Del Casino—A Companion to Social Geography M Chapter 17 Sexual Life Gavin Brown, Kath Browne, and Jason Lim When and Where does Sexual Life Matter: Introduction Sexual life matters in all manner of places and in all manner of situations. This chapter explains why. By thinking about how sexual life matters in different social ields, we think about the diversity of phenomena that might fall under the rubric “sexual life.” Within the sub-discipline of “geographies of sexualities” (or “sexual geographies”), much work has focused on the lives, experiences and identities of sexual minorities, especially those who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or queer. Research conducted in geographies of sexualities considers the relationships between the identities and practices of sexual minorities and how they face persecu- tion, discrimination and (consequently) marginalization from heteronormative society – that is, a society that privileges particular versions of masculinity and femininity and assumes that these are opposites that are meant to come together within heterosexual relationships. Sexual life matters, then, because of these ques- tions of power, rights, exclusion, and marginalization, and geographical research has shown that these questions apply in a wide range of spaces: workplaces and corporate boardrooms (McDowell 1997; Kitchen and Lysaght 2003); bars, night- clubs, and other leisure spaces (Binnie and Skeggs 2004; Casey 2007); voluntary organizations (Andrucki and Elder 2007); streets and other public spaces (Valentine 1993); homes and bedrooms (Johnston and Valentine 1995). The sex that is considered, celebrated, and debated within geographies of sexuali- ties and queer geographies tends to be the unusual, the resistant, the “abnormal.” Although the importance of sexuality in the constitution of gender (and vice versa) has been a central consideration in much foundational feminist theorizing, this relationship of co-constitution has become taken-for-granted in certain recent feminist and/or gender geographies, such that the dynamic reproduction of A Companion to Social Geography, First Edition. Edited by Vincent J. Del Casino Jr., Mary Thomas, Paul Cloke, and Ruth Panelli. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. c17.indd 293 11/29/2010 4:20:50 PM