Emerging Dimensions in the Conceptualization of Gender, Sex and Sexuality: A Theoretical Review
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.47941/jgrs.1298Keywords:
Bodies, Binaries, Framing, Gender Variant, Genderqueer, TransgenderAbstract
Purpose: This report considers gender diversity across a range of spaces and places, the core purpose of the study was to stretch as far as possible the emerging dynamics in the conception of the term gender.
Methodology: The researchers adopted a desk review of related literature to interrogate theories, discussions and results to enable it reach its conclusions.
Findings: The researcher notes that while the notion of gender has been troubled, there exist opportunities to trouble it further. The highlight is on the scholarship that has sought to deconstruct genders, and the binary framing of man/woman and male/female roles and relationships, through a detailed desk review, this research has sought to draw attention to the emergence of geographical bodies that force the academic world to recognize the need to pay more attention to its distinctiveness. The queering of sexuality has meant that geographers are now tracing the ways in which lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer (LGBTIQ) bodies experience and live their gender beyond normative binaries. Research concerned with relational gendered subjectivities within LGBTIQ communities is discussed, and the study found that the trend of this research may conflate gendered experiences while privileging sexual subjectivities.
Unique Contribution to Theory, Policy and Practice: The study has succeeded in drawing attention to how body geographers are tracing the ways in which the LGBTIQ experience and live their gendered lives beyond normative binaries
Downloads
References
Aiello G, Bakshi S, Bilge S, Hall LK, Johnston L and Kimberee P (2013) Here, and not yet here: A dialogue at the intersection of queer, trans, and culture. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 6(2): 96–117.
Aizura AZ (2013) The romance of the amazing scalpel: ‘Race’, labor, and affect in Thai gender reassignment clinics. In: Stryker S and Aizura AZ (eds) The Transgender Studies Reader 2. New York: Routledge, 496–511.
Andersson J, Vanderbeck RM, Valentine G, Ward K and Sadgrove J (2011) New York encounters: Religion, sexuality and the city. Environment and Planning A 43: 618–633.
Bailey MM (2014) Engendering space: Ballroom culture and the spatial practice of possibility in Detroit. Gender, Place and Culture 21(4): 489–507.
Bain A, Payne W and Isen J (2014) Rendering a neighborhood queer. Social and Cultural Geography 16(4): 424–443.
Baydar G (2012) Sexualized productions of space. Gender, Place and Culture 19(6): 699–706.
Bender-Baird K (2011) Transgender Employment Experiences: Gendered Perceptions and the Law. New York: State University of New York Press.
Besnier N and Alexeyeff K (eds) (2014) Gender on the Edge: Transgender, Gay, and Other Pacific Islanders. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
Bondi L (1992) Gender and dichotomy. Progress in Human Geography 14(3): 438–445. Bornstein K (1994) Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us. New York: Routledge.
Brady A (2012) The transgendered Kiwi: Homosocial desire and ‘New Zealand identity’. Sexualities 15(3– 4): 355–372.
Brown M (2011) Gender and sexuality I: Intersectional anxieties. Progress in Human Geography 36(4): 541–550.
Brown M (2014) Gender and sexuality II: There goes the gayborhood? Progress in Human Geography 38(3): 457–465.
Browne K (2004) Genderism and the bathroom problem: (Re)materializing sexed sites, (re)creating sexed bodies. Gender, Place and Culture 11(3): 331–346.
Browne K (2006) ‘A right geezer-bird’ (man-woman): The sites and sights of ‘female’ embodiment. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 5(2): 121–143.
Browne K (2007) Drag queens and drab dykes: Deploying and deploring femininities. In: Browne K, Lim J and Brown G (eds) Geographies of Sexualities. Hampshire: Ashgate, 113–124.
Browne K (2009) Womyn’s separatist spaces: Rethinking spaces of difference and exclusion. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 35: 541–556.
Browne K (2011) Beyond rural idylls: Imperfect lesbian utopias at Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. Journal of Rural Studies 27(1): 13–23.
Browne K and Bakshi L (2013) Ordinary in Brighton? LGBT, Activisms and the City. Aldershot: Ashgate. Browne K and Lim J (2010) Trans lives in the ‘gay capital of the UK’. Gender, Place and Culture 17(5): 615–633.
Browne K and Nash CJ (eds) Queer Methods and Methodologies: Intersecting Queer Theories and Social Science Research. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 129–142.
Browne K, Lim J and Brown G (eds) (2007) Geographies of Sexualities: Theories, Practices and Politics. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Browne K, Nash CJ and Hines S (2010) Introduction: Towards trans geographies. Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 17(5):573–577.
Browne K, Norcup J, Robson E and Sharp J (2013) What’s in a name? Removing women from the Women and Geography Study Group. Area 45(1): 7–8.
Butler J (1990) Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge. Butler J (2004) Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge. at University of Waikato Library on June 20, 2015phg.sagepub.comDownloaded from
Casey M (2007) The queer unwanted and their undesirable ‘Otherness’. In: Browne K, Lim J and Brown G (eds) Geographies of Sexualities. Hampshire: Ashgate, 125–136. Caudwell J (2012) [Transgender] young men: Gendered subjectivities and the physically active body. Sport, Education and Society 19(4): 398–414.
Cavanagh S (2012) Response from the author. Gender, Place and Culture 19(4): 549–551. Christmas G (2010) Research note: Intersexuality, feminism and the case for gender binaries. Women’s Studies Journal 24(1): 60–65.
Cotton T (ed.) (2012) Transgender Migrations: The Bodies, Borders, and Politics of Transition. New York: Routledge.
Cream J (1995) Re-solving riddles: The sexed body. In: Bell D and Valentine G (eds) Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities. London: Routledge, 31–40.
Currah P, Green J and Stryker S (2009) The State of Transgender Rights in the United States of America. San Francisco, CA: National Sexuality Resource Center.
D’Ooge C (2008) Queer Katrina: Gender and sexual orientation matters in the aftermath of the disaster. In: Willinger B (ed.) Katrina and the Women of New Orleans. New Orleans, LA: Tulane University, 22–24.
Dahl U (2014) White gloves, feminist fists: Race, nation and the feeling of ‘vintage’ in femme movements. Gender, Place and Culture 21(5): 604–621.
Davidson E (2014) Responsible girls: The spatialized politics of feminine success and aspiration in a divided Silicon Valley, USA. Gender, Place and Culture 22(3): 390–404.
Davy Z (2011) Recognizing Transsexuals: Personal, Political and Medicolegal Embodiment. Farnham: Ashgate.
Doan PL (2007) Queers in the American city: Transgendered perceptions of urban spaces. Gender, Place and Culture 14: 57–74.
Doan PL (2009) Safety and urban environments: Transgendered experiences of the city. Women and Environment International 78/79: 22–25.
Doan PL (2010) The tyranny of gendered spaces: Living beyond the gender dichotomy. Gender, Place and Culture 17: 635–654.
Doan PL (ed.) (2011) Queerying Planning: Challenging Heteronormative Assumptions and Reframing Planning Practice. Farnham: Ashgate.
Doan PL (ed.) (2015) Planning and LBGTQ Communities: The Need for Inclusive Queer Spaces. New York: Routledge.
Dominey-Howes D, Gorman-Murray A and McKinnon S (2013) Queering disasters: On the need to account for LGBTI experiences in natural disaster contexts. Gender, Place and Culture 21(7): 905–918.
Dreger A (2004) Shifting the paradigm of intersex treatment. Intersex Society of North America. Available at: http://www.isna.org/drupal/compare (accessed March 2015).
Duffy D, Waitt G and Gibson C(2007) Get in to the groove: The role of sound in generating a sense of belonging at street parades. Altitude 8. Available at: http://ro.uow. edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article¼7159&context¼ scipapers (accessed June 2015).
Enke FA (2013) The education of little cis: Binary gender and the discipline of opposing bodies. In: Stryker A and AizuraA(eds) TheTransgender Studies Reader 2.New York: Routledge, 234–247.
Feinberg L (1992) Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come. New York: World View Forum.
Feinberg L (1993) Stone Butch Blues. Boston: Alyson Books.
Feinberg L (1997) Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman. Boston: Beacon.
Garber M (1992) Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York: Routledge. Gorman-
Halberstam J (2005) In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press.
He C (2013) Performance and the politics of gender: Transgender performance in contemporary Chinese films. Gender, Place and Culture 21(5): 622–636.
Hines S (2010) Queerly situated? Exploring negotiations of trans queer subjectivities at work and within community spaces in the UK. Gender, Place and Culture 17(5): 597–613.
Hird M (2003) Considerations for a psychoanalytic theory of gender identity and sexual desire: The case of intersex. Signs 28(4): 1067–92.
Holliday R, Bell D, Jones M, Hardy K, Hunter E, Probyn E and Sanchez Taylor J (2015) Beautiful face, beautifulat University of Waikato Library on June 20, 2015phg.sagepub.comDownloaded from
Hubbard P (2012) Sexualities and Cities. London: Routledge. Hutchings J and Aspin C (2007) Sexuality and the Stories of Indigenous People. Wellington: Huia Publishers.
Isoke Z (2013) Can’t I be seen? Can’t I be heard? Black women queering politics in Newark. Gender, Place and Culture 21(3): 353–369.
Johnson L (2008) Re-placing gender? Reflections on 15 years of gender, place and culture. Gender, Place and Culture 15(6): 561–574.
Johnston L (1996) Pumped up politics: Female body builders refiguring the body. Gender, Place and Culture 3(3): 327–340.
Johnston L (2005a) Man: Woman. In: Cloke P and Johnston R (eds) Spaces of Geographical Thought: Deconstructing Human Geography’s Binaries. London: SAGE,119–141.
Johnston L (2005b) Queering Tourism: Paradoxical Performances at Gay Pride Parades. London: Routledge.
Johnston L (2009) Scholar’s choice essay: ‘The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls: The Movie’. Emotion, Space and Society 2: 70–72.
Johnston L (2012) Sites of excess: The spatial politics of touch for drag queens in Aotearoa New Zealand. Emotion, Space and Society 5: 1–9.
Johnston L (2014) Documenting bodies beyond binaries. The Association of American Geographers 106th Annual Meeting Abstract Volume, 8–12 April, Tampa, Florida. Available at: http://meridian.aag.org/callforpapers/program/AbstractDetail.cfm?AbstractID¼55359 (accessed May 2015).
Johnston L and Longhurst R (2010) Space, Place and Sex: Geographies of Sexualities. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Kannen V (2013) These are not ‘regular places’: Women and gender studies classrooms as heterotopias. Gender, Place and Culture 21(1): 52–67.
Kulick D (1998) Travesti: Sex, Gender and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Longhurst R (2005) ‘Man-breasts’: Spaces of sexual difference, fluidity and abjection. In: van Hoven B and Ho¨rschelmann K (eds) Spaces of Masculinities. London: Routledge, 165–178. Longhurst R (2008) Maternities: Gender, Bodies, Space. London: Routledge.
Longhurst R and Johnston L (2014) Bodies, gender, place and culture: 21 years on. Gender, Place and Culture 21(3): 267–278.
Misgav C and Johnston L (2014) Dirty dancing: The (non)fluid geographies of a queer nightclub in Tel Aviv. Social and Cultural Geography 1–17. DOI: 10.1080/ 14649365.2014.916744.
Moussawi G (2012) Queering Beirut, the ‘Paris ofthe Middle East’: Fractal orientalism and essentialized masculinities in contemporary gay travelogues. Gender, Place and Culture 20(7): 858–875.
Murray A, McKinnon S and Dominey-Howes D (2014) Queer domicile: LGBT displacement and home loss in natural disaster impact, response and recovery. Home Cultures 11(2): 237–262.
Namaste K (1996) Gender bashing: Sexuality, gender and the regulation of public space. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 14: 221–240.
Namaste VK (2000) Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People.Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Nash CJ (2010) Queer conversations: Old-time lesbians, transmen, and the politics of queer research. In:
Nash CJ and Bain A (2007) Reclaiming raunch? Spatializing queer identities at a Toronto women’s bathhouse event. Social and Cultural Geography 8: 47–62.
Nash CJ and Gorman-Murray A (2014) LGBT neighborhoods and ‘new mobilities’: Towards understanding transformations in sexual and gendered urban landscapes. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38(3): 756–772.
Nast H and Pile S (eds) (1998) Places through the Body. London: Routledge. Nestle J, Howell C and Wilchins R (eds) (2002) Gender Queer: Voices From Beyond the Sexual Binary. Los Angeles: Alyson Books. Payne W (2015) Death-squads contemplating queers as citizens: What Colombian paramilitaries are saying. Gender, Place and Culture. DOI: 10.1080/0966369X. 2015.1013442.
place: Relational geographies and gender in cosmetic surgery tourism websites. Gender, Place and Culture 22: 90–106.
Podmore J (2013) Lesbians as village queers: The transformation of Montre´al’s lesbian nightlife in the 1990s. ACME 12(2): 220–249. Prosser J (1998) Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality. New York: Columbia University Press.
Rek J (2009) Homeless gay and transgender youth of color in San Francisco. Journal of LGBT Youth 6: 223–242.
Rosenberg R and Oswin N (2014) Trans embodiment in carceral space: Hypermasculinity and the US prison industrial complex. Gender, Place and Culture. DOI: 10.1080/0966369x.2014.969685.
Sandell J (2010) Transnational ways of seeing: Sexual and national belonging in ‘Hedwig and the Angry Inch’. Gender, Place and Culture 17(2): 231–247.
Schmidt J (2010) Migrating Genders: Westernisation, Migration, and Samoan Fa’afaine. Farnham: Ashgate. Schroeder CG (2013) (Un)holy Toledo: Intersectionality, interdependence, and neighborhood (trans)formation in Toledo, Ohio. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104(1): 166–181.
Selen E (2012) The stage: A space for queer subjectification in contemporary Turkey. Gender, Place and Culture 19(6): 730–749.
Seuffert N (2009) Reflections on transgender immigration. Griffith Law Review 18(2): 428–452. Shah S (2014) Queering critiques of neoliberalism in India: Urbanism and inequality in the era of transnational ‘LGBTQ’ rights. Antipode. DOI: 10.1111/anti. 12112.
Sharp J (2009) Geography and gender: What belongs to feminist geography? Emotion, power and change. Progress in Human Geography 33(1): 74–80.
Sheehan R and Vadjunec J (2015) Roller derby’s publicness: Toward greater recognition of diverse genders and sexualities in the Bible Belt. Gender, Place and Culture. DOI: 10.1080/0966369X.2015. 1013453.
Silva JM and Ornat MJ (2014) Intersectionality and transnational mobility between Brazil and Spain in travesty prostitution networks. Gender, Place and Culture. DOI: 10.1080/0966369x.2014.939148.
Smith L, Nairn K and Sandretto S (2015) Complicating hetero-normative spaces at school formals in New Zealand. Gender, Place and Culture. DOI: 10.1080/ 0966369X.2015.1034245.
Stone S (1987) The empire strikes back: A posttranssexual manifesto. Available at: http://pendientedemigracion. ucm.es/info/rqtr/biblioteca/Transexualidad/trans%20 manifesto.pdf (accessed 3 June 2015).
Stratford E and Langridge C (2012) Critical artistic interventions into the geopolitical spaces of islands. Social and Cultural Geography 13(7): 821–843. Stryker S and Aizura AZ (eds) (2013) The Transgender Studies Reader 2. New York: Routledge.
Tagg B (2012) Transgender netballers: Ethnical issues and lived realities. Sociology of Sport Journal 29: 151–167. Tagg B (2014) Men’s netball or gender-neutral netball? International Review for the Sociology of Sport. DOI: 10.1177/1012690214524757.
Tan QH (2013) Flirtatious geographies: Clubs as spaces for the performance ofaffective heterosexualities. Gender, Place and Culture 20(6): 718–736.
Taylor V and Rupp L (2005) When the girls are men: Negotiating gender and sexual dynamics in a study of drag queens. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 30(4): 2115–2139.
Te Awekotuku N (2001) Hinemoa: Retelling a famous romance. Journal of Lesbian Studies 5: 1–11.
Travers A (2006) Queering sport: Lesbian softball leagues andthe transgender challenge. International Review for the Sociology of Sport 41(3–4): 431–446.
Valentine D (2007) Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Valentine G (2010) Prejudice: Rethinking geographies of oppression. Social and Cultural Geography 11(6): 519–537.
Van Doorn N (2013) Architects of ‘the good life’: Queer assemblages and the composition of intimate citizenship. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31: 157–173.
Vanderbeck RM, Andersson J, Valentine G, Sadgrove J and Ward K (2011) Sexuality, activism, and witness in the Anglican communion: The 2008 Lambeth Conference of Anglican Bishops. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 101(3): 670–689.
Waitt G (2008) Boundaries of desire: Becoming sexual through the spaces of Sydney’s 2002 gay games. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 96(4): 773–787.
Weaver H (2014) Friction in the interstices: Emotion and landscape in Stone Butch Blues. Emotion, Space and Society 12: 85–91.
Whittle S, Turner L and Al-Alami M (2007) Engendered Penalties: Transgender and Transsexual People’s ExperiencesofInequalityandDiscrimination.Wetherby: Communities and Local Government Publications.
Williams EL (2013) Sex work and exclusion in the tourist districts ofSalvador, Brazil. Gender, Place and Culture 21(4): 453–470. Wilson M (2002) ‘I am the Prince of Pain, for I am a Princess intheBrain’:Liminaltransgenderidentities,narrativesand the elimination of ambiguities. Sexualities 5(4): 425–448.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2023 Hussayn U Idris , Grace P. Dafiel, Amina Kaseem
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this journal.
