American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting (Web); Organised by Kath Browne, Joe Hall, Jason Lim and Nick Mcglynn

Venue: Boston
Time: April 5-9, 2017
Proposals by October 1, 2016

Liberal acceptance of diverse sexual practices and identities, particularly in the metropolitan Global North, has widely been framed in the discourse of ‚progress‘. Such progress is often measured in terms of shifting attitudes to sexual agency – especially women’s sexual agency – and increasing inclusivity and rights gains for LGBTQ people. This discourse has been critiqued, however, and many authors and activists argue that these trajectories of ‚progress‘ are spatially and temporally specific and question their applicability globally. Geographical imaginations of ‚progress‘ often rely on the construction of a homogeneous and antediluvian Global South – an imagination that erases both the ‚achievements‘ of activists therein and the continued injustice, violence and oppression in what are imagined as the heartlands of progress in the metropolitan Global North. Discourses of ‚progress‘ have also been challenged on the basis that they tend to normalize particular sexual identities and then to globalize them, for instance in the tying of development aid to recognition of LGBTQ identities.

Building on broader geographical engagements with questions of ‚progress‘, this session seeks to develop critical insights regarding the relations between progressive politics and the sexual(ities) that progress. We invite speakers to critically interrogate assumptions of progress, and the ideals and models that follow from understandings of certain places as ‚leading the way‘ in terms of sexual and gender inclusions.
Papers are invited that address any of the following points, but this list is not exhaustive:

• What counts as ‚progressive sexual politics‘? How is ‚moving forward‘ constituted and contested? What does ’not progressing‘ mean?
• How are sexualities used to define ‚progress‘ and ‚failure‘?
• How are sexualities mobilized in the production of progressive or failing polities(e.g. nation states, ‚progressive cities‘)?
• How are geographical constructs such as ’safe spaces‘ and ‚autonomous spaces‘ used in the creation of ’new‘ progressive politics?
• How are ‚progressive sexual politics‘ embodied?
• Technological spaces of sexual progress
• How do demands for sexual progress touch down in a variety of places, networks and across different spatial scales?
• How are ideals and ideas of sexual progress reconstituted through (im)migration, and social differences, including race, ethnicity, religion, class, disability, gender?

Please send titles and 250-word abstracts to Kath Browne k.a.browne@brighton.ac.uk, Jason Lim J.Lim@brighton.ac.uk , Joseph Hall J.J.Hall@brighton.ac.uk and Nicholas Mcglynn N.Mcglynn2@brighton.ac.uk by October 1, 2016.

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