In this episode, I talk to Derek Ruez, Academy Research Fellow at the University of Tampere (Finland). Derek’s current research project examines the politics of migration in Nordic queer spaces with a focus on two cities, Helsinki and Copenhagen. In this podcast’s episode we talk about queer spaces in cities, discussing what it means that space has historically been produced as heterosexual and heteronormative, and how people with different practices have had to carve out their own spaces.
Derek’s recommended resources:
Ali, A. (2022). Warming up narratives of community: queer kinship and emotional exile. Intersections. East European Journal of Society and Politics, 8(4), 10-24. https://doi.org/10.17356/ieejsp.v8i4.1014
Boussalem, A. (2022). A place where there is no need to explain: LGBTQ Muslims, collective disidentification and queer space in Brussels, Belgium. Social & Cultural Geography, 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2022.2083667
Brown, G., & Browne, K. (eds.). (2016). The Routledge Research Companion to Geographies of Sex and Sexualities. Routledge.
Oswin, N. (2008). Critical geographies and the uses of sexuality: Deconstructing queer space. Progress in Human Geography, 32(1), 89-103. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132507085213
Oswin, N. (2019). Global city futures: Desire and development in Singapore. University of Georgia Press.
Rosenberg, R. D. (2023). Geographies of Hegemonic Gay Masculinity: Interplays of Trans and Racialized In/Exclusions in the Gay Village of Toronto. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2023.2211141
Special issue on Placing LGBTQ+ urban activisms (edited by Alison Bain and Julie Podmore), published in Urban Studies https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/usj/58/7
Derek’s highlighted work:
Ruez, D., & Cockayne, D. (2021). Feeling otherwise: Ambivalent affects and the politics of critique in geography. Dialogues in Human Geography, 11(1), 88-107. https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820621995617
Ruez, D. (2017). “I never felt targeted as an Asian… until I went to a gay pub”: Sexual racism and the aesthetic geographies of the bad encounter. Environment and Planning, 49(4), 893-910. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X16680817
Thank you to Elmeri Tommiska for the music and post-production assistance.
