Queer Space

45.2, Fall/Winter 2007
Kelly Hurley, editor

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This special issue of ELN seeks to produce new understandings of space enabled by the articulation of queer embodiment, sexual practices, and counterpublics, building upon earlier queer work on space that, despite its value, has tended to elevate gay white male experience as universal. This issue attempts, instead, to focus on the particular and the local as it seeks to introduce questions of sexuality and space into conversations about gender, race, globalization and transnationalism. The term “queer space” refers to nonnormative locales that are physical, social, and constituted by and through social relations, as well as nonexclusionary and nonhomogeneous locations that are largely or exclusively theoretical constructs (such as virtual spaces). Several of the essays in this ELN issue engage with queer renderings of postmodern geography in order to demonstrate the utility of queer space as a means for assessing political and cultural change, doing so within a framework that privileges a literary, cinematic, or virtual lens.