Geographies of gender and sexuality I: Engaging the shift towards Southern urbanism

Abstract

Geographers working on sexuality - and specifically of relevance to this report, scholars working on non-heternormative sexualities - have come to understand the need to engage with the urban South, culminating in acknowledgement of the benefits of engagements with Southern urbanism literature. I summarise how very recent sexualities scholarship is starting to signal direct connections with some of the broader interests of Southern urbanism. Such scholarship, I argue, has more in common with some of the empirical and theoretical interests of Southern urbanism than existing interests of the geographies of sexualities literature. I also consider how such emergent scholarship can potentially enrich interests of the geographies of sexualities literature in new and exciting ways.

I Introduction

As various geographers working on sexuality have identified, sexuality – and specifically non-heteronormative sexualities – has been deeply enmeshed with the study of urban space (Brown, 2014; Brown et al. 2016; Hubbard, 2012). While space precludes an holistic summary of this work (see Brown, 2014 for an earlier detailed examination), this work has nevertheless led to a proliferation of studies on agglomerated urban spaces such as ‘gay villages’ or ‘gay territories’ primarily in the global North (Brown, 2008; Bell and Binnie, 2004; Forest, 1995); the connections such spaces have to economic development (Collins, 2004; Knopp, 1997) and subsequent political representation and activisms (Brown, 1997; Castells, 1983; Gieseking, 2020); concerns as to how such spaces may also act as sites of homonormative exclusion specifically along classed, raced, and gendered axis (Andersson, 2019; Duggan, 2002; Nast, 2002; Rosenberg, 2017); and a subsequent shift to look at a wider array of spaces away from spatial agglomerations in major cities tied to the metronormativity critique of sexualities studies (Halberstam, 2005; Podmore and Bain, 2020).

Another emerging concern for geographers working on sexuality, and especially on urban sexualities, has been a need to acknowledge and find ways of addressing the relative lack of studies on the urban South (Brown et al., 2010; Brown et al., 2016; Bain and Podmore, 2021; Tucker, 2023). On the one hand, such work can be seen to speak to broader concerns regarding the need to appreciate southern knowledge production and not to assume that theories or approaches that emerge from the global North will have the same applicability in the global South (Connell, 2014). On the other hand, such work has also at times gestured towards a parallel and fast-growing set of literature within urban studies that, for the purposes of this report, can collectively be framed under the term ‘Southern urbanism’. This scholarship can be seen to have taken significant strides over the past two decades to call into question the ‘universality’ of urban theory drawn from a limited set of Eurocentric case studies from the urban North; to highlight the need to appreciate and explore empirical differences in the urban South, in sites that have historically remained peripheral within urban studies, and where the reasons for and characteristics of the urban form are sometimes radically different to the urban North; and to think though how new theoretical approaches or a retooling of existing theories may be necessary to adequately explain the difference and complexity of the urban South (Bhan, 2019; Lawhon and Truelove, 2020; Robinson, 2022; Robsinson and Roy, 2016; Oldfield and Parnell, 2016; Pieterse, 2015; Schindler 2017; Sheppard et al., 2013; Watson, 2003).

The aims of this report are therefore two-fold. First, it charts the evolving manner in which geographers working on sexuality have come to understand the need to engage with the urban South. Second, it charts how largely very recent scholarship is now signalling connections between scholarship on urban sexualities and the broader imperatives of the Southern urbanism canon. This work, I suggest here, currently has far more in common with some of the imperatives of Southern urbanism than it does with the existing interests of the geographies of sexualities literature. However, as summarised at the end of this report, there remain fundamental ways in which such emergent scholarship has the potential to enrich and take forward the interests of the geographies of sexualities literature in new and exciting ways.

II Appreciating the urban South within the geographies of sexualities literature

Beyond work which has focused specifically on the urban South, it is important first to acknowledge geographical work which has explored the need to engage more broadly with the global South in terms of sexuality. In particular, it is important to note the ground-breaking work of Brown et al. (2010) which acted as a nuanced call to explore how to further scholarship from and on the South. This work brought to the fore a number of concerns that would go on to shape and inform critical issues for geographers wishing to engage with the South – and which also find echoes in later Southern urbanism literature. One of these was an understanding that the global South cannot be reduced solely to a set of geographical coordinates and instead should also be seen as a relational concept that highlights both uneven and unequal geopolitical relations and, just as importantly, the collective peripheralisation of certain sites within global knowledge production (Lawhorn and Trulove, 2020; Manalansan IV, 2015; Nkula-Wenz and Cupers, 2022; Pieterse, 2015; Tucker, 2023). Another highlighted critical issue was an understanding that failing to read for complexity and agency among communities located in the South (tied, e.g. to simplistic readings of locations at the periphery of academic knowledge production) may lead to the discursive framing of such communities as needing ‘saving’ by actors and policy processes that emerge from the North (Brown and Browne, 2016; Kollman and Waites, 2009). Yet while ground-breaking, we can also appreciate how at the time of writing Brown, Browne, Elmhirst, and Hutta had little empirical material to draw on which could highlight work from within the geographies of sexualities literature which had indeed engaged directly with the South. They therefore make the compelling case that broader scholarship by other sub-fields within the discipline of geography (and indeed, beyond) have shown clear connections between the study of locations in the global South and work on sexuality, including health geography/anthropology (e.g. Farmer, 2006) and post-colonial geography (see e.g. McClintock, 1995; Stoler, 1995).

Six years later, and specifically in relation to urban geography, several of the aforementioned concerns were subsequently significantly expanded upon by Brown et al. (2016). Directly acknowledging a continued imbalance of scholarship that focused primarily on ‘global cities’ such as New York, San Francisco, and London in the study of sexuality, there was here again a call to look beyond the existing geographies of sexualities canon to other studies from other disciplines in other locations to help right this imbalance. In this instance, one key strength of this approach was to look beyond scholarship in the English language and to consider how sometimes very different scholarly genealogies have approached the relationship between sexuality and space. Specifically, work within the Lusophone tradition from Brazil pointed towards very different scholarly histories where Marxist frameworks have remained central to the study of sexuality and also gender (e.g. Silva and Vieira, 2014).

A range of sexualities scholarship at around this time also saw utility in the work of the urban theorist Jennifer Robinson, and her work on ‘ordinary cities’ (Robinson, 2006) which aimed to displace the hierarchical distinction between ‘global cities’ and ‘third world’ cities. Robinson’s work was one of the first sustained attempts to articulate a central pillar of Southern urbanism scholarship, namely, that it was key to acknowledge that urban theory should not be overdetermined by empirical examples from a small number of wealthy cities in the global North (see Lawhorn and Truelove, 2020; Parida and Agrawal, 2002). For sexualities scholars during this period, Robinson’s call was taken up in relation to the need to consider other cities beyond ‘global cities’, to look at other configurations of sexuality and urban space (see e.g. Brown, 2012; Browne and Bakshi, 2013; and Muller Myrdahl, 2013). Crucially, however, while these other studies clearly helped resituate the supposed centrality of global cities within urban sexualities scholarship by engaging with (smaller) cities in the global North that had remained largely off the academic map, they were not about cities in places such as parts of Africa or Asia which had remained even more peripheral (and were subsequently central to Southern urbanism scholarship). As a result, sexualities scholars charted their own different course towards an eventual deeper engagement with the ideas that were emerging from Southern urbanism.

For example, Misgav and Hartal (2019) pointed towards the continued need to focus on the relationship between sexuality and space as ‘views from the margins’ (p.2), which included geographic locations beyond those cities which have traditionally been the focus of study for the geographies of sexualities literature. Centred initially on the Middle East (rather than the wider global South), and specifically on urban political movements, Misgrav and Hartel nonetheless pointed towards a key impetus that drives a need to move beyond either global cities or cities in the global North, to also experiment with new ways of constructing academic knowledge (see also Banerjea, 2019 and her work on Delhi). As they contend, and drawing on the key southern urban scholars such as Vanessa Watson (2009, 2012), a focus beyond the global North helps shift what scholars do and do not see by highlighting at times radically different empirical concerns, which in turn may lead to new theorisations.

Taking a different but still related approach, Bain and Podmore’s (2021) work on LGBTQ + urban activisms, by drawing on Derickson (2015), considered the implications of a shift from ‘Urbanisation 1’ towards ‘Urbanisation 2’. ¹ In this conceptualisation, ‘Urbanisation 1’ is related closely to contemporary planetary urbanisation debates, which suggest the complete urbanisation of society (Brenner and Schmid, 2014, 2016). Such a framing, critiqued from a Southern urbanism perspective (see, e.g. Leitner and Sheppard, 2016; Parnell and Robinson, 2017; Schindler, 2017), potentially risks losing sight of the particularities and unique genealogies of urban developmental processes rooted in particular places (most particularly, post-colonial places), instead searching only for and hence only finding readings of urban form which align to capitalist development in the global North. ‘Urbanisation 2’, meanwhile, aligns closely with core tenets of Southern urbanism and the need to move beyond totalising narratives of knowledge production (often originating in the urban North) and to appreciate how empirical difference to urban (Northern) theory should be acknowledged on its own terms. For Bain and Podmore, there is also utility in seeing the connections between ‘Urbanisation 2’ and queer theory. Both, it can be argued, attempt to trouble and destabilise hegemonic (and often masculine) approaches towards the theorisation of cities, in turn challenging the erasures created by such theory. The approach taken by Bain and Podmore can therefore be seen to have taken significant strides in directly attempting to connect existing geographical work on sexuality to Southern urbanism interests. Yet, they also stop short of suggesting that theirs or the wider contributions in the Special Issue in which they write are in fact (to use Derickson’s (2015) parlance) ‘Urbanisation 2’. Instead, they propose that their intervention be seen as an ‘Urbanisation 1.5’ due to the need to first rework queer frameworks to make sense of contemporary urban debates (and also perhaps since the work they introduce remains centred primarily on global North cities).

A question therefore remains as to how a more concerted engagement with the theoretical and empirical imperatives already outlined by Southern urbanism, and which engage directly with cities located in parts of the world that have historically remained peripheral to academic scholarship, may connect to and push forward the interests of geographers working on sexuality. Before turning to that question, I first survey an emergent body of work which while focused on sexuality in sites in the urban South, has perhaps drawn greater inspiration from some of the empirical and theoretical interests of Southern urbanism rather than the geographies of sexualities literature.

III Emergent connections between Southern urbanism and sexuality

As Parida and Agrawal’s (2022) recent expansive synthesis of the characteristics of Southern urbanism has outlined, scholarship has now mapped a number of features, based on particular problematics noted across certain cities, that have emerged from southern academic orientations, opening up new research and theoretical landscapes. While by no means all encompassing, of emerging importance for this discussion of the study sexuality are the centrality of informality both in terms of the built environment and informal economic enterprises (Roy, 2009; Chen et al., 2016); the attention paid to the everyday urban processes driven by uncertainty and creativity (Pieterse, 2010; Simone, 2010; Thieme, 2018); the theoretical concept of ‘conflicting rationalities’ between diverse urban stakeholders (Watson, 2003); and the high vulnerability generally for diverse groups of urban residents (Bhan, 2009; Cartwright, 2015; McIlwaine, 2013). As outlined below, the following summary of sexualities scholarship based on (and largely undertaken by scholars located in) the urban South, perhaps unsurprisingly draw implicit inspiration from these Southern urbanism interests.

Informality, both in terms of informal urban settlements and the informal economy, has proven to be an area of research that both points towards the empirical uniqueness of many cities engaged with by Southern urbanism and also is starting to be understood to have applicability to the study of urban sexualities. In terms of informality, emergent sexualities scholarship is pointing towards the opportunities to explore how non-heteronormative communities both exist within informal and peri-urban spaces and also are engaging in forms of informal economic enterprise (Hassan and Tucker, 2021; Tucker and Hassan, 2020). Such scholarship, which takes as a starting point the delinking of industrialisation from urbanisation in southern cities, has highlighted the likelihood that proportionately far greater numbers of individuals with non-heteronormative subjectivities may be inhabiting informal rather than formal urban spaces. This may be the result of persistent forms of sexuality-based discrimination in schools across regions such as sub-Saharan Africa, adding additional barriers for certain individuals to gain formal employment and move both to more formal urban settlements and enter the formal economy (Tucker and Hassan, 2020). Furthermore, scholarship is also pointing towards the existence of informal economic enterprises run by or targeted at non-heteronormative communities in the urban South, such as entertainment spaces and service industries. Work here is exploring how such economic activity can exist and find ways to thrive in environments with persistent and severe sexuality-based discrimination (Gevisser, 2020; Tucker, 2009, 2010). Further exploration of such enterprises, which often due to their informality exist without formal protections of, or formal relationships with, the state, may signal an important new area of scholarship on urban sexualities, which may be even more enriched by existing southern urban interests on understanding the enabling reasons for – and potential strategies to help replicate – forms of urban innovation (Simone and Pieterse, 2017).

Closely linked to work on informality, but encompassing the wider city, has been a focus within the Southern urban canon on urban everyday lived experiences, especially in the face of precarity, and potentially enabling forms of creativity. This work has been driven by the need to construct new research lenses to comprehend the multiple logics and modes of existence that define the sometimes-chaotic nature and complexity of sites in the urban South. Recent work is now starting to chart the everyday strategies of same-sex communities not only to survive (often in the face of persistent sexuality-based discrimination) but also to enact strategies to thrive. Ombagi’s (2019, 2023) research in Nairobi, for example, has explored the liminal spaces through which especially queer men are able to navigate, suggesting neither outright capitulation to regressive forms of state and societal power, nor directed confrontation with such power. Rather, various places (such as community members’ homes and particular taverns or clubs) that go unremarked upon within the far larger city allow for varying degrees of ‘queer ambivalence’, where vibrant forms of ‘queer liveability’ are enacted (see also Gevisser, 2020; Livermon, 2014; Marnell, 2023). For Ombagi (2023), such spaces and the work that are needed to maintain them, point towards the need to appreciate how urban everyday practices are creating queer ‘archives of knowledge’ designed to be passed on between local queer men in the city – but which remain all but invisible to outsiders (including, one could argue at present, most researchers). An exploration of the urban everyday also connects to and is of key importance to the third area of emergent interest within Southern urbanism that is starting to have direct applicability to sexualities research in the urban South, namely, that of ‘conflicting rationalities’.

As a key theoretical insight that has emerged from Southern urbanism, ‘conflicting rationalities’ brings to the fore how states and communities can come into conflict with one another based on mutual incomprehensibility (Watson, 2003; Ngwenya and Cirolia, 2021). Such conflict is especially apparent when, as De Stagé and Watson (2018) note, expert and bureaucratic power/knowledge comes into contact with less visible but still assertive knowledge/power regimes that circulate among the marginalised, rooted in particular place-based material and discursive realities and constraints. Such work has been especially important in the context of urban development and planning in the South, due to challenges communities often face in southern cities at gaining representation within formal municipal or state processes (de Stagé & Watson, 2018). In the context of work on sexualities, work is starting to engage with the need to see how, across different scales and spheres of influence, mismatches are repeatedly being highlighted between different interest groups that play out and find most clear expression at the urban scale (and through work on the urban everyday). While not overtly drawing on a conflicting rationalities framework, Marnell (2023), for example, nonetheless has explored the implications of not exploring the impact of transnational sexuality-based migrant and refugee policy across East Africa in the context of the day-to-day struggles faced by trans migrants and refugees. Hassan et al. (2018) and Taylor (2016) meanwhile have explored how mismatches between international health policies and protocols and the material needs of same-sex communities as they navigate cities can have severe and deleterious effects on those for whom such policies are meant to support, which in turn can severely temper the impact of such policies.

Finally, another key feature of Southern urbanism has been an appreciation of the various forms of vulnerability faced by urban residents, including social, political, environmental, and economic risks. The significance of such widespread vulnerability therefore needs to be considered alongside the already widely documented instances of vulnerability faced by certain same-sex communities in parts of the urban South, where societal and/or legal discrimination may oftentimes be severe (Tucker, 2023). The existence of such widespread vulnerability is not only distinctly different to the vast majority of cities in the urban North, it also presents particular unique ways in which scholars can and are approaching the potential for how to comprehend urban politics as related to sexuality in the South. With urban research long pointing towards the need to appreciate a wide diversity of ways in which we may come to frame politics in the urban South (Pieterse, 2005), researchers are now starting to consider the possibility of wide-ranging solidarities across various urban interests groups, due to potential shared concerns. Khuzwayo (2023), for example, has highlighted the remarkable similarities in the way women more generally and queer women in particular are exposed to very high risks of physical violence due to regressive and violent forms of heteropatriarchy in cities (and especially informal settlements) in South Africa. Research is also suggesting that same-sex community groups and women’s groups in these contexts can closely align for particular forms of political action (Gevisser, 2016) which may also echo wider regional and transnational solidarity movements across sites in Latin America, Africa, and Asia (Bonner and Carré, 2013). As Tucker and Hassan (2020) and Tucker (2023) have argued, across the urban South there is a pressing need to think through how there may be in existence other broad-based urban political solidarity movements that include same-sex communities and how such movements may be involved in a wide array of activities potentially including, but also stretching beyond, formal protest against the state.

IV Future interest for the urban geographies of sexualities?

Moving on from the earlier summary as to how geographers working on sexuality have in differing ways and at different times gestured towards the need to engage more directly with the urban South, this section considers how existing sexuality work which already allies with Southern urbanism may support pre-existing interests within the geographies of sexualities literature.

Work on informal settlements and the informal economy, for example, could add productively to and clearly extend existing concerns with the geographies of sexualities literature with regard to a focus only on large cities (and by implication, formalised cities) in the urban North. While the concept and critique inherent with metronormativity has so far been deployed largely to help explicate the need to address other spaces, such as suburbs and rural locations in the North, to highlight other socio-sexual configurations, so too could a focus on radically different urban forms help further this endeavour. Equally, a focus on informal economic activity and sexuality potentially challenges an implicit key tenet within urban sexualities scholarship outlined in the introduction of this report, namely, the relationship between spatial agglomeration, economic enterprise, social visibility, and political representation. An appreciation of the delinking of industrialisation (and the formal economy) from urbanisation together with oftentimes persistent sexuality-based discrimination across various sites in the urban South opens new research avenues that do not presuppose spatial agglomeration, social visibility, or formal political representation vis-a-vie the state.

Equally, an appreciation of the urban everyday can speak to concerns raised by geographers working on sexuality with regard to the need to appreciate local forms of agency of actors in the South, rather than to assume that they need ‘saving’ by those in the North. Engaging with the urban everyday, the complexity of southern cities, and the strategies communities find to thrive therefore also closely align with some of the foundational interests of geographers working on sexuality. Yet again, this work moves away from earlier research concerns regarding larger territorial units such as ‘gay villages’ or ‘gay territories’, to instead explore the micro-geographies through which clandestine or semi-clandestine sexualities operate. How such spaces may still be inclusionary or exclusionary of certain identities (e.g. in terms of raced, classed, or gendered subjectivities) as with existing work on homonormativity, is also an area of potential future research.

Furthermore, work that aligns with theoretical insights such as conflicting rationalities and also work on urban politics tied to widespread vulnerabilities both speak towards key interests within the geographies of sexualities literature on urban activisms and the strategies by which communities attempt to mobilise to address various forms of injustice. In the context of Southern urbanism debates, the potential disconnect between community needs and political processes occurring at wider scales can be significantly greater than those elsewhere, and the strategies by which urban citizens attempt to confront the state may also indicate significant diversity and creativity. Equally, the potential imperative for those advocating for sexuality-based rights to require and be supported by solidarities with other urban citizens who also experience other forms of widespread vulnerability may also extend current work on urban activisms.

V Conclusion

There exist numerous ways in which geographers working on sexuality have sought to engage with the urban South, and today there’s emergent literature on sexuality in the urban South that can be seen to align closely to wider Southern urbanism debates. Significant opportunities exist for the geographies of sexualities literature to consider further potential links and alignments to the ever-growing and evolving Southern urbanism literature, to take in new directions both bodies of scholarship. After all, both an initial driving impetus for the geographies of sexualities literature and current work on Southern urbanism has been the need to explore forms of subjectivity and social, political, and economic relationships, that were or remain largely unknown, peripheral or ‘off the map’. Greater engagement by geographers working on sexuality with the imperatives and interests of Southern urbanism can help highlight and put into perspective new ways of appreciating what as academics we do and do not see, beyond categories and conceptualisations developed in the global North. Such work may then support the generation of new theories and concepts that do not attempt to universalise, but, instead, are attuned to the particular needs of communities in the South.