Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
life of the city, they established the China Association,
which plays an active role in Mexicali's social and civic life.
Mexicali's Chinatown is experiencing a transforma-
tion, as Chinese residents have dispersed to the edges
of the city and beyond (many because they can afford to
move out of town now). Relatively few Chinese continue
to live in the city's Chinatown; some have even moved
across the border to Calexico (a city of 27,000 on the
California side of the border), while retaining business
interests in Mexicali. Yet Mexicali's Chinatown contin-
ues to play an important symbolic and functional role for
individuals of Chinese ancestry in the area, who are still
shaping the region's social and economic geography. Even
in regions where an ethnic population is small in number,
if they have a group identity and consciousness they can
have a lasting effect on the cultural landscape.
themselves, and what kinds of problems they confront.
For example, early studies examining gay neighborhoods
in San Francisco and London focused on how gay men
created spaces and what those spaces meant to gay identi-
ties. Specifi c studies have also focused on the role of gay
pride parades in creating communities and the political
struggle for access to other parades such as St. Patrick's
Day parades in some cities. Other studies examine the role
gays and lesbians play in the gentrifi cation of neighbor-
hoods in city centers (a topic we explore in Chapter 9).
Today, geographers studying sexuality are focusing
not only on the distributions and experiences of people in
places but also on the theories behind the experiences, the
theories that explain and inform our understanding of sexu-
ality and space. Many of the geographers who study sexual-
ity are employing queer theory in their studies. By calling
the theory
queer theory
, Elder, Knopp, and Nast explain
that social scientists (in geography and other disciplines) are
appropriating a commonly used word with negative conno-
tations and turning it in a way that “highlights the contextual
nature” of opposition to the heteronormative and focuses on
the political engagement of queers with the heteronorma-
tive. Geographers are also concentrating on extending fi eld-
work on sexuality and space beyond the Western world of
North America and Europe to the rest of the world, explor-
ing and explaining the local contexts of political engagement.
In 2000, the United States Census Bureau counted
the number of same-sex households in the United States.
In 2010, the Census added same-sex marriage to their
counts. These data, by census tract—a small area in cit-
ies and a larger area in rural America—made it possible
for Gary Gates and Jason Ost to publish
The Gay and
Lesbian Atlas
. Their detailed maps of major cities in the
United States show concentrations of same-sex house-
holds in certain neighborhoods of cities (Fig. 5.10), such
as Adams-Morgan and DuPont Circle in Washington,
D.C., and the West Village and Chelsea in Manhattan
(Fig. 5.11). Taking the Census data by county, we can see a
pattern of same-sex households in the United States, with
concentrations in cities with well-established gay and les-
bian neighborhoods. And we can also see the presence of
same-sex households throughout the country, throughout
states where same-sex unions are illegal.
Identity and Space
Another way of thinking about place is to consider it as a
cross section of space. Doreen Massey and Pat Jess defi ne
space
as “social relations stretched out” and
place
as “par-
ticular articulations of those social relations as they have
come together, over time, in that particular location.” Part of
the social relations of a place are the embedded assumptions
about ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, about what certain
groups “should” and “should not” do socially, economically,
politically, even domestically. Geographers who study iden-
tities, such as gender, ethnicity, race, and sexuality, realize
that when people make places, they do so in the context of
surrounding social relationships. We can, for example, create
places that are
gendered
—places seen as being appropriate
for women or for men. A building can be constructed with
the goal of creating gendered spaces within it, or a building
can become gendered by the way people make use of it.
Sexuality and Space
Sexuality is part of humanity. Just as gender roles are
culturally constructed, so too do cultures decide sexual
norms. In their installment on “Sexuality and Space” in
Geography in America at the Dawn of the 21st Century
, geog-
raphers Glen Elder, Lawrence Knopp, and Heidi Nast
argue that most social science across disciplines is writ-
ten in a heteronormative way. This means that the default
subject in the minds of the academics who write studies
is heterosexual, white, and male. These geographers and
many others are working to fi nd out how heternormative
ideas infl uence understandings of places and cultures, and
how the practices of peoples who do not conform to these
ideas infl uence the development of places.
Geographers' initial forays into the study of sexual-
ity focused largely on the same kinds of questions posed
by those who fi rst took up the study of race, gender, and
ethnicity. Geographers ask where people with shared
identity live and gather, what they do to create a space for
In the 2010 census, the government tallied the number of
households
where a same-sex couple (with or without chil-
dren) lived. Study the map of same-sex households in New
York by census tract in Figure 5.10. How would the map
change if sexuality were one of the “boxes”
every
person
fi lled out on the census?
