Introduction to special issue “Geographies of Sexualities”

In this foreword to the special issue “Geographies of Sexualities,” I provide a review of the scholarly discussions about place and sexuality that have occurred in the past 20 years. I highlight five major themes in my synthesis of this scholarship: (1) how narratives about geography and sexuality are co-constitutive; (2) a critical interrogation of these narratives to demonstrate how more nuances exist than these narratives suggest; (3) assessments of the spatial distribution of women in same-sex relationships, comparisons to the spatial distribution of men in same-sex relationships, and analyses of the experiences of women in areas with high concentrations of women in same-sex relationships and urban lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) neighborhoods; (4) comparisons across spaces to address the effect of place on outcomes such as well-being and how mobilities and movements across geographies matter; and (5) discussions as to whether, how, and why the geographies and spaces of lesbian, bisexual, and queer-identified women are shifting. My goal is to highlight these themes in order to contextualize how the articles in this special issue continue discussions and introduce new questions for the field.