The Geographies Of Digital Sexuality

This edited book engages with the rapidly emerging field of the geographies of digital sexualities, that is, the interlinkages between sexual lives, material and virtual geographies and digital practices. Modern life is increasingly characterised by our integrated engagement in digital/material landscapes activities and our intimate life online can no longer be conceptualised as discrete from ‘real life.’ Our digital lives are experienced as a material embeddedness in the spaces of everyday life marking the complex integration of real and digital geographies. Perhaps nowhere is this clearer than in the ways that our social and sexual practices such as dating or casual sex are bound up online and online geographies and in many cases constitute specific sexuality-based communities crossing the digital/material divide. The aim of this collection is to explore the complexities of these newly constituted and interwoven sexual and gender landscapes through empirical, theoretical and conceptual engagements through wide-ranging, innovative and original research in a new and quickly moving field.

This accessible and engaging book explores the ways that "space, place, and sex" are inextricably linked from the micro to the macro level, from the individual body to the globe. Drawing on queer, feminist, gender, social, and cultural studies, Lynda Johnston and Robyn Longhurst highlight the complex nature of sex and sexuality and how they are connected to both virtual and physical spaces and places. Their aim is to enrich our understanding of sexual identities and practices--whether they be lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, asexual, queer, or heterosexual. They show that bodies are defined and connected through media such as television, movies, ads, and the Internet, as well as through "real" places such as homes, churches, sports arenas, city streets, beaches, and wilderness. Drawing on a diverse array of historical and contemporary examples, the authors argue convincingly that sexual politics permeate all places and spaces at every level of geographical scale. Thus, they illustrate, sexuality affects the way people live in and interact with space and place, as space and place in turn affect people's sexuality.

This book examines the changing digital geographies of the Anthropocene. It analyses how technologies are providing new opportunities for communication and connection, while simultaneously deepening existing problems associated with isolation, global inequity and environmental harm. By offering a reading of digital technologies as ‘more-than-real’, the author argues that the productive and destructive possibilities of digital geographies are changing important aspects of human and non-human worlds. Like the more-than-human notion and how it emphasises interconnections of humans and non-humans in the world, the more-than-real inverts the diminishing that accompanies use of the terms ‘virtual’ and ‘immaterial’ as applied to digital spaces. Digital geographies are fluid, amorphous spaces made of contradictory possibilities in this Anthropocene moment. By sharing experiences of people involved in trying to improve digital geographies, this book offers stories of hope and possibility alongside stories of grief and despair. The more-than-real concept can help us understand such work – by feminists, digital rights activists, disability rights activists, environmentalists and more. Drawing on case studies from around the world, this book will appeal to academics, university students, and activists who are keen to learn from other people’s efforts to change digital geographies, and who also seek to remake digital geographies.

This is the first book to explore sexualities from a geographical perspective. The nature of place and notions of space are of increasing centrality to cultural and social theory. Mapping Desire presents the rich and diverse world of contemporary sexuality, exploring how the heterosexual body has been appropriated and resisted on the individual, community and city scales. The geographies presented here range across Europe, America, Australasia, Africa, the Pacific and the imaginary, cutting across city and country and analysing the positions of gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and heterosexuals. The contributors ring different interests and approaches to bear on theoretical and empirical material from a wide range of sources. The book is divided into four sections: cartographies/identities; sexualised spaces: global/local; sexualised spaces: local/global; sites of resistance. Each section is separately introduced. Beyond the bibliography, an annotated guide to further reading is also provided to help the reader map their own way through the literature.

This timely research handbook offers a systematic and comprehensive examination of the election laws of democratic nations. Through a study of a range of different regimes of election law, it illuminates the disparate choices that societies have made concerning the benefits they wish their democratic institutions to provide, the means by which such benefits are to be delivered, and the underlying values, commitments, and conceptions of democratic self-rule that inform these choices.

As digital technologies have become part of everyday life, mediating tasks such as work, travel, consumption, production, and leisure, they are having increasingly profound effects on phenomena that are of immediate concern to geographers. These include: the production of space, spatiality and mobilities; the processes, practices, and forms of mapping; the contours of spatial knowledge and imaginaries; and, the formation and enactment of spatial knowledge politics Similarly, there are distinct geographies of digital media such as those of the internet, games, and social media that have become indispensable to geographic practice and scholarship across sub-disciplines, regardless of conceptual approach. This textbook presents a fully up-to-date, synoptic and critical overview of how digital devices, logics, methods, etc are transforming geography. It is divided into six inter-related sections introduction to digital geographies digital spaces digital methods digital cultures digital economies digital politics With illustrious instructors and researchers contributing to every chapter, Digital Geographies is the ideal textbook for courses concerning digital geographies, digital and new media and Internet communications, and the spatial knowledge of politics.

We now live in a world where all aspects of everyday life are thoroughly mediated by digital technologies. Making sense of digital life is accordingly an essential undertaking for social science and humanities scholars. This multidisciplinary book provides an essential guide to researching digital life: Orienting readers with respect to methodologies, research design, and research ethics. Detailing key research methods, including interviews, surveys, ethnographies, walking methodologies, arts-based and participatory approaches, historical analysis, data visualisation, mapping and data analytics. Demonstrating these methods in action in real-world studies that have investigated apps and interfaces, social and locative media, mobilities, smart cities, and digital labour and work. The authors provide: • Non-Eurocentric perspectives and case studies from diverse disciplines • Annotated further reading to help you situate your research alongside existing research in your field • An outline of future directions for researching digital life. Accessible in style and richly illustrated, the chapters provide a wealth of key insights and practical information to ensure research projects are successfully planned and implemented.

Recent years have seen a dramatic upsurge of interest in the connections between sexualities, space and place. Drawing established and 'founding' figures of the field together with emerging authors, this innovative volume offers a broad, interdisciplinary and international overview of the geographies of sexualities. Incorporating a discussion of queer geographies, Geographies of Sexualities engages with cutting edge agendas and challenges the orthodoxies within geography regarding spatialities and sexualities. It contains original and previously unpublished material that spans the often separated areas of theory, practices and politics. This innovative volume offers a trans-disciplinary engagement with the spatialities of sexualities, intersecting discussions of sexualities with issues such as development, race, gender and other forms of social difference.