Desire/disgust: mapping the moral contours of heterosexuality

Abstract

Recent studies of sexuality and space have done much to demonstrate that ‘everyday’ space is experienced as aggressively heterosexual by lesbians and gay males. In this review essay, I aim to extend this analysis by examining the (limited) body of work which has explored how heterosexuality has served to create (and justify) other forms of oppression and confinement in western cities. Specifically, this essay examines how heterosexuality has been theorized within and beyond geography, exploring the contention that the ‘performance’ of particular oedipal identities is central to the normalization of heterosexuality. This idea is scrutinized through an overview of the geographies of ‘moral’ and ‘immoral’ heterosexual identities which serves to demonstrate how heterosexuality is territorialized in the city, albeit in an often complex and contradictory manner. Invoking geographic theories of morality, identity and difference, the article concludes that a fuller and more nuanced understanding of heterosexuality needs to be developed in order to understand the role of space in shaping social relations of all kinds.