Interrogating Rurality in Settler-Societies: Place, Identity and Culture

A review of David L. Brown and Kai A. Schaft, Rural People and Communities in the 21st Century: Resilience and Transformation (Polity, 2011) and Rob Garbutt, The Locals: Identity, Place and Belonging in Australia and Beyond (Peter Lang, 2011)

Introduction: doing rural cultural studies

The guest editors of the Rural Cultural Studies section introduce the articles

International students, intersectionality and sense of belonging : a note on the experience of gay Chinese students in Australia

This essay considers the experience of international students, contemplating their identity and agency in Australian society. Thinking through the potential experience of gay Chinese students, we argue that the community of international students is not homogenous. Working with and against the literature on studentification, we suggest more consideration should be given to the social and personal experience of students, not just their economic contribution to placemaking. The fluidity and dynamism of gay Chinese students’ identities reveals how geography plays an important role in shaping intersectionality. In this essay, we also question the generalised image of ‘Asian’ identity that is often used in academic approaches, and argue that geographers could make valuable contributions to the debate of intersectionality, by grounding the analysis in specific geographical contexts

Recovering the gay village : a comparative historical geography of urban change and planning in Toronto and Sydney

This chapter argues that the historical geographies of Toronto’s Church and Wellesley Street district and Sydney’s Oxford Street gay villages are important in understanding ongoing contemporary transformations in both locations. LGBT and queer communities as well as mainstream interests argue that these gay villages are in some form of “decline” for various social, political, and economic reasons. Given their similar histories and geographies, our analysis considers howthese historical geographies have both enabled and constrained how the respective gay villages respond to these challenges, opening up and closing down particular possibilities for alternative (and relational) geographies. While there are a number of ways to consider these historical geographies, we focus on three factors for analysis: post- World War II planning policies, the emergence of “city of neighborhoods” discourses, and the positioning of gay villages within neoliberal processes of commodification and consumerism. We conclude that these distinctive historical geographies offer a cogent set of understandings by providing suggestive explanations for how Toronto’s and Sydney’s gendered and sexual landscapes are being reorganized in distinctive ways, and offer some wider implications for urban planning and policy

Queer trans-Tasman mobility, then and now

This article situates queer mobility within wider historical geographies of trans-Tasman flows of goods, people and ideas. Using case studies of women’s and men’s experiences during the early twentieth century and the twenty-first century, it shows that same-sex desire is a constituent part of these flows. Conversely, antipodean mobility has fostered particular forms of desire, sexual identity, queer community and politics. Rural and urban landscapes in both New Zealand and Australia shape queer desire in a range of diverging and converging ways, and political and legal shifts in both countries have fostered changes in trans-Tasman travel over time. Our investigation of the circuits of queer mobility urges a wider examination of the significance of trans-Tasman crossings in queer lives, both historically and in contemporary society

Queering disasters: on the need to account for LGBTI experiences in natural disaster contexts

This article seeks a queering of research and policy in relation to natural disasters, their human impacts, management and response. The human impacts of natural disasters vary across different social groups. We contend that one group largely absent from scholarly and policy agendas is sexual and gender minorities, or lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender/transsexual and intersex (LGBTI) populations. To demonstrate that these minorities have particular experiences that need to be addressed, we critically review five case studies that comprise the limited scholarly and policy research on LGBTI populations in disasters to date. Building on this, we offer some specific ways forward for queer disaster research that accounts for the vulnerabilities, needs and resilient capacities of LGBTI populations. In doing so, we recognise and urge researchers, policy-makers and aid agencies to acknowledge that LGBTI populations are not homogeneous and have different needs wrought by intersections of socio-economic resources, gender, race/ethnicity, age and regional or national location.Australian Research Council-DP130102658,DP130100877 University of Western Sydne

'The greatest loss was a loss of our history': natural disasters, marginalised identities and sites of memory

This paper examines intersections between space, materiality, memory and identity in relation to lesbian and gay experiences of recent disasters in Australia. Drawing on interviews with lesbians and gay men in two disaster sites, the paper argues that disaster impacts may include the loss of sites of memory that inform and underpin the formation and maintenance of marginalised identities. We explore the ways in which social marginality is experienced by sexual minorities during disasters as a result of threats to sites of lesbian and gay memory. The paper contributes to scholarship in geographies of memory by investigating the impacts of disasters on how memory is spatially located and experienced.Australian Research Council-DP13010265