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pre-given, personal or constant. They become, instead, ongoing and mutually constituted.
Emotions were understood as having inherently personal, social and spatial attributes. As
Sedgwick (1993), Munt (1998, 2007) and Probyn (2000) have argued, the emotions of pride
and shame offered an important research agenda for investigating sexuality because of how
they intersect with subjectivities and spatiality. For example, shame is mobilised by offi cial
hegemonic discourses circulating within many nation states to single out specifi c social
groups and stigmatise them as being 'out of place', including homosexuals. Indeed, as Munt
(2007) argued, the shame/pride binary may help understanding of the lesbian and gay libera-
tion movement, as shame is reconfi gured into pride as part of a strategy to reverse normative
discourses and bridge the breach in the borders between self and Other. As Munt (2007)
noted, the effects of pride and shame are always unstable and unpredictable. Munt (1998)
drew attention to how pride, while integral to forging collective identities of social move-
ments, may operate to create tensions between sexualities such as trans, bisexual, lesbian and
gay groups. Equally, through the unpredictability and volatility of how shame touches on
subjectivities, she recognised the potential for political change or stasis.
In the context of gay pride parades, Johnston (2007), and Waitt and Staple (2010) were
interested in the ambiguous embodied dynamics of pride and shame. Focusing on the cultural
politics of emotion, their work showed how such events can expose the emotional residuals
of taken for granted heterosexuality in the constellation of the discursive, embodied and
material relationships that confi gured specifi c places. Johnston (2007) studied a women's
drumming group that performed for Pride Scotland in Edinburgh, a city where Pride is
designated on notions of sexualised shame. She revealed the ambiguous attributes of how the
bodies of the drumming group were sexualised and gendered by onlookers. For a group who
consciously chose to perform their subjectivities in ways that challenged the norms of hetero-
sexuality, each found themselves constantly negotiating the parade as simultaneously oppres-
sive and celebratory, and evoking emotions of pride and shame.
Waitt and Staple (2010) investigated the cultural politics of emotion generated by the
Syd ney Ma rd i Gra s pa rade some 3,0 0 0 k i lomet res away in Tow nsv i l le, Queensla nd, Aust ra l ia.
They documented the multiple and confl icting emotions narrated by how the televised parade
intersected with understandings of sex, sexuality and Townsville. Some men who claimed a
gay identity expressed shame confi gured as disgust by how public displays of sex acts and
nudity soiled their understanding of Townsville. These participants were wedded to ideas of
a heterosexual intimate life. For others, evidence suggests the ongoing role of the Sydney
Mardi Gras in the constitution of sexual subjectivities beyond the metropolis through evoking
pride. In the absence of free-to-air television broadcasts since 2002, video re-runs of the
annual event still brought people together in houses and commercial venues to challenge
normative ideas of sexuality in Townsville.
An 'unqueer' gay tourism industry?
Adopting a queer perspective, geographers have also explored the impacts of the growth of
the Western gay tourism industry and how sexuality and citizenships are tethered to capi-
talism. One set of concerns arose around the commodifi cation of 'gay lifestyles' by all manner
of businesses, including tourism organisations of Western states that once incarcerated homo-
sexuals. Why have some North American, British, European, African and Australasian cities
and states invested resources into courting the gay tourism industry and encouraging visitors
to participate in gay pride parades? What are the implications of state-sanctioned neoliberal
urban policies and marketing that refashioned 'deviants' to 'economic saviours' and 'gay
 
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