Urban (Homo)Sexualities: Ordinary Cities and Ordinary Sexualities

Abstract

This article appraises the current state of research on urban sexualities and suggests some underexamined areas of research that might productively be explored further. This review primarily focuses on studies of gay space and urban homosexualities, as this remains the largest body of work on urban sexualities within geography. I argue that this work has got caught in a trap of concentrating on the production of gay identities and spaces within small areas of a relatively small set of cities, against which all other spaces are implicitly assessed. Drawing on recent post-colonial debates within urban geography, this article argues that it is time for sexual geographers to expand their horizons and move beyond this hierarchy of metropolitan gay centres, to study a broader range of sexualities and spaces in ‘ordinary cities’ assessed on their own terms. To this end, the article considers work on gay domestic spaces in suburban Australia, and the interaction of local homosexualities with transnational ‘gay’ identity in Chengdu, China. This work offers productive examples of studying gay space across the whole city and attending to urban homosexualities outside of the world cities of the Global North.