Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

This paper proposes an approach to mobility that takes both historical mobilities and forms of immobility seriously. It is argued that is important for the development of a politics of mobility. To do this it suggests that mobility can be thought of as an entanglement of movement, representation, and practice. Following this it argues for a more finely developed politics of mobility that thinks below the level of mobility and immobility in terms of motive force, speed, rhythm, route, experience, and friction. Finally, it outlines a notion of ‘constellations of mobility’ that entails considering the historical existence of fragile senses of movement, meaning, and practice marked by distinct forms of mobile politics and regulation.

This paper seeks to construct an antinostalgic portrait of an imperial feminist. As the representative of the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene (AMSH) in India between 1928 and 1947, Meliscent Shephard was an embodiment not only of the feminist urge to challenge patriarchal gender relations, but also of the imperialist urge to classify and fathom the world through a series of racist typologies. Despite an earlier belief that blame for the exploitation of prostitutes lay with the colonial state and economy, she later fell back on explanations based on notions of Indian society and religion. Operating in a period of heightened anticolonial nationalism, these latter views thwarted any hope of her forging successful connections with emergent Indian social reform groups. This failure to cultivate intimate relations with Indian colleagues marks a failure at the level of national and racial politics. Shephard did, however, cultivate an intimate relationship with correspondents at the AMSH in London, while her experiences of the sexual geographies of Indian cities provided a form of intimate interaction that would inspire her mission to close down tolerated brothels. As such, this paper marks an empirical engagement with the intimate frontiers at which the affective grid of colonial politics was marked out.

Coinciding with the so-called ‘Celtic Tiger’ boom of the 1990s, Ireland experienced a momentous shift in long-standing patterns of migration, with significant in-migration and an unprecedented change in population dynamics. Asylum seekers form a small and noteworthy group within the population in association with several recent legislative changes. In 2003 a previously granted guarantee of residency rights for so-called ‘non-national’ migrant parents whose children were born in Ireland was withdrawn; subsequently, in 2004 voters endorsed a referendum doing away with the Irish Constitution's provision for birthright citizenship. With this, many asylum seekers and their children who were born in Ireland were excluded from the possibility of establishing intimate ties within society and to the state. This social context forms the backdrop for examining the intersections between governmentality and the intimate ties between populations and nation-state. Drawing on recent attention to Foucault's lectures on Security, Territory, Population, three specifics themes are elaborated; these are: (i) government as a continuum of overlapping apparatuses; (ii) intersections between sovereign territory and population; and (iii) the question of the state in Foucault's work. These themes are elucidated with reference to housing policies, living conditions, and newsprint discourses that prevailed upon women asylum seekers in particular prior to Ireland's 2004 citizenship referendum. The associated unraveling and rearrangement of governmental practices and rejigging of the Irish State highlights some of the ways intimacy and population are tangled together as populations are produced.

This paper examines the visual and narrative geographies of AIDS in the documentaries Pandemic and A Closer Walk (both of which came out in 2003). Each film offers a travelogue of diverse sites affected by HIV/AIDS in order to politicize viewers' understanding of their place in the global pandemic, seeking to remake the spatial subjectivities that support a dangerously disinterested status quo that allows preventable illness and death to occur. In exploring the spatial politics of mass-mediated subject formation through these conventionally accessible documentaries, I argue that each film hopes to offer what I will call a ‘queer optic’ on global AIDS, enabling viewers to look critically at the structures of inequality that normalize preventable suffering. By challenging normative ways of looking at AIDS, these documentaries seek to produce visual intimacies with the hope of diminishing the distinterest of distance. However, neither film is able to realize its boldest ambitions. While recognizing their strong commitment to greater justice for people living with HIV/AIDS, I argue that each film employs narrative and visual strategies that ultimately limit their efficacy as political projects. In various ways, they struggle with and in substantive ways fail to dislodge colonial narratives and optics. By examining their projects through a theoretical framework influenced by early AIDS video activism, I demonstrate the importance of identifying visual strategies that resist neoimperial logics that too often shape the representation of spatial Others.

During a 2007 reform of Singapore's Penal Code, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong rejected calls by gay and lesbian activists for the removal of a colonial-era statute that prohibits ‘gross indecency’ between two men. This paper critically responds to the perpetuation of this illiberal sexual politics by exploring heteronormativity in the city-state as a colonial trace. It takes a postcolonial queer approach that combines insights from work on the globalization of sexuality, histories of colonialism, and postcolonial development geographies to interrogate the sedimentation of heteronormativity in Singapore over its late-colonial and early-postcolonial periods. Emphasis is placed on the role of colonized elites in transforming an entrepot of single male migrant workers into a nation of nuclear families. By attending to the contingent materialities of colonial governance through an examination of the intimate politics advanced by local colonial actors, the legacy of heteronormativity in Singapore is revealed to be about much more than heterosexuality and homosexuality. As such, it is argued that an approach that goes beyond sexuality per se to disrupt the progress narrative on which heteronormativity in Singapore relies might therefore be a useful way to challenge the narrow imagination of intimate possibilities.

Recent genealogies of the self-governing liberal subject have placed a renewed emphasis on the sphere of intimacy for its production. A critical narrative has emerged whereby liberal constructions of ‘appropriate’ intimacy as an autonomous sphere serves to actively disavow the racialisation and sexualisation of the liberal subject as white and heterosexual. At the same time, its constitutive outside, the nonwhite and the nonheternormative, positively require explanation to shore up its boundaries. Yet these widespread complementary assumptions miss places and times, such as the Progressive-era US, in which mainstream discourse has interrogated the liberal subject and has explicitly examined its heterosexual whiteness, while it has also strategically underexplained its others. Writings of Progressive figures such as Jane Addams and Louise de Koven Bowen on the productive regulation of intimacy, particularly marriage and prostitution, are put in conversation with current accounts of these issues. In doing so, the assumption of the liberal subject's invisibility to itself is problematised on an empirical basis, and the reification of distinctions between race and sexuality—even as their contingent production is being explained—is problematised at a theoretical level.

We provide an account of a bizarre sex panic from rural Washington State, USA. There, a man died after having sex with a horse and a panic ensued because there was no law against human – animal sex. Quickly a law was placed on the books outlawing bestiality, but only after a series of interlocking-yet-disparate arguments enjoined the local public sphere over just why a law prohibiting sex with animals was necessary. We deconstruct those shifting arguments with respect to their imaginative geographies, and their political theories. Tracing the borders between, and hybridities of, nature – culture, we show that there are broader issues at stake than just sex acts in otherwise moral, rural space. Resisting liberationist accounts of sexuality that buy into assumptions of sexuality as one's authentic self, we suggest that these borders and hybrids around nature might be one tack towards a queerer queer geography.