Sex and the City: Embodying Urban Geography

Question 1

Explain heteronormativity.

Answer 1

Society privileges a particular relation of cisman with ciswoman in a monogamous relationship following particular trajectories e.g. marriage -> children.
Heteronormativity organises our societies and our cities in particular ways.

Question 2

Describe conviviality.

Answer 2

Conviviality is said to be expressive of new forms of urban citizenship, where belonging is not necessarily reliant on the fixed markers of race, ethnicity and nationality. Rather, people may exhibit multiple attachments to place and identity through hybridised migrant belonging and a shared sense of cosmopolitanism enriched through numerous, often repetitive encounters.
(Nayak, 2017)
Cities are approached as convivial encounters repeated until difference is overcome.

Question 3

How does Butler conceptualise the body?

Answer 3

Butler conceptualises the body as a blank canvas upon which language, discourse and meaning are encoded.
X - body has materiality which is assembled in many technologies, is always in process and can resist.

Question 4

What do embodied encounters teach us?

Answer 4

Embodied encounters offer a way of examining urban encounters at the scale of the body – multiscalar

Sexuality and the city are mutually constituted

Question 5

How is ‘queer’ located?

Answer 5

‘Queer’ is colonial as it is produced in the Global North and applied to areas of the Global South

Question 6

How are LGBT politics appropriated?

Answer 6

Countries use LGBT politics to construct themselves as tolerant and others as intolerant - colonial tool.
Queer politics scaled up to global scale for countries to gain control.