexual spaces, we need to intensify examinations of what comes together in
processes of sexualization. By abandoning
belief in the existence of facile geometries of
heroes and hegemons, analysis is opened up
to the myriad uses of sexuality.
While a critique of the concept of queer
space has been the vehicle through which
I have come to make this argument for a
broader use of queer theory in geography, it
should by now be clear that I am simultaneously arguing against the division of space
into queer and straight space. Thus the
following section turns to the limitations
of the notion of heterosexual space. Alison
Blunt and Jane Wills state, Although it remains politically and analytically imperative
to make dissident sexualities visible and to
resist their marginalization, it is also important
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