A New Title: the Work of Queering
I’ve been wondering how to move this blog along; hence, I’m focusing this conversation and renaming this blog “Queering the Geographical Imagination” (from “The Geographical Imagination”). I aim to not only consider the geographical imagination to analyze the spatialities of everyday life–a theoretical concept and tool I find useful–but to queer that work as well.
Here’s how I defined “Queer Theory” in Encyclopedia of Social Problems (2008) to start this conservation. There are many definitions of queer theory and this is merely one to begin from:
“Queer” is often used as an umbrella term by and for persons who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, intersex, and/or transgender, or by and for individuals who use the term as an alternative to LGBTI labels. Some find the term derogatory depending upon their race, class, personal experience, and also their generation. Recently, heterosexuals whose gender or sexuality does not conform to popular expectations…
NYTimes Shrinks the Western World into the Geography of Paris
Today the NYTimes provided an incredible example of how they and others like them have the power to reorgazine space, time, and power through the geographical imagination. The newspaper labeled photographs of Michael Bloomberg’s two Victorian residences in New York City and London as the West Bank and East Bank in Diane Cardwell’s “Trans-Atlantic Living in the Bloomberg Style.” The labels given to the two photographs of these urban mansions equated the U.S. and Europe as the center of cosmopolitan upscale living with the Atlantic Ocean as our calm Seine River. The resultant effect reads like David Harvey’s notion of “time-space compression”–globalization and modern capitalist economies pull us closer and closer together, as if he entire “developed,” Western world was the city around which the “rest’ of the world gathered. As such, Cindi Katz’s “time-space expansion” comes out as well–when political and economic processes pull us…
