Navigating Embodied Lesbian Cultural Space: Toward a Lesbian Habitus

In: Space and Culture, Band 10, Heft 2, S. 231-252

Abstract

This article examines the ways that sexual and gendered identities are played out in space. By tracing a journey from London to Brighton and back taken during ethnographic fieldwork, it argues that that the complicated ways in which gendered and sexual identities unfold in space reveal the tensions and contradictions in both the real and imagined spaces of lesbian and gay urbanism. Through focusing on the tensions that arose in this journey, this article explores the imaginary of the queer city and the visual regimes and material and embodied practices that construct and occupy these spaces. By drawing on both Judith Butler's and Pierre Bourdieu's work on performativity, embodiment, and cultural capital, this article offers the concept of the lesbian habitus to make sense of the visual and embodied cultures of lesbian identity spaces.