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.
Nayan Shah’s "Stranger Intimacy" examines the social history of migrant South Asian males in the Canadian and US West during the first half of the 20th century. He analyzes this world not in isolation from other social groups but rather paradoxically as a world full of encounter.
In "Techniques of Pleasure" Margot Weiss offers an ethnography of the pansexual BDSM scene in the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 2000s. The book draws on interviews with more than sixty BDSM practitioners, as well as extended ethnographic observations at dungeon play parties, community social gatherings (‘munches’), and workshops teaching BDSM techniques and etiquette around bondage, flogging, and forms of erotic role play.
"Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis" is an inspiring book. Through a set of critical self-reflections on alliances involving feminist scholars in the United States and Canada and grassroots organizations around the world, the contributors to this edited volume explore both the potentials of transnational feminist collaborations and the relations of power embedded within them.
This is a sympathetic and strong critique of the field that spans theory, empirical research, and personal experience to make sense of what it means to be trans in geography, what trans geographies offer critical geographies, and to propel forward a trans* radical geographical imagination.
This essay makes a two-fold argument. First, that in failing its trans constituents, the discipline of geography falls short of its ethical, intellectual, and imaginative commitments. Second, that the task of developing a concept of space adequate to the diversity of trans experience offers an opportunity to tackle long-standing tensions in the discipline.
As a discipline, geography holds potential in interrogating the notion of belonging, and identifying the consequences of routine violence and unbelonging. However, geography’s nature as a cis discipline seriously calls into question the effectiveness of this potential.
In this editorial, our managing editor writes with an update for our readers, authors, and reviewers, and a critique of the global capitalist labour conditions that have long marred the peer review system, and have been exacerbated in pandemic times.
This article investigates what the double life of Apitatán’s mural reveals about the politics of visibility in Quito at a critical moment of consolidating political rights for the country’s LGBTQ community.