Opening Remarks

How can we square sexual justice with economic justice? How can we integrate a concern for sexual and economic justice in our work when sexuality and economics so often appear incompatible or unrelated in academic discussions? Material and economic concerns often appear highly marginal within sexual politics; as Richard Goldstein (2002: 19) in his polemic against the Gay Right has contentiously and provocatively claimed, "poverty is the only dirty secret left in our community." More surprisingly, this marginality of the economic has often been reproduced in academic research on the transnational politics of sexuality, as Geeta Patel (2006: 25) has argued: "Too often the literature on transnational sexualities portrays sexuality as being constituted outside capital, outside political economies, outside transnational or global finance." While Patel is right to highlight this concern, it is critical that we simultaneously recognise the almost complete absence of sexuality within political economic accounts of globalization (Binnie, 2004). Particularly given the current state of economic, social, and political affairs, it is important to think through the interconnections between sexuality and economics, and to acknowledge the dangers of easy moralising in producing well-meaning explanatory accounts of inequality.

Guy Hocquenghem (1993: 93) has argued that, "the anti-capitalist movement can often be pro-family, and indeed anti-homosexual." Erotophobia and homophobia on the Left is widespread. It may be less explicit and more understated nowadays, but it has not gone away completely. This legacy has meant that some political economic accounts of gay male consumption and the pink economy have been problematic and even harmful. For instance, in his pioneering book on the material basis of sexual citizenship, David Evans produced a highly voyeuristic depiction of what he terms the "virilisation" of gay male consumption, with a particular emphasis on the paraphernalia associated with leather and sadomasochism (Evans, 1993). Despite these concerns about the way erotics and sexual politics have been integrated within some political economic analyses, there are studies in which economics and sexuality are integrated more productively. Lee Badgett (1997: 70) has powerfully critiqued dominant discourses about the pink economy, de-bunking myths of gay and lesbian affluence by arguing that, "the real economic difference [of lesbians, bisexuals and gay men] comes from the harmful effects of employment discrimination against lesbian, gay and bisexual people."

Beyond the Gay Affluence Stereotype

While economics and sexuality may sometimes seem difficult to reconcile within academic debates, they appear prominently within media discourses around the pink economy that have constructed (lesbians and) gay men as an affluent niche market in late capitalism. In an essay I wrote over a decade ago on the intersection between sexuality, citizenship and the market in the UK and the Netherlands, I noted the growth of media visibility of gay men and lesbians as model consumers (Binnie, 1995). I argued that as this pink economic discourse emerged during a period of economic recession, it produced a potentially harmful stereotype that fed into a growing resentment over the representation of gay men and lesbians as an economically privileged group in society. Writing this article nearly a year after the Barnard colloquium, it would appear that Naomi Klein's discussion of "precariousness" in relation to neoliberalism and the global economy seems ever more relevant in th e current global financial crisis.

Other writers have argued that the myth of lesbian and gay affluence is dangerous in playing into the hands of the Christian Right. As Hardisty and Gluckman (1997: 218) have noted: "Recently, a new stereotype has crept into the antihomosexual literature of the right. In addition to being portrayed as immoral, disease-ridden child molestors, gay men and lesbians are now described as superwealthy, highly-educated free spenders." Stereotypes of affluence therefore fuel notions that gay rights are "special" or additional rights, and that lesbians and gay men are a privileged minority in no need of legal protection against discrimination on the basis of homophobia. These stereotypes are firmly established within the media and also get reproduced in academic discussions of sexual politics and citizenship. Consider Brenda Cossman's (2007) highly stimulating and thought-provoking book Sexual Citizens, which moves beyond a narrow focus on the rights of lesbians and gay men to examine the racialised and gendered politics of poverty and welfare reform in the United States. Cossman's attempts to broaden debates on sexual citizenship to bring poverty into the equation are of course welcome and necessary, and build on the work of Anna Marie Smith (2007) in this area. However, there are aspects of Cossman's book that make me a bit uneasy. Cossman argues that in some media discourses and legal cases, lesbians and gay men have now become configured as model citizens, a far cry from representations portraying them as sexual outlaws: "Not unlike the Fab Five of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, gay and lesbian subjects are the new model citizens, the heroic citizens, standing for all that is valued in American citizenship. In an extraordinary reversal of the more traditional terms of heterosexual sexual citizenship, gay men and lesbians are here becoming the most becoming of citizens" (177). I think it is easy to overstate the extent to which lesbians and gay men have become full citizens within the United States (see for instance the passing of Proposition 8 in California). I feel particularly uneasy when reading the discussion of gay affluence and model consumer-based citizenship in Queer Eye alongside CossmanŐs exploration of poverty within the heterosexual family—principally because the question of queer poverty is rarely addressed explicitly.

Given the problematic representation of queer poverty and the way the pink economy discourse became visible in the UK during the last recession, what can we look forward to in the current global financial crisis? In my essay from 1995, I noted how the growth in media visibility of a pink niche market in the UK at the start of the 1990s coincided with the recession. There was much discussion in the British media of how this particular niche market appeared to be thriving during an economic downturn and how it appeared to be resilient and recession-proof. In the UK, we can already ascertain a reaction in the media against the forms of lifestyle consumption that have proliferated in the past decade. Lifestyle consumption practices associated with aspiration and class mobility are now denigrated as vulgar, unsophisticated and unethical, thereby reproducing a class-based discourse.

Scale and Economic and Sexual Justice

Elsewhere I have argued that the relationships between sexuality and economics remain difficult and that sexuality has been marginalised within political economic perspectives on globalization (Binnie, 2004). This is particularly worth noting when we think through the spatial politics of sexual and economic justice. One of the key questions used to formulate discussions in the Barnard colloquium was the question of scale and how it might inform our discussions of the relationships between sexuality and economics. The question was framed accordingly: "What scale is helpful to you as you approach these questions? The national? The global? The regional? The local? The South-South? Something else?" To answer this question properly, we first need to consider the significance of space in the relationship between economic and sexual justice, and to define what we mean by scale more specifically.

This question is concerned with the spatial politics of economic and sexual justice. Reflecting on the spatial politics of social justice, Don Mitchell (in Brown et al, 2007: 9) has stated that: "I can never decide if the fact that everything has to take place somewhere is so obvious as to be banal or quite profound." Recognition of the significance of space and place within everyday life means that space should not be merely seen as a passive container, the backdrop or canvas across which economic/sexual practices take place, but rather, the pervasive context in and through which such practices are constituted. For instance, consider the notion that the city is a generator of eroticism as Henning Bech argues: "The city is not merely a stage on which a pre-existing, preconstructed sexuality is displayed and acted out; it is a space where sexuality is generated" (1997, page 118).

The question of how to define and approach spatial scale has become a subject of intense heated debate of late. There is even disagreement over whether the notion of scale is relevant, or whether it should exist or be abandoned altogether. For instance, Sallie Marston, John Paul Jones III and Keith Woodward (2005: 416) note that "there is no agreement on what is meant by the term or how it should be operationalized" and that "scholarly positions on scale are divergent in the extreme." Debates about scale within human geography have largely been based within a political economic framework, concerned with either A) the scaling of capital and flows of goods, capital and labour across national boundaries or B) how governance is being re-scaled under the current regime of accumulation. It is therefore not surprising that sexual politics have rarely figured within these debates.

One of the most commonly understood (but most criticised) conceptualisations of scale is to see scales as objective, factual, contained entities—like Russian dolls, existing in a clear relation to one another in what Howitt (2002: 305) terms a "nested hierarchical ordering of space." In this model, scales exist in a clear hierarchy: from the body, the neighbourhood, city, region, nation through to the global. This hierarchical understanding has been challenged by those who argue that the construction of scale is itself a dynamic political process. Other writers now argue that we need to go beyond scalar thinking, and focus instead on networks, examining the connections between nodes within transnational (and other) networks. This approach draws attention to the flows and links between transnational actors in different locations, and emphasizes the study of horizontal linkages (for instance across national boundaries) over vertical hierarchies of bounded territorial scales. However, the network approach is itself treated with suspicion and found wanting by Marston et al (2005: 423), who argue that it is complicit within modes of thought that emphasise mobilities and flows of capital:

While we do not find ourselves at odds with the possibilities of flow thinking per se, we are troubled by what we see as liberalist trajectories (absolute freedom of movement) driving such approaches, particularly when these develop alongside large-scale imaginaries such as the global and the transnational. We are often at a loss as to what materiality is grounding these claims to pure flow or absolute deterritorialization.

Marston et al (2005: 419) argue that scale should be abandoned altogether, critiquing the work of Neil Brenner, Doreen Massey and others by claiming that: "We find at the base of all these corrections, and extensions, however, a foundational hierarchy—a verticality that structures the nesting so central to the concept of scale, and with it, the local-to-global paradigm." While Marston et al champion the abandonment of scale and are critical of the network approach to social-spatial relations, Bob Jessop, Neil Brenner and Martin Jones are keen to stress the limitations of privileging any one brand of sociospatial theory over others. As former advocates of the scalar turn, they now recognise "the limitations of too sharp a sociospatial turn (or any kind) and the need for a multidimensional account of sociospatial relations" (2008: 389).

Jessop et al discern four distinct ways that sociospatial relations have been conceptualised within social sciences: territory, place, scale and networks. Each one privileges a distinctive way of thinking about socialspatial relations. Jessop et al (2008: 397) are critical of what they label "one-dimensional" ways of studying sociospatial relations that focus on one sociospatial lexicon to the exclusion of others, and call instead for multi-dimensional approaches that interrogate the relationships between these approaches: "thinking in multidimensional terms can help to clarify contemporary debates within sociospatial theory (for instance, on the possibilities and limits of 'scale' or 'network' as geographic concepts)." While these discussions of scale can appear somewhat territorial and pedantic, they are nevertheless instructive for thinking about the relationships between economics and sexuality. Jessop et al's call for a multi-dimensional approach to theorising sociospatial relations means that we should consider the construction of scale alongside other ways of ordering and conceptualising social-spatial relations such as those focused on territoriality, place and networks. Therefore, while highlighting the flows of sexualised subjects, commodities, capital and ideas across territorial boundaries, we should not ignore other ways in which sociospatial relations are ordered—for instance, within territorially-bounded units such as the nation-state and regional supranational blocs such as the European Union.

Having outlined competing approaches to the study of socialspatial relations, we need to focus on how we might think about the spatial politics of economic and sexual justice. The dramatic growth of research on transnational sexual politics in recent years has brought questions of spatial scale to the fore within issues of sexual and economic justice. For instance, consider how within conservative nationalist discourses, non-normative sexualities have been constructed as non-local threats to the national scale of governance. In recent research on transnational sexualities, some scales have been privileged (e.g. the global) while others have been neglected (e.g. the national). In the next section, I discuss how sexual and economic justice can be considered at the urban scale.

The Urban in Economic and Sexual Justice

While there has been a decline of interest in the national scale of governance in political economy, there has been a growth of interest in cities, how they are connected by (transnational) flows of people, capital and knowledge, and the competition for inward investment, entrepreneurs, income from tourism, etc.

Richard Florida's book The Rise of the Creative Class has been highly influential in urban policy-setting agendas associated with city development and regeneration strategies. Florida argues that economically successful and entrepreneurial cities in the U.S. are those that contain high concentrations of bohemians, gays and immigrants. He calculates a "gay index" based on census data of same-sex couples and suggests that cities shown to be open to gays are also open to innovation and supportive of entrepreneurialism.

Rather problematically, he argues that: "to some extent, homosexuality represents the last frontier of diversity in our society, and thus a place that welcomes the gay community welcomes all kinds of people" (2002: 256). In Florida's argument, homosexuality becomes equated with entrepreneurialism and affluence, but renders invisible economically-disadvantaged queers. There are also problems with the way he discusses the notion of creativity and middle class, which ignores vernacular, working class forms of creativity. He goes on to state that: "The Gay Index was positively associated with the Creative Class . . . but it was negatively associated with the Working Class" (ibid: 258). Arguing that cities containing large numbers of gays, geeks and foreign-born residents tend to be more entrepreneurial, Florida draws attention to the competition between cities to attract professionals, entrepreneurs, inward investment, and tourism. This argument reproduces a neoliberal discourse where urban governance is primarily concerned with promoting cities as business-friendly spaces of innovation and entrepreneurialism, as opposed to addressing and tackling social inequalities within their citizenry.

Strategies to promote international lesbian and gay tourism have generated controversy and produced distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate sexual subjectivities. In a study based on Manchester, UK, Howard Hughes (2002) argues that the branding and marketing of the city's gay village nationally and internationally is having potentially deleterious consequences leading to a loss of ownership and a "de-gaying" of the space. He also notes criticism of marketing campaigns for "promoting sex" and giving a poor impression of the city. Discourses around gay entrepreneurialism and the marketing of gay tourist destinations position affluent, entrepreneurial, professional gays of the creative and tourist economy as distinct from the "queer unwanted"—individuals whose lifestyles are less respectable and do not fit the narratives of urban regeneration strategies.

Stephen Tomsen's (2006) research on homophobia in New South Wales in Australia also illustrates the importance of spatial ordering in distinguishing between notions of gay and lesbian respectability. Drawing attention to the law's distinction between "innocent" and "guilty" victims of homophobic attacks, Tomsen argues that the formation of respectable, gentrified gay and lesbian spaces has helped to reinforce distinctions between proper and improper homosexualities. One of the negative consequences arising from the de-sexing of lesbian and gay cultural identities associated with the development of these spaces has been that people engaging in public sex become further marginalised as improper, the "guilty" victims of homophobic attacks.

Concluding Comments

Tomsen's essay should remind us that we need to recognise the significance of the erotic and the spatial in the way distinctions are made between those whose bodies are seen to matter, and those who are seen as without value. Moreover, an awareness of the scaling of economic and sexual practices can help us recognise the limitations of notions of economic and sexual justice that are rooted in specific spatial contexts. In attempting to articulate a vision of sexual and economic justice, we need to recognise both the significance of space, and the necessity to strive for holistic ways of conceptualising socialspatial relations.

References

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