Trans geographies, embodiment and experience

Abstract

Queer geographers have long been interested in the interconnections between sexuality and space. With queer theorizing as its hallmark, queer geographical research has made substantial contributions to our understandings of genders, sexualities and embodiment and their constitution in, and production of, space and place. This article examines how trans scholarship intersects with several themes central to queer geographical research - subjectivity/performativity; experience/embodiment; and the historical, political and social constitution of what are now called ‘traditional’ LGBTQ or ‘queer’ urban spaces - and offers geographers interested in intersections between sexuality, gender and the body, alternative and challenging avenues of inquiry. This scholarship highlights, in part, the discontinuities and silences embedded in so-called LGBTQ and queer communities and spaces and points to the need to explore more particularly historical and political conceptualizations of the formations of subjectivities, identities and forms of embodiment in play in these spaces.

Full text

Please note: This is the author’s pre-print copy. The final edited and complete copy is available online through the
publisher’s site.
Citation: Nash, C. J. (2010) Trans geographies, embodiment and experience. Special Issue on Trans Geographies,
Gender, Place and Culture 17 (5): 579-595.
Trans geographies, embodiment, and experience
Catherine J. Nash
Associate Professor,
Department of Geography
Brock University
Mackenzie Chown Building
St. Catharines, ON
L2S 3A1, Canada
Tel: (905) 688-5550 ext. 3238
Fax: (905) 688-6369
E-mail: cnash@brocku.ca
Submitted February, 2009
Word count (excluding footnotes and references): 8589 words

1
Trans geographies, embodiment, and trans experience
Abstract
Queer geographers have long been interested in the interconnections between sexuality and
space. With queer theorizing as its hallmark, queer geographical research has made
substantial contributions to our understandings of genders, sexualities and embodiment and
their constitution in and production of space and place. This paper examine how trans
scholarship intersects with several themes central to queer geographical work research —
subjectivity/performativity; experience/embodiment, and the historical, political and social
constitution of what are now called ‘traditional’ LGBTQ or ‘queer’ urban spaces — and
offers geographers interested in intersections between sexuality, gender and the body,
alternative and challenging avenues of inquiry. This scholarship highlights, in part, the
discontinuities and silences embedded in so-called LGBTQ and queer communities and
spaces and points to the need to explore a more particularly historical and political
conceptualizations of the formations of subjectivities, identities, and forms of embodiment
in play in these spaces.
Keywords: gay; lesbian; queer theory; trans; queer geographies; sexuality; gender

2
Introduction
Transfolk are an increasingly visible presence in many North American queer communities. In
Toronto, the addition of the ‘T’ in the naming of various LGBTQ political and social
organizations is largely viewed as a positive and welcome, although not completely uncontested,
recognition of that trans presence. Many trans individuals experience unsettling combinations of
reification and celebrity and/or exclusion and rejection in LGBTQ spaces (Halberstam 2005;
Styker 2006; Browne and Lim, this issue).1 Such experiences suggest that despite the political
and social struggles waged to foster inclusivity in spaces variously represented as gay, bi-sexual,
‘feminist’, ‘lesbian’, and ‘women-only’, ‘LGBTQ’ and ‘queer’, transfolk are sometimes taken as
transgressing spatially specific gendered, sexualized, and embodied expectations. In Toronto,
several transfolk participating in ‘trans friendly’, queer women’s bathhouse events, report
receiving hostile glances and derogatory comments seemingly because they were not
immediately legible as normatively ‘female’ (Nash and Bain 2007). The long-standing battle
between trans activists and organizers of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (Browne 2009)
and the case of Kimberly Nixon, a trans woman excluded from volunteering for a feminist-based
sexual assault crisis centre attests to the fact that North American LGBTQ spaces are not
inherently inclusive either. Trans men often experience a mixed reception at gay male
bathhouses suggesting that even spaces understood by some as libratory and transgressive
(Tattleman 2000; Warner 2002) may have limits on who may be present to experience such
radical imaginings (Syms 2007, see also Doan 2007).
These troubled spatial experiences mirror long-standing and often acrimonious debates
between some feminist, queer theorists and transfolk over the political, social and theoretical
implications of the increasingly visible (and vocal) trans subject (Raymond 1994, Stone 1991;

3
Hausman 1995; Nestle et al. 2002; Devor and Matte 2004; Currah et al. 2006; Stryker 2006).
Largely excluded (self-imposed and otherwise) from feminist, gay/lesbian and to a lesser extent,
queer studies, trans scholars have carved out a largely independent field of study cutting across
both the humanities and social sciences (e.g. Bornstein 1994; Cameron 1996; Califia 1997;
Prosser 1998; Cromwell 1999; Rubin 2003; Macdonald 2006; Noble 2004, 2006; Stryker 2006).
Such scholarship provides rich explorations of lived trans experiences both within and beyond
the traditional North American urban ‘gay’ village. Such work often reflects complex, although
not necessarily reconcilable conceptual work around gender, sexuality and embodiment as well
as race, class and ability/dis-ability.2
While attention to trans issues has surfaced in the geographical literature, we have yet to
see a truly sustained engagement with the distinctive intellectual and conceptual threads
emerging in trans scholarship utilized in queer geographies and geographies of sexualities
(Browne 2004; Doan 2007; Nash 2007). This paper offers a very broad and preliminary sketch of
some of the more intriguing possibilities and challenges of trans scholarship for geographical
work on sexuality, gender and the body. This is by no means a proscriptive discussion or call to
set some sort of research agenda; rather it is an attempt to work across semi-permeable
disciplinary boundaries, established, at least in part, through the particular vagaries of North
American scholarly and grassroots histories and politics.
This paper begins with a brief overview of contemporary geographies of sexualities and
queer geographies in order to provide a backdrop for subsequent discussions on select aspects of
trans scholarship. I then consider three selected themes from a diverse body of trans scholarship
that engages with central issues of ongoing concern in feminist and queer geographical research
— notions of subjectivity/performativity, experience/embodiment, and the historical, political

4
and social constitution of what are now called ‘traditional’ LGBTQ or ‘queer’ urban spaces.
Drawing on my ongoing research on trans men’s and trans women’s experiences in various gay
and lesbian spaces in Toronto’s gay village, I sketch out how the particularities of these
experiences mark points of engagement and divergence with some contemporary geographical
scholarship. I conclude with some final thoughts on queer geographical engagements with
various strands of trans scholarship.
Considering sexuality and space: Gay/lesbian and queer geographies
Beginning in the late 1970s, geographical research on space and sexuality took as its primary
focus the historical, social, and political development of gay and lesbian identified commercial
and residential neighbourhoods in western cities. This research, grouped as ‘geographies of
sexualities’, generally assumes a constructed but largely essentialized and stable gay (and
lesbian) subject, defined largely through straightforward assumptions about gender, embodiment,
and ‘same-sex’ object choice (e.g. Castells 1983; Lauria and Knopp 1985; Adler and Brenner
1992; Valentine 1993; Rothenberg 1995). Research on gay and lesbian experiences in urban
space, particularly the focus on urban residential neighbourhoods was more pronounced in North
American geography. As Knopp argues (2007, 48), scholarly attention tended to fix on ‘sexual
minority experiences from a geographical perspective’ where identities are largely fixed and
aligned unproblematically with particular spaces. By contrast, research in the UK, while
interested in sexuality in urban spaces, looked more broadly at notions of performativity and the
subversion of normative sexuality and gender assumptions (e.g. Bell et al. 1994; Binnie 1995).
Work by Australian and New Zealand scholars over the last decade has explored the
particularities of gay and lesbian experiences in both urban and rural locals, across the

5
public/private divide and in more overtly considered colonial and postcolonial contexts (e.g.
Hodge 1993; Taylor 1998; Shale 1999; Markwell 2002; Johnston 2005; Riggs 2007; Hutchings
and Aspin 2007). More recent work !"#$%&'($)!"#*'+*,-.)$%/%.-(%*%'$)-#&)%/0"(*-#*)&%11'('#!'$)
2'*3''#)4#5."64/'(%!-#)-#&)4,$*(-.-$%-#)5'"5(-07%'$)"1)5'#&'()-#&)$'+,-.%*%'$)8'959)Waitt
and Markwell 2006; :"(/-#6;,((-<)'*)-.9!=>>?@)A"7#$"#)-#&)B"#57,($*)=>>?C9))
In the geographies of sexualities scholarship as a whole, with some notable exceptions,
‘gender’ was largely understood as those social behaviors and practices linked to presumed
bodily difference (either male or female) while sexuality tended to be understood as falling on
one side or the other of the heterosexual/homosexual binary (but see Valentine 1993). 3 More
recent geographical work, grouped under the heading ‘queer geographies’, and drawing on a
range of theoretical, ideological and political commitments, theorizes more unstable and
oscillating intersections between identity/subjectivity, sexual desire, embodiment and spatial
organization (Nash 2006; Browne et al. 2007; Nash and Bain 2007). Drawing on a vast but not
necessarily reconcilable body of postmodern and poststructuralist thinking, queer theorists
critique essentialist categorizations of human subjects, arguing that human cognizance of lived
possibilities is more complicated and subject to variation than essentialized, binary categories of
male/female, man/woman, heterosexual/homosexual admit. Geographers’ queer
conceptualizations tend to adhere to postmodernist precepts that ‘distrust certainties, universal
truths’ and reject mechanical ontological versions of reality that ignore the multiple ways in
which people experience the world (Knopp 2007, 48; see also Turner 2000). Queer geographies
focus on how non-normative sexual practices operate to both queer space and constitute various
formulations of queer subjectivities. This work operates beyond essentialized gay and lesbian
identities through an exploration of non-normative practices, behaviours and desires that are not

6
commensurate with identity-based understandings. More recently, scholarship has turned toward
a consideration of how traditional gay and lesbian spaces are being ‘queered’ through the
presence of ‘queer’ practices and behaviors although debates about the efficacy and limitations
of this queering have also surfaced (Prichard et al. 2000; Browne 2006a; Nash and Bain 2007).
Within these historical contexts, North American gay and lesbian, urban-based political
and social organizations have increasingly conceptualized their constituency as self-identifying
beyond the hetero/homo; masculine/feminine and male/female binaries. Organizations
strategically employ a variety of acronyms (exemplified, for example, by ‘LGBQQT’ — lesbian,
gay, bi-sexual, queer, questioning, trans, two-spirited) that strive to embed non-exclusionary
practices in both community building and activism. In Toronto, traditional gay and lesbian
neighbourhoods, built on a more essentialist and assimilationist identity politics, increasingly
contains bodies, genders, and sexualities that ‘queer’ the stable categorization of these spaces as
straight-forwardly ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ (Nash 2005; 2006). Queer practices and experiences
challenge the hegemonic, normative binaries that initially organized contemporary gay and
lesbian villages (and arguably remain a dominant aspect of social and political life) and disrupt
the neat division of more traditional ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ geographies (Knopp 2007). In much
queer geographical research, questions of gender usually only surfaces in work focused on the
distinctions in gay male and lesbian experiences in urban space (Adler and Brenner 1992;
Valentine 1993; Rothenberg 1995; Nash, 2001; Podmore 2001). While queer scholarship
questions ‘the supposedly stable relationship between sex, gender, sexual desire, and sexual
practice’ (Browne et al. 2007, 49), scholars tend portray queer geographies as centrally
concerned with sexuality. Knopp explicitly argues that queer geographies might be expanded to

7
include a ‘queering of the spatialities of gender’, foregrounding queer geographies’ primary
interest in sexualities (2007, 48).
Critiques of queer geographies point out that despite its conceptual commitment to move
beyond essentialist notions of sexual subjects, much of its scholarship continues to focus mainly
on gay and lesbian subjects and spaces (Oswin 2008). The failure to recognize that queer spaces,
are themselves, always complicit in the reproduction of normativities around class, gender, and
ethnicity challenges ‘queer’ (anti-normative) pretensions. As well, queer aspirations to render
subjectivities fluid, unstable and ‘capable of obliterating boundaries’ is often compromised when
‘queer’ is taken up as an identity and politic and attains a disciplining fixity that belies its desire
to be ethereal and uncontained (Browne 2006a, 888; see also Nash and Bain 2007). Queer
theories’ impulse to dissolve boundaries and render identities fluid, partial and unstable works to
make certain groups such as lesbians ‘disappear’ and render invisible the very diversity it strives
to highlight (Jeffrey 1994; see Anzaldúa 1991 in Goldman 1996). Both Knopp (2007) and Oswin
(2008) urge queer geographers to move beyond a general focus on sexual minorities, sexuality
and sexed spaces (usually gay and lesbian spaces) towards a more fully integrated consideration
of gendered, racialized, and classed experiences of space (Besio and Moss 2006; Browne 2004,
2006b).
Taken together, there is a rich body of geographical work that attempts to work through
the political, social and spatial implications of gendered and sexualized identities, practices and
behaviours. With the increasing visibility and activism of transfolk in gay and lesbian
communities, new possibilities (and points of contention) have emerged in how we think about
the spatialized experiences of particularly gendered, sexualized and embodied individuals.

8
Trans geographies: Queer tropes, experience/embodiment and LGBTQ spaces
Trans experiences in LGBTQ spaces attest to the complex and contested interconnections
between sexuality, gender, embodiment and the (re)constitution of spaces and subjectivities.
Trans scholarship argues pointedly for the need to seriously consider ‘the body, sentiment,
emotion and desire as coequal’ to ‘reason, rationality and the mind’ in the production of
knowledge (Knopp 2007, 53). Such sentiments reflect trenchant critiques of postmodern and
poststructuralist engagements, with their focus on texts, discourses and representations that
seemingly fail to produce understandings about the lived, material experiences of the everyday.
Despite the argument that queer geographies are attuned to the material experiences of their
queer conceptualizing, they too sometimes appear detached from the material in favour of the
representational (Knopp 2007). Some trans scholarship is quite critical of queer theories’
poststructuralist proclivities and seeks alternative modalities for understanding the inter-layering
of gender, sexuality and sexed body. In this section, I undertake a selective, but detailed,
examination of three key themes in trans scholars’ critiques of queer scholarship — the themes
of subjectivity and performativity; questions of experience/embodiment; and experiences in
‘traditional’ LGBTQ or ‘queer’ urban spaces.
Subjectivity and performativity: Queer tropes
Over the last 20 years or so, a rich and diverse body of work has been loosely consolidated under
the rubric ‘trans studies’ or ‘trans scholarship’ (Stryker 2006). In North America, trans
scholarship developed relatively independently from Women’s Studies programs, feminist
scholarship, gay and lesbian and queer studies despite overlapping areas of interest. As Sue
Stryker argues, trans scholarship has a rather ‘vexed’ relationship with both feminist and queer

9
theory due, in part, to the animosity exhibited by some feminists to trans-identified individuals
(2006, 7). That the increasing visibility of transsexual and transgendered people met overt
hostility from the feminist movement is notably exemplified by Janice Raymond’s Transsexual
Empire (1979). The hostility generated by Raymond’s book and much of trans scholarship’s
distaste for both feminist and queer theorizing spans several generations. Attempts at
reconciliation have been ongoing but with varying degrees of success (e.g. Butler 1990, 1993,
1997; Nataf 1996). As queer geographers take up the challenge of understanding queer spaces as
‘contested sites in which racializations, genderings, and classed processes take place’, trans
scholarship offers potential insights into how some of these processes are lived and experienced
(Oswin 2008, 100).
According to Stryker and Whittle (2006), trans scholarship encompasses a broad array of
subject positions, behaviours and practices that far exceed a narrow focus on either same-sex
desire or gender inversion. Stryker and Whittle claim trans scholarship has as its purview:
[T]ranssexuality and cross-dressing, some aspects of intersexuality and
homosexuality, cross cultural and historical investigations of human gender diversity,
specific subcultural expressions of ‘gender atypicality’, theories of sexed embodiment
and subjective gender identity development, law and public policy related to the
regulation of gender expression and many other similar issues (ibid. 3).
Trans theorists have been highly critical of many of queer theory’s foundational texts, including
the work of Judith Butler (1990, 1993, 1997), Marjorie Garber (1992) and Eve Sedgwick (1990).
The main critique is the way these authors take up the transgendered subject as the ‘the key
queer trope by which theorists has challenged sex, gender, and sexuality binaries’ particularly
through Butlarian notions of performativity (Prosser 1998, 6). Such critique mirrors work by

10
feminist scholars such as Biddy Martin (1982) who argue that we can never really regard bodies
and psyches as merely discursive effects within power relations and that invested with the
‘historicity of lived experience’, they ‘exert pressure’ on the normalizing tendencies through
which they are constituted (Elliot and Roen 1998, 234). While queer notions of performativity
has been a productive conceptual move, trans scholars argue that notions of performativity,
deconstruction and signification have rendered the transgendered subject an imaginary, fictional
and merely metaphorical presence in the service of a larger intellectual project. In a particular
trenchant example of a grassroots acrimony to the way ‘performativity’ has been deployed in
certain queer spaces, Kyle Scanlon, Trans Services Coordinator for Toronto’s 519 Church Street
Community Centre no longer gives interviews to feminist researchers who traffic in the trope of
queer performativity. Ray argues, ‘being trans is not a fashion statement. Trans-ness is not a
fucking playground for the trendy, elite and hip members of academia’ (Scanlon 2006, 88).
Being ‘transgendered’ as it has been utilized in some queer theorizing seemingly means
being an ethereal and disembodied subject apparently capable of ‘shape-shifting’ at will in ways
that deny, for some trans folk, the subjective experience of gender, sexuality and embodiment as
stable and unchanging. Such theorizing also opens a rift between transsexual and transgendered
subjects through a reification of transgendered individuals’ supposed fluidity as transgressive
and resistive which positions transsexual subjects as apparent prisoners of medicalized gendered
systems (Prosser 1998; Rubin 2003). Poststructuralist deconstructions of gender and sexuality as
fluid, contingent and open to multiple variations also dissolves important political and social
categories that matter including, for example, ‘the differences between men and women, the
difference between those who occasionally play with the trope of transsexuality and those for
whom it is a matter of life and death’ (Feliski 1996, 347; see also MacDonald 1998). While

11
perhaps overstating the matter somewhat, Namaste asserts that queer theory, at its worst, is a
kind of academic enquiry that is ‘contemptuous and dismissive of the social world’ and ‘exhibits
a remarkable insensitivity to the substantive issues of transpeople’s everyday lives’ (2000, 16).
Trans scholarship also troubles queer research that takes as its starting point the
hetero/homosexual binary, that is, taking up an exclusive focus on sexual object choice. Sue
Stryker (2006, 7) points out that queer theory loses coherence ‘to the precise extent that the sex
of the object is called into question, particularly in relation to the object’s gender’. Put another
way, Stryker is arguing that queer studies, with its focus on same-sex object choice, is ill-
equipped to deal with conceptualizing alternative differences from heterosexist cultural norms.
Transgendered individuals, in this argument, constitute another axis of difference that cannot be
subsumed to an object choice model of ‘anti-heteronormativy’ and their presence suggests as yet
unexplored modes of queer difference in place (ibid. 2006, 8).
Current queer geographical work tends to see the hetero/homo binary as the primary
defining spatial moment and focuses on non-heterosexual spaces as the main object of study (but
see Hubbard 2000). Arguably, this reinforces an artificial and readily collapsible boundary;
effacing the multiple incursions that occur across and between normatively understood
heterosexual and homosexual spaces (Bell et al. 1997). As Jasbir Puar (2002, 935-6) notes, in
most queer research:
the assumed inherent quality of space is that it is always heterosexual, waiting to be
queered or waiting to be disrupted through queering, positing a single axis of identity
which then reifies a heterosexual/homosexual split that effaces other kinds of identity
— race, ethnicity, nationalism, class, and gender.

12
Queer research on sexual minorities is largely focused on the experiences of gays and lesbians in
traditional gay and/or lesbian urban spaces and homogenizes the vastly distinctive experiences of
bisexuals, transfolk and queers in both hetero and homosexual urban spaces (e.g. Hemmings
2002; Oswin 2008). Research on the specificity and disciplinary properties of some queer spaces
and their homogenizing tendencies (Nash and Bain 2007) as well as work on trans experience
(Halberstam 1998, 2005; Noble 2006) demonstrates the need to pull apart the term ‘LGBTQ’
and/or ‘queer space’ in order to get at the relational and subjective experiences and constitution
of space.
While queer geographers are concerned with the ‘queering’ of spaces through alternative
non-normative practices and behaviours, some trans scholars argue that ‘queer’ as it is currently
explicated may not be the best conceptual lens through which to understand trans spatial
processes and experiences. Work by Bobby Noble on the entwined emergence of FtM and Drag
King culture in Toronto’s lesbian community in the 1970s, argues that spaces typically
understood as ‘lesbian’ now reflect a ‘post queer’ (rather than ‘queer’) sensibility although queer
conceptualizations may still circulate. Noble (2006) argues that Drag King performances of
gender transitivity arguably deploy complex performances of masculinity that move beyond the
anti-misogynist, butch-femme and female masculinities of queer conceptualizations towards an
illegible postqueer incoherance. Audiences for these performances are themselves increasing
queered through the complicated meanings circulating in traditionally lesbian space through their
being read ‘against the grain of hegemonic gender and desire’ (ibid. 2006, 61). Although drag
kinging may have originated within a lesbian aesthetic and place, what is in play now, according
to Noble, ‘is not “lesbian identity” as ontology but the beginnings of a very clear and eventually
post queer desire’. For Noble, this is not a ‘queering’ of space in terms of rejecting or

13
overcoming the heterosexual/homosexual binary, but a transformation where spaces and subjects
cannot be rendered familiar through ontological gender (male/female); sexuality (hetero/homo)
or biological (male/female) bodies. While one can debate whether the Noble’s term ‘postqueer’
captures shifting formulations of desires, eroticism and practices more fully than notions of
‘queer’, his argument illustrates the conceptual complications of an increasingly gender variant
presence in LGBTQ spaces.
Embodying experience/experiencing the body
A second major theme in trans scholarship addresses the importance of the narration of lived
experience in understanding transsexual subjectivities, in particular, as they emerge outside of
authoritative medical and legal discourses on gender, sexuality and embodiment (Posser 1998,
Rubin 2003, Stryker and Whittle 2006). For some scholars, understanding ‘transsexuals’ as a
product of medical intervention casts transsexuals as ‘medicine’s passive affect, a kind of
unwitting technological product’ and as lacking any agency or self determination (Prosser 1998,
7). Transsexual historical narratives claiming the veracity of subjective experiences, supports the
contention that transsexuality ‘constitutes an active subjectivity that cannot be reduced to either
technological [medical] or discursive fact’ (Prosser 1998, 7; see also O’ Hartigan 1997; Wilchins
1997; Roen 2001a and b). The importance of experience and agency in understanding
subjectivity and embodied experiences raises challenges for some feminist and queer
geographers conducting research within poststructuralist approaches who tend to deny the
possible efficacy of cognitive human resistance and intervention. Dominant theorizing
associated with various strands of second wave feminism tended to valourize or reify
‘experience’ as a way of giving voice to or recovering the knowledges of marginal or subjugated

14
groups, particularly women (Rose 1993; McDowell and Sharpe 1997; Moss and Al-Hindi 2008).
By valourizing and recording women’s experiences, second wave feminist scholars sought to
dislodge what was regarded as hegemonic masculinist ways of knowing. A substantial body of
research recorded the first-hand experiences of a broad range of marginalized women and was
designed, in part, to demonstrate women’s common experience of oppression in Western
patriarchal society (Canning 1994; Hall 1991; Scott 1988a, 1988b, 1993).
Feminists employing postmodern and poststructuralist approaches have critiqued the use
of ‘experience’ as the foundation of certain knowledges in ways that challenge trans narratives of
the ‘experience’ of gendered embodiment (Scott 1993; Cannings 1994; Dias and Blecha 2007).
Within poststructuralist approaches (including various versions of queer theorizing), subjects and
identities are understood as discursively constructed within multiple, intersecting systems of
meaning embedded in language and including ‘the physical arrangement of things, architectural
plans, clothing and any other entities’ (Scott 1993, 36). Discursively constituted social categories
such as male/female, heterosexual/homosexual, or black/white organize our understanding of
ourselves within social relations. Understood this way, the record of our subjective experience is
‘merely’ a record of the particular discursive constitution of the self we have selected,
demarcating a limited form of agency (Scott 1993; Canning 1994; Valverde 1990).
Poststructuralist projects have largely (although not completely) rejected ‘experience’ as
representing an ‘authentic, reliable or transparent mirror to reality’ and portraying subjective
knowledges as partial, situated and constructed (Dias and Blecha 2007, 7-8). In more recent
scholarship, feminists and others have taken up the challenge of thinking through the
interconnections of emotion, experience and place (e.g. Davidson et al 2005; Smith 2009). This
marks a potential crucial point of connection between trans scholarship strongly influenced by

15
experiential and subjective accounts of the self and work by geographers on embodiment,
emotion and queer formulations of self-understandings.
For queer theorists, language and discourse are central to the constitutive understandings
of subjective experiences of embodiment. In most versions, queer theorists draw heavily on
Judith Butler and her rejection of notion of the body as assuming ‘materiality prior to
signification and form’ (1990, 130). Butler suggests that our ‘conceptions of our bodies come to
us through language: the belief in the pre-culturally material body as the ground for identity itself
depends on the circulation of meanings in culture’ (Turner 2000, 114). Bodies become sexed
through continual gendered performances that render the body intelligible in social relations. We
experience our bodies through the systems of meaning available through language and discourse
and not through some a priori state.
Some trans researchers take exception to feminist and queer studies which, with its
distrust of ‘experience’, have managed to detach subjects (gays, lesbians, queers and transfolk)
from the ‘knowablity’ of their everyday lived experiences. As Rubin (2003, 13) asserts, any
conceptualization of internalized essentialist subjectivity has been strongly critiqued as a ‘fiction
of our combined cultural imaginations’. Yet, many trans researchers advocate a return to a
consideration of experience and the production of knowledges at the level of the individual
(Prosser 1998; Nameste 2000; Rubin 2003; Stryker 2006). This is driven in part by a desire to
wrestle the narrative of transsexual subjectivity and identity away from the medical profession
and to place agency, resistance, and self-constitution back in the hands of those experiencing and
living trans lives. Namaste (2000), argues that queer theory begins with transfolk as a starting
point, and dismisses individual agency by limiting its focus to how subjects are constituted in
and through social institutions and discourse. Namaste cites the work of sociologist Dorothy

16
Smith (1987) who proposes ‘that we develop ways of knowing and ways of doing research that
begin from the perspective of the lived experience of the people under investigation’ (cited in
Nameste 2000, 47).
Trans scholars often reject queer discursive approaches that seemingly mask the ‘real’ of
the biological. The apparent usurping of bodily sensations and desires to manifestations of
linguistic effects denies some trans experiences of the body as present and pre-figurative to an
understanding of the self. Some trans scholarship calls for a radical recorporealization of the
understanding of the everyday lived experiences, or a return to what some call ‘an unvarnished
materiality of bodies’ (Prosser 1998, 9). For example, Henry Rubin (2003, 11) argues that
‘bodies are a crucial element in personal identity formation and perception’ and that bodies,
including secondary sex characteristics are integral and central to the recognition of a core
gendered self. So while Butler (2001, 622) argues that the performative gesture of a legible
gender is a ‘presupposition of humanness’ and ‘governs the recognizability of the human’, others
argue that performance-based theories of gender cannot account for the ways in which transfolk
conceive of gender as ‘an internal, persistent identity that is not in accordance with the biological
body’ (Cromwell 1999, 48).
For many transfolk, embodiment in a physical body legible to others as either ‘male’ or
‘female’ in no way negates a subjective sense of being ‘other gendered’ in ways not in sync with
their biological selves. For some individuals, in order for there to be coherence within socially
legible configuration, some form of physical alterations may be desired in order to live
unambiguously (Stryker, 2006). For others, ‘trans’ marks emergent categories of new
configurations of genders and bodies that do not require any stability or fixity in order for there

17
to be subjective compatibility, particularly around heterogendered constructs. Noble (2006, 3)
argues, for example, that the prefix trans itself:
captures what we imagine our various levels of sex and gender crossing, in various
levels of permanence to these transitions, seeming to signify everything from the
medical technologies that transform sex bodies to cross-dressing, to passing, to a
certain kind of ‘life plot,’ to being legible as one’s birth sex but with a ‘contradictory’
gender inflection.
While Noble’s comments have resonance with aspects of queer theoretical positions, this work
nevertheless gives new perspectives on notions of subjective embodiment beyond queer
theoretical notions denying or at the very least calling into question the possibilities of pre-
discursive subjectivities. Work by trans scholars contains a diverse array of theoretical and
conceptual approaches to notions of embodiment and experience that might extend geographical
scholarship concerned with gendered, sexuality and embodiment and in relation to other markers
of the self including race, class and age.
Transfolk*and*LGBTQ*spaces*
The preceding discussion about subjectivity and embodiment signal the need to attend to the
specificity of trans experiences in myriad spaces including LGBTQ spaces. In this section, I link
some of these theoretical considerations with material from interviews with trans individuals to
highlight how trans experiences in LGBTQ spaces open up new avenues for research. The
individuals cited here give breadth and materiality to the historically specific possibilities and
incoherencies of lives lived in gay, lesbian and LGBTQ spaces that emerged in North America in
the post-World War II period. Twelve individuals from the Greater Toronto area, ranging in age

18
from 20 and to mid-60s, participated in in-depth, semi-structured interviews exploring differing
experiences in ‘LGBTQ’ and ‘queer’ spaces in Toronto over the last decade. Several participants
identified as unambiguously male and heterosexual while others employed a range of terms that
crossed normative categories, including ‘heteroflexible’, ‘intersex’, ‘queer’, ‘transsexual’ and
genderqueer’. Collectively, participants largely identified as white and middle class although
several understood themselves as currently living a working class life based on income and
employment. Most have some post-secondary education. Participants’ shifting self-
understandings and changing or transformative embodiments raise complex methodological
questions. Being legible as the self one understands oneself to be, can be influenced by the
expectations and practices of the inhabitants of the places one is in (Butler 2004; Nash,
forthcoming). For trans folk in particular, shifting self presentation, the potential contradictions
for the experiencing self in place and the possibility of being illegible to others suggests the need
for research that can grapple with more flexible and unstable realities and slippery and unstable
knowledges (Butler 2004; Stryker 2006). Further, and as I have discussed elsewhere, researcher
positionality, experience and the shifting nature of the ‘field’ in queer geographical work
complicates the constitution of geographical knowledge across and between differently
embodied folks (Nash, 2010). For feminist geographers focused on both gender and sexuality,
the body and embodied experience is seen to ‘anchor feminist geography at the dawn of the
twenty-first century’ (Nelson and Seagar 2005, 1). Both queer and feminist geographers also
acknowledge difficulties with Butler’s notions of performativity, noting that a focus on
discursive formulations constitutes a ‘performative subject abstracted from the personal, lived
history as well as from its historical and geographical embeddedness’ (Nelson 1999, 332).
Bodies and spaces thus simultaneously (re)create one another and while bodies are

19
understandably ‘biological’, the meanings attached to bodies ‘are always historically and
spatially located’ (Longhurst 2005, 388; Longhurst and Johnson 2005; Nast and Pile 1998).
Trans scholarship demonstrates that in North America at least, many trans lives are
experienced at some time or another in and through gay, lesbian and queer spaces in ways that
reconstitute subjectivities, embodiments and spaces themselves. Some of this work contests the
exclusions and oppressions at work in these spaces that make it difficult to make visible the
historic specificity of trans lives. Henry Rubin, in his examination of ‘butch-femme’ culture in
lesbian spaces in the 1950s and 1960s, argues that the so-called butches of that era might better
be understood as trans men although such possibilities have been eradicated in the histories of
gay and lesbian spaces that dominate scholarship including geographies of sexualities and queer
geographies. Also contentious are the histories written about so-called ‘passing’ and cross-
dressing women (e.g. Brandon Teena) that claim these individuals as lesbians and for a ‘lesbian’
history. Some trans scholars argue, these individuals might just as ‘easily be recuperated as
transgendered men’ (Boyd 1997, 422; See also Noble 2004). Such re-visionings of gay and
lesbian political and spatial histories challenges queer geographers to reconsider some of their
own historical narratives about the emergence of ‘gay and lesbian’ spaces in terms of ‘who’ was
present, how the understood themselves (as gendered, sexualized, racialized and embodied) and
who has arguably been erased by these accounts. This raises important questions about the power
relations inherent in the production of knowledges about spaces and about how our theoretical or
conceptual frameworks (and our political and activist leanings) are implicated in how we, as
scholars, tell particular tales that might fail to ‘see’ the others in the spaces we study.
The overlapping histories of butch/femme social organization in Toronto’s working class
bars of the 1960s and the more contemporary debates over trans presence in women’s spaces

20
such as Toronto’s women’s bathhouses events illustrates the alternatively contested and accepted
gendered (and embodied) permutations in lesbian spaces. For trans men, whose pre-transition
social and cultural lives revolve around lesbian communities, the process of transition often
comes with dissonant experiences in lesbian spaces prior to, during, and after transition (Hines
2007; Nash 2007). For some trans men, ‘butch’ lesbian or dyke identities are the first or
preliminary identifications through which they struggle to reconcile embodiment with social
categories of gender and sexuality despite their sense that ‘lesbian’ does not accurately describe
their sense of self. In such cases, lesbian spaces such as bars, restaurants, sports teams, and
university women’s centres become primary social spaces.
For example, George who self identifies as ‘a heteroflexible’ man notes that:
I came out as gay. I didn’t know why I had an issue with the word lesbian but I did.
Like that was definitely one of those like gut feeling that word doesn’t work for you. ...
I assumed that my attraction for women which is what I recognized explained my
gender … But the whole time … like I said, the word lesbian was just like no, I’m not a
lesbian. I somehow felt better with the word dyke, I’m not sure why (11 October 2006).
For trans men who initially took on a lesbian identification and socialized within the lesbian
community, transitioning can mean discovering that one is no longer welcome in lesbian social
and political spaces. For those trans men who increasingly embodied or legible as masculine and
male, participating in lesbian spaces can grow awkward when others object to the presence of
individuals sporting so-called male ‘attributes’ (e.g. facial hair). This disapproval sometimes
forces trans men to leave the lesbian community and to establish new social networks beyond or
outside that community. As Kyle, a transsexual man notes:

21
I actually kind of felt like the lesbian community abandoned me. There I was all alone
wanting support, wanting friends and suddenly people stopped calling. I had one
friend who stuck around … But because she was still part of this bigger group, I
wasn’t welcome at the group anymore … So I began staking out my claim in the FtM
community, so to speak. It sounds awfully territorial, doesn’t it? I don’t mean it quite
like that. I guess I mean more of like trying to find a place in the FtM community
(03August 2006).
For other trans men, transitioning meant a rejection of lesbian spaces as no longer relevant to
their lives and a seeking out spaces that supported shifting self-identifications. For some trans
men this meant frequenting exclusively heterosexual spaces, exclusively straight male spaces
and/or gay male space. This decision was sometimes grounded in the experience of being
members of lesbian communities and developing sensitivity or commitment feminist precepts.
Denis noted that through his experiences as a member of the lesbian/feminist community, he was
prepared to recognize the importance of lesbian-only spaces.
I’d rather see it be the guys excluding themselves, just saying ‘okay, that’s women’s
only space, I’m not a woman, I’ll respect that’. It seems like a lack of respect to fight
your way into women’s space (Denis 03, March 2007).
Queer geographers and trans scholarship share a growing concern with understanding how race
and class, as well as other markers of social positioning are implicated in understanding gender
and sexuality and embodiment (Oswin 2008; Valentine 2007). In considering trans subjectivities
and embodiment, Emi Koyama (2006) argues that lesbian feminists’ and trans activists’
contestations over the presence of transsexual women at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival

22
is easily read as both racist and classist although such perceptions are rendered invisible and
unspoken. In attempting to resolve matters, the festival’s organizers and trans activists have an
de facto ‘no-penis’ policy that permits some trans individuals access to the festival grounds
although the controversy (and its practical ramifications) has by no means been resolved. This
policy clearly ignores the fact that minority transwoman are far more likely to lack the financial
resources to obtain the necessary surgeries. Richard Juang, in a more nuanced argument, draws
on Kimberlè Crenshaw’s (2006, 705–706) conceptualization of intersectionality to argue for a
transgender politics that would acknowledge how ‘constellations of forces’ constitute forms of
racialized, classed, and gendered discrimination that results in unique kinds of physical and
representational violence. This offers the possibility of teasing out how, for example, ‘sexualized
racial stereotyping combines with racialized gender stereotypes’ in ways that prompt distinctive
and unique forms of oppression (2006, 709; see also Valentine 2007). This work echoes calls by
Gill Valentine (2007, 10) for geographers to consider the concept of intersectionality to ‘theorize
the relationship between different categories: gender, race, sexuality and so forth’.
Because of the social and political history of LGBTQ activism in Canada, trans political
aspirations have largely been yoked to gay and lesbian community-based organizations. In places
such as Toronto, with a well-established gay village and a well funded community centre, trans
out-reach and support groups operate through gay and lesbian spaces and organizations. Major
government funding for trans services is funneled through these organizations, embedding trans
issues (and lives) within gay and lesbian social and political organizations. This has not been an
easy road to follow and there is a sense that trans interests may not best-served under the
umbrella of LGBTQ organizations despite the obvious commitment of those organizations. Trans

23
interests do not always mesh with gay and lesbian political aims such as ‘gay marriage’ and
‘same-sex’ health benefits. As Nick points out:
… trans issues and people do not resonate with the majority of gay and lesbian people
… On the trans side, most trans people have a problematic relationship with the ‘gay
and lesbian communities’ as well. So it’s not a happy marriage if you will. But it’s sort
of some type of family, like there’s a relation. But it’s not easy or simple (10 October
2007).
Trans presence in LGBTQ spaces is a complicated experience and can only be understood
through paying particular attention to the specificity of historical, locational and spatial contexts.
Terms such as butch-femme, transvestite, cross dressers, gay men, lesbians, FtM, MtF,
transsexual and queer are subject positions made available and operative in particular ways and
disappear, re-emerge and transform both those so identifying and the spaces they frequent. The
various strands of trans scholarship briefly touched on here offer intriguing challenges to queer
geographers to position their ‘queer perspective’ as the site of difference in order to articulate the
historical and material specificity of gendered and sexual practices.
Final thoughts
Some three decades of scholarship on sexual and queer geographies has produced a theoretically
diverse body of work examining gender and sexuality. More recently conceptualized queer
geographical scholarship, drawing on feminist research and postmodern and poststructuralist
ideas, has expanded our formulations of how identities and subjectivities are spatially constituted
and specifically embodied in historically and culturally particular ways. However, critiques of
queer geographical research suggest that geographers have perhaps stepped far away from what

24
Knopp calls the ‘messy realities, including fluidity, hybridity, incompleteness, moralities, desire
and embodiment’ and that ‘a queer perspective ought to be informed as much by embodied
experience as by theory’ (Dias and Blecha 2007, 7). What I suggest here is that certain strands of
trans scholarship intersect with and trouble certain aspects of queer geographical scholarship in
productive ways. We need to pull apart what we mean by ‘LGBTQ’ spaces and identities in
order to get at the more particular, historical and transformative operations of subjectivities,
identities, and forms of embodiment in play in these spaces. Trans scholarship potentially
challenges the histories and geographies we have written about what we initially called ‘gay and
lesbians’ spaces. Trans scholarship also suggests intriguing possibilities for understanding how
some conceptualization of the ‘queering’ of space finds itself trapped by its dependency on
sexual object choice (as opposed to notions of desire eroticism) and how, at this historical
juncture, alternative subjectivities grounded in differently gendered and embodied ways of being,
challenge this notion of space as ‘queer’. Scholarship suggest that it is these differently gendered
and embodied ways of being not only contribute to the ‘queering’ of space but have taken those
spaces to a ‘postqueer’ incoherence. We need to press forward with work considering the
intersectionality of subject positions that are compilations of gendered, sexed, racialized and
classed experiences and the spatial implications derived from this.
These transformations in identities and spaces need to be considered within the political,
economic and social processes in what we call traditional gay and lesbian villages (and beyond
of course) — places that support the currently successful conservative and assimilationist ‘gay
and lesbian’ politics in places such as Canada. While these political ‘gains’ protect gay and
lesbian subjects through human rights legislation and inclusion in mainstream institutions such as
marriage, such a politic has difficulty supporting those who are not legible as the subjects these

25
initiatives are designed to protect. Trans political interests are often starkly at odds with
mainstream gay and lesbian political agendas and have, in recent years, been used by anti-gay
right wing groups to further oppositional political goals. While a ‘queer’ politic has been about
building alliances across difference, the multiplicity of subject positions begs the question of
whether it can bear the weight of its own contradictions. For geographers interested in grappling
with these issues, trans scholarship has much to offer.
Acknowledgements
This article is based on a paper given at the American Association of Geographers Annual General
Meeting, in San Francisco, April, 2007 and is funded in part through a grant from the Faculty of Social
Sciences Dean’s Fund for Research, Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, Canada. Many thanks to Kath
Browne and Sally Hines for their thoughtful and engaging comments and to the two anonymous reviews
and Robyn Longhurst for their careful assessment and suggestions.
Notes on Contributors
Catherine J. Nash is an Associate professor in the Department of Geography at Brock University, St.
Catharines, ON Canada. Nash has published article in a number of journals including Social and Cultural
Geography, Antipode, Canadian Geographer, Documents d'Anàisi Geogràfica and elsewhere and has
contributed a number of book chapters to Various projects. Her research interests include urban and
regional geography, urban development, feminist, trans and queer geographies, urban social movements
with an emphasis on gender, sexuality and social relations.

26
References
Adler, Sy, and Joanna Brenner. 1992. Gender and space: Lesbians and gay men in the city.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 16, no. 1: 24–34.
Matin, Biddy. 1994. Sexualities without genders and other queer utopias. Diacritics 24, no. 2–3.
Bell, David, Jon Binnie, Julie Cream, and Gill Valentine. 1994. All hyped up and no place to go.
Gender, Place and Culture 1: 31–47.
Besio, Kathryn, and Pamela Moss, ed. 2006. Sexed, unsexy and gendered spaces of inversions
and reversals. Acme: An International E-Journal for Critical geographies 5, no. 2: 112–
120.
Binnie, Jon. 1995. Trading places: Consumptions, sexuality and the production of queer space. In
mapping desire: Geographies of sexualities, ed. D. Bell and G. Valentine, 182–199.
London: Routledge.
Bornstein, Katie. 1994. Gender outlaw: On men, women, and the rest of us. New York: Vintage
Books.
Boyd, Nan A. 1997. Bodies in motion: lesbian and transsexual histories. In The transgender
studies reader, ed. Sue Stryker and Stephen Whittle, 420–433. London: Routledge.
Browne, Kath. 2004. Genderism and the bathroom problem: (Re)materialising, sexed sites,
(re)creating sexed bodies. Gender, Place and Culture 11, no. 3: 331–346.
_____. 2006a. Challenging queer geographies. Antipode 38, no. 5: 885–893.

27
_____. 2006b. ‘A right geezer-bird (man-woman)’: The sites and sights of ‘female’ embodiment.
ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 5, no. 2: 121–143.
_____. (2009). Womyn’s separatist spaces: Beyond paranoid ways of knowing. Transactions of
the Institute of British Geographers 34, no. 4: 541-556.
Browne, Kath, Jason Lim, and Gavin Brown. 2007. Geographies of sexualities: Theory,
practices and politics. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. London:
Routledge.
_____. 1993. Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of sex. New York: Routledge.
_____. 1997. Against proper objects. In Feminism meets queer theory, ed. E. Weed and N.
Schur, 1–30. Bloomington, IL: Indiana University Press.
_____. 2001. Doing justice to someone: Sex reassignment and allegories of transsexuality. GLQ:
A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 7, no. 4: 621-636.
Califia, Patrick. 1997. Sex changes: The politics of transgenderism. San Francisco: Cleis Press.
Castells, Manuel. 1983. The city and the grass roots: A cross cultural theory of urban social
movements. London: Edward Arnold.
Cameron, L. 1996. Body alchemy: Transsexual portraits. Pittsburgh: Cleis Press.
Cannings Katharine. 1994. Feminist history after the linguistic turn: Historicizing discourse and
experience. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 19, no. 2: 368–404.

28
Shale, E. 1999. Right on sister, Inside Out: An Australian Collection of Coming Out. Melbourne:
Bookman.
Crenshaw, Kate. 1993. Beyond racism and misogyny: Black feminism and 2 Live Crew. In
Words that wound: Critical race theory, assaultive speech and the first amendment, ed. J.
Matsuda and C. Lawrence III, 59–72. Boulder: Westview.
Cromwell. Jason. 1999. Transmen and FTMs: Identities, bodies, genders and sexualities.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Currah, Paisley, Richard M Juang, and Shannon Price Minter, ed. 2006. Transgender rights.
Minneapolis: Minnesota Press.
Davidson, Joyce, Liz Bondi, and Mick Smith, ed. 2005. Emotional Geographies. Burlington,
VT. Ashgate.
Devor, Aaron, and Nicholas Matte. 2004. One Inc and Reed Jackson: The uneasy collaboration
of gay and trans activism, 1964–2003. Gay and Lesbian Quarterly 10, no. 2: 179–209.
Dias, Karen, and Jennifer Blecha. 2007. Feminism and social theory in geography. Professional
Geographer 59, no. 1: 1-9
Doan, Petra. 2007. Queers in the America city: Transgendered perceptions of urban space.
Gender, Place and Culture 14, no. 1:57–74.
Elliot, Patricia, and Katrina Roen. 1998. Transgenderism and the question of embodiment:
Promising queer politics? Gay and Lesbian Quarterly 4, no. 2: 231–261.

29
Felski, Rita. 1996. Fin de siecle, fin de sexe: Transsexuality, postmodernism and the death of
history. New Literary History 27, no. 2.
Goldman, Ruth. 1996. Who is that queer queer? In Queer studies: A lesbian, gay, bisexual and
transgender anthology, ed. Brett Beemyn and Michele Eliason, 169-182. London: New
York University Press.
Gorman-Murray, Andrew. 2007. Reconfiguring domestic values: Meanings of home for gay men
and lesbians. Housing, Theory and Society 24, no. 3: 229-246.
Gorman-Murray, A, Gordon Waitt, and Chris Gibson. 2008a. A queer country? A case study of
the politics of gay/lesbian belonging in an Australian country town. Australian
Geographer 39: 171-91.
Gorman-Murray, Andrew, Gordon Waitt, and Louise Johnson. 2008b. Guest editorial-
Geographies of sexuality and gender ‘down under’. Australian Geographer 39, no. 3:
235-246.
Grosz, Elizabeth. 1994. Volatile bodies: Toward a corporeal feminism. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Halberstam, Judith. 1998. Female masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
_____. 2005. In a queer time and place. New York: New York University Press.
Hall, Catherine. 1991. Politics, poststructuralism and feminist history. Gender and History 3, no.
2: 204–10.

30
Hausman, Bernie. 1995. Changing sex: Transsexualism, technology and the idea of gender.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Hemmings, Clara. 2002. Bisexual spaces: A geography of sexuality and gender.London:
Routledge.
Hennen, Peter. 2004. Fae spirits and gender trouble. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 33,
no. 5: 548–567.
Hines, Sally. 2007. Transforming gender: Transgender practices of identity, intimacy and care.
Bristol: Polity Press.
Hodge, Dino. 1993. Did You Meet Any Malagas? A Homosexual History of Australia’s Tropical
Capital. Nightcliff, NT: Little Gem.
Hubbard, Phil. 2000. Desire/disgust: Mapping the moral contours of heterosexuality. Progress in
Human Geography 24, 191–217.
Hutchings, Jessica, and Clive Aspin. 2007. Sexuality and the Stories of Indigenous People.
Wellington: Huia Publishers.
Jeffreys, Shelia. 1997. Playing with fire: Queer politics, queer theories. London: Routledge.
Johnston, Lynda. 2005. Queering tourism: Paradoxical performances at gay pride parades.
London: Routledge.
Johnston, Lynda, and Robyn Longhurst. 2008. Queer(ing) geographies ‘down under’: Some
notes on sexuality and space in Australasia. Australian Geographer 39, no. 3: 247-257.

31
Kinsman, Gary. 1996. Regulation of desire: Sexuality in Canada, 2nd ed. Montreal: Black Rose
Books.
Knopp, Lawrence. 2007. On the relationship between queer and feminist geographies.
Professional Geographer 59, no. 1: 47–55.
Longhurst, Robyn. 2001. Bodies: Exploring fluid boundaries. London: Routledge.
_____. 2005. Fat bodies: Developing geographical research agendas. Progress in Human
Geography 29, no. 3: 247–259.
Longhurst, Robyn, and Lynda Johnson. 2005. Changing bodies, spaces, places and politics:
Feminist geography at the University of Waikato. New Zealand Geographer 61, no. 2:
94–108.
MacDonald, Eleanor. 1998. Critical identities: Rethinking feminism through transgender politics.
Atlantis 23, no. 1: 3–12.
Markwell, K. 2002. Mardi Gras tourism and the construction of Sydney as an international gay
and lesbian city’. Gay and Lesbian Quarterly 8: 88-99.
Martin, Biddy. 1982. Feminism, criticism and Foucault. New German Critique 27. Reprinted in
Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on resistance, ed. Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby,
3-20. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988.
McDowell, Linda, and Joanne Sharp. 1997. Why study feminist geography? In Space, gender,
knowledge: Feminist readings, ed. Linda McDowell and Jo Sharp, 19-23. New York:
John Wiley & Sons.

32
Moss, Pamela, and Karen Falconer Al-Hindi, ed. 2008. Feminisms in geography: Rethinking
space, place and knowledges. New York: Rowman and Littlefield.
Namaste, Vivian. K. 2000. Invisible lives: The erasure of transsexual and transgendered people.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Nash, Catherine. J. 2005. Gay politics and ethnic minorities: The struggle for gay identity in
Toronto in the late 1970s. Gender, Place and Culture 12, no. 1: 113-135.
_____. 2006. Toronto’s gay village (1969 to 1982): Plotting the politics of gay identity.
Canadian Geographer 50, no. 1: 1–16.
_____. (forthcoming) Queer conversations: Old-time lesbians, transmen and the politics of queer
research. In Queer methodologies, ed. Kath Browne and Catherine. J. Nash, xx-xx.
Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
_____. Forthcoming. Transecting the traditional gay ghetto: Trans experiences in lesbian and
queer space. Canadian Geographer.
Nash, Catherine. J, and Alison Bain. 2007. ‘Reclaiming raunch’: Spatializing queer identities at
Toronto women’s bathhouse events. Social and Cultural Geography 8, no. 1: 16–42
Nast, Heidi. J, and Stephen Pile, ed. 1998. Places through the body. London: Routledge.
Nataf, Zackery. 1996. Lesbians talk transgender. London: Scarlett Press
Nelson, Lisa. 1999. Bodies (and spaces) do matter: The limits of performativity. Gender, Place
and Culture 6, no. 4: 331–53.

33
Nestle, Joan, Riki Wilchins and C Howell, ed. 2002. Genderqueer: Voices from beyond the
sexual binary. Boston, MA: Alyson.
Noble, Bobby J. 2004. Masculinities without men: Female masculinity in twentieth century
fiction. Vancouver: UBC Press.
_____. 2006. Sons of the movement: FtMs risking incoherence on a postqueer cultural
landscape. Toronto: Women’s Press.
O'Hartigan, Margaret. 1997. Transsexuals need the gender identity disorder diagnosis.
Transgender Tapestry 79.
Oswin, Natalie. 2008. Critical geographies and the uses of sexuality. Progress in Human
Geography 32, no. 1: 89–103.
Podmore, Julie. 2001. Lesbians in the crowd: Gender, sexuality, and visibility along Montréal's
Boulevard St.-Laurent. Gender, Place and Culture 24: 191–217.
Prosser, Jay. 1998. Second skin: The body narrative of transsexuality. New York: Columbia
University.
Prichard, Anne, N Morgan, and D Sedgley. 2000. In search of lesbian space? The experience of
Manchester’s gay village. Leisure Studies 21: 105–123.
Puar, Jaspir. 2002 . A transnational feminist critique of queer tourism. Antipode 34, no. 5: 935–
46.
Riggs, Damien. 2006. Priscilla, (white) queen of the desert: Queer rights/race privilege. New
York: Peter Lang.

34
Roen, Katrina. 2001a. Either/or and both/neither: discursive tensions in transgender politics.
Signs 27, no. 2: 201–522.
_____. 2001b. Transgender theory and embodiment: the risk of racial marginalization. Journal of
Gender Studies 10, no. 3: 253–63.
Rothenburg, Tamar. 1995. ‘And she told two friends’: Lesbians creating urban social space. In
Mapping desire: Geographies of sexuality, ed. David Bell and Gill Valentine, 165-181.
London: Routledge.
Rubin, Henry. 2003. Self-made men: Identity and embodiment among transsexual men.
Nashville, Tennessee: Vanderbilt University Press.
Raymond, Janice. 1974. [1994]. The transsexual empire: The making of the she-male. New
York: Teachers College.
Scanlon, Kyle. 2006. Where’s the beef? Masculinity as performed by feminists. In
Trans/forming feminisms: Trans-feminist voices speak out, ed. Karen Scott-Dixon, 87–
94. Toronto: Sumach Press.
Seidman, Steven, ed. 1996. Queer theory/sociology. Oxford: Blackwell.
Scott, Joan. 1988. Deconstructing equality-versus-difference or, the uses of poststructuralist
theory for feminism. Feminist Studies 14: 33–50.
_____. 1988b. Gender and the politics of history. New York: Columbia University Press.
_____. 1993. The evidence of experience. In The lesbian and gay studies reader, ed. Henry
Abelove, Michèle. A. Barale, and David. M. Halperin, 397–415. New York: Routledge.

35
Scott-Dixon, Karen, ed. 2006. Trans/forming feminisms: Transfeminist voices speak out.
LaCrosse, WI: Sumach Press.
Sedgwick, Eve. 1990. Epistemology of the closet. Berkley, CA: University of California Press.
Smith, Dorothy. 1987. The everyday world as problematic. Toronto: University of Toronto
Press.
Smith, Mick. 2009. Emotion, place and culture. Burlington: Ashgate.
Stone, Sandy. 1991. The empire strikes back: A post-transsexual manifesto. In The transgender
studies reader, ed. Sue Stryker and Stephen Whittle, 221-235. London: Routledge.
Stryker, Sue. 2006. (De)subjugated knowledges: An introduction to transgendered studies. In
The transgender studies reader, ed. Sue Stryker and Stephen Whittle, 1–18. London:
Routledge.
Stryker, Sue and Stephen Whittle, ed. 2006. The transgender studies reader. London: Routledge.
Syms, Matt. 2007. Trans men loving gay men loving trans men Xtra!
http://www.xtra.ca/public/viewstory.aspx (Accessed February 3, 2007).
Tattelman, Ian. 2000. Presenting a queer (bath)house. In Queer frontiers: Millenial geographies,
genders, and generations, ed. Joseph .A. Boone et al., 222-257. Wisconsin: University of
Wisconsin Press.
Taylor, Alice. 1998. Lesbian space: More than one imagined territory. In Exploring Bodies,
Space, and Gender, ed. Rosa. Ainley, 129-141. London: Routledge.

36
Turner, William. 2000. Genealogy of queer theory. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Valentine, Gill. 1993. (Hetero)sexing space: Lesbians perceptions and experiences of everyday
places. Environment and Planning D: Space and Society 11: 395–413.
_____. 2007. Theorizing and researching intersectionality: A challenge for feminist geography.
Professional Geographer 59, no. 1: 10–21.
Waitt, Gordon and Kevin Markwell. 2006. Gay tourism: Culture and context. Binghamton:
Haworth.
Warner, Tom. 2002. Never going back: A history of queer activism in Canada. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press.
Whittle, Stephen. 2000. The transgender debate: The crisis surrounding gender identities. South
Street: Reading.
Wilchins, Riki. A. 1997. Gender identity disorder diagnosis harms transsexuals. Transgender
Tapestry: The International Journal of Transgenderism 79.

37
1 I use the term ‘transfolk’ as an umbrella term for an admittedly diverse and not necessarily commensurate series of
gender variant subject positions encompassed by myriad terms (e.g. transgendered, transsexual, FtM, MtF, gender
variant, bois, cross-dressers, drag kings, drag queens trykes; trannyfag, boychik). In this paper, I adhere to the
terminologies used by the participants who generously took the time to speak with me. I use the term ‘transsexual’
for those persons who so identify and who desire complete physical transformation from female to male or male to
female through medical and surgical intervention. I use the term FtM (trans men) or MtF (trans women) to refer to
those individuals who so identify and who may have various surgical and medical interventions and may live
primary as ‘men’ and ‘women’ while refusing the total disappearance of a ‘trans’ identity. I use the term
‘transgendered’ or ‘trans’ for those individuals who so identify or where the term makes sense given the nature of
the discussion.
2 ‘Trans’ scholarship is an umbrella term for a sweeping range of research and writing on, by and about transfolk.
This paper is not intended as a thoroughgoing review of that body of work and draws on a selective set of writings
that offer points of interesting engagements for feminist and queer geographers among others.
3 While bi-sexuality and heterosexuality have been the focus of geographical research on sexuality and space, it has
largely eclipsed in volume by work on gays and lesbians (but see, for example, Hemmings, 2002; Hubbard, 2000).