An Ambitious ”State of the Field” Volume that Puts ”the Rural” Firmly on the Map of Sexual Geographies

Abstract

THE STUDY OF the connections between sexuality and space is a broad area of interdisciplinary research that has, until recent years, predominantly focused on LGBT and queer identities and communities in cos- mopolitan Western metropolises. The sub-discipline of geographies of sexuality emerged initially from interests in space, diversity, and deviance in fields such as sociology and human geography in the 1970s and 1980s. The field came into its own, as it were, with the publication of seminal and dedicated volumes, such as David Bell and Gill Valentines edited collection Mapping Desire (1995), at a time when scholarship also benefited from a surge in queer and sexuality research more broadly.