Scott J McKinnon

Queering disasters: On the need to account for LGBTI experiences in natural disaster contexts

This article seeks a queering of research and policy in relation to natural disasters, their human impacts, management and response. The human impacts of natural disasters vary across different social groups. We contend that one group largely absent from scholarly and policy agendas is sexual and gender minorities, or lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender/transsexual and intersex (LGBTI) populations. To demonstrate that these minorities have particular experiences that need to be addressed, we critically review five case studies that comprise the limited scholarly and policy research on LGBTI populations in disasters to date. Building on this, we offer some specific ways forward for queer disaster research that accounts for the vulnerabilities, needs and resilient capacities of LGBTI populations. In doing so, we recognise and urge researchers, policy-makers and aid agencies to acknowledge that LGBTI populations are not homogeneous and have different needs wrought by intersections of socio-economic resources, gender, race/ethnicity, age and regional or national location.

Queer Domicide: LGBT Displacement and Home Loss in Natural Disaster Impact, Response, and Recovery

ABSTRACT This article examines lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) experiences of displacement, home loss, and rebuilding in the face of natural disasters. LGBT vulnerability and resilience are little studied in disaster research; this article begins to fill this gap, focusing on LGBT domicide—how LGBT homes are “unmade” in disasters. To do this, we critically read a range of non-government, scholarly, and media commentaries on LGBT experiences of natural disasters in various settings over 2004–12, including South Asia, the USA, Haiti, and Japan. Additionally, we utilize preliminary data from pilot work on LGBT experiences of 2011 disasters in Brisbane, Australia, and Christchurch, New Zealand. we find that disaster impacts are the first stage of ongoing problems for sexual and gender minorities. Disaster impacts destroy LGBT residences and neighborhoods, but response and recovery strategies favor assistance for heterosexual nuclear families and elide the concerns and needs of LGBT survivors. Disaster impact, response, and recovery “unmakes” LGBT home and belonging, or inhibits homemaking, at multiple scales, from the residence to the neighborhood. we focus on three scales or sites: first, destruction of individual residences, and problems with displacement and rebuilding; second, concerns about privacy and discrimination for individuals and families in temporary shelters; and third, loss and rebuilding of LGBT neighborhoods and community infrastructure (e.g. leisure venues and organizational facilities).

Problems and possibilities on the margins: LGBT experiences in the 2011 Queensland floods

Abstract Vulnerability to disasters is not inherent to particular social groups but results from existing marginality. Marginalisation from social, political and economic resources and recognition underpins vulnerability and impedes recovery. Yet concurrently, disasters can reveal the resilient capacities of some marginal groups, who often develop specific means of coping with marginality. This article applies these perspectives to the experiences of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans) people during the 2011 disaster in Queensland, Australia, which resulted from catastrophic flooding of Brisbane and South-East Queensland. The findings come from a survey conducted by the Queensland Association for Healthy Communities (QAHC) a year after the floods, which sought to understand LGBT experiences, resources and needs. An agreement was established between QAHC and university researchers to facilitate data analysis. This article analyses some key findings using the concept of marginality to understand both vulnerability and resilience. This framework helps grasp the particular issues facing LGBT people. The data reveal vulnerability due to social and political marginality, including discrimination and inhibited access to assistance, but simultaneously examples of resilience borne by self-reliance and coping strategies developed in a context of marginality. Understanding LGBT marginality, vulnerability and resilience helps contribute to inclusive and effective disaster preparation, response and recovery.

‘The greatest loss was a loss of our history’: natural disasters, marginalised identities and sites of memory

Abstract This paper examines intersections between space, materiality, memory and identity in relation to lesbian and gay experiences of recent disasters in Australia. Drawing on interviews with lesbians and gay men in two disaster sites, the paper argues that disaster impacts may include the loss of sites of memory that inform and underpin the formation and maintenance of marginalised identities. We explore the ways in which social marginality is experienced by sexual minorities during disasters as a result of threats to sites of lesbian and gay memory. The paper contributes to scholarship in geographies of memory by investigating the impacts of disasters on how memory is spatially located and experienced.

Disasters, Queer Narratives, and the News: How Are LGBTI Disaster Experiences Reported by the Mainstream and LGBTI Media?

ABSTRACT The media plays a significant role in constructing the public meanings of disasters and influencing disaster management policy. In this article, we investigate how the mainstream and LGBTI media reported—or failed to report—the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) populations during disasters in Brisbane, Australia and Christchurch, New Zealand. The implications of our work lie within recent disasters research suggesting that marginalized populations—including LGBTI peoples—may experience a range of specific vulnerabilities during disasters on the basis of their social marginality. In this article, we argue that LGBTI experiences were largely absent from mainstream media reporting of the Brisbane floods and Christchurch earthquake of 2011. Media produced by and about the LGBTI community did take steps to redress this imbalance, although with uneven results in terms of inclusivity across that community. We conclude by raising the possibility that the exclusion or absence of queer disaster narratives may contribute to marginality through the media’s construction of disasters as experienced exclusively by heterosexual family groups.

The Emerald City of Oz: The city of Sydney as a gay space in Australian feature films

ABSTRACT Australian feature films featuring gay male characters have consistently defined the inner-city—and. particularly the inner-city of Sydney—as. a gay space. This article examines a range of such films within the historical context of the emergence of gay male community and culture in Sydney. While this history reveals the complex and contested nature of gay mens connections to the city, on-screen depictions have tended to mask such complexity in favour of a simplistic urban/gay versus rural/straight divide. By repeatedly exploring gay life in inner-city spaces through the eyes of heterosexual, rural visitors, Australian films have developed and replicated discourses that have seen Sydney defined as the ‘true’ home of gay male community and culture.

Listening and learning: giving voice to trans experiences of disasters

Abstract This article gives voice to trans experiences of disasters, investigating their specific vulnerabilities and resilient capacities. We draw on findings from a project on lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) experiences of recent Australian and New Zealand disasters. We present and analyse trans voices from a survey conducted across multiple case study sites and insights from interview data with a trans person who experienced the 2011 Brisbane floods. Conceptually, to provide a robust understanding of trans experiences of disasters, we bring socially sensitive disaster studies into conversation with trans geographies. Disaster studies have begun to examine LGBT experiences, with some suggestion that trans people are most vulnerable. We advance this work by focusing on trans lives. Trans geographies, in turn, underline the importance of space, place and the body in understanding trans lives, and the need to examine the lived reality of trans people’s everyday geographies rather than embodiment as an abstract concept. Applying these insights to the trans voices in our project, we examine four themes that highlight impediments to and possibilities for trans-inclusive disaster planning: apprehension with emergency services and support; concerns about home and displacement; anxiety about compromising the trans body; and the potential of trans and queer interpersonal networks for capacity building. We offer suggestions for trans-inclusive disaster planning and preparedness, and indicate how the insights from trans experience can enrich disaster planning and preparedness for wider social groups.

Remembering an epidemic during a disaster: memories of HIV/AIDS, gay male identities and the experience of recent disasters in Australia and New Zealand

Abstract Memory is increasingly understood as a source of both vulnerability and resilience within the experience of disasters associated with natural hazards. In this article, we investigate how members of marginalised populations impacted by disasters in Australia and New Zealand drew on forms of memory tied to their minority identity. Gay men, along with other sexual and gender minority groups, experience increased vulnerability in disaster contexts resulting from discrimination and stigmatisation. We draw on interviews with two gay men, each of whom had lived through the crisis of HIV/AIDS beginning in the 1980s and who had, more recently, been seriously impacted by a disaster associated with a natural hazard. Memories of HIV/AIDS informed these men’s experiences of the later disaster in ways which bolstered resilience but which conversely resulted in feelings of vulnerability and isolation.

Negotiating Difference Across Time: The Temporal Meanings of the Sydney Mardi Gras in Lesbian and Gay Life Narratives

ABSTRACT This paper examines the temporal meanings of the annual LGBTI pride event, the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. Drawing on findings from a large-scale oral history project, the paper explores ways in which Australian lesbians and gay men place Mardi Gras within life narratives. Three temporal frameworks were commonly used by our interviewees. First, Mardi Gras acted as an annual temporal marker through which to plan a year. Second, changing personal understandings of Mardi Gras were used by interviewees to position themselves within the life course. Third, the shifting meanings of Mardi Gras were deployed as a means of narrating broader historical changes in the LGBTI community. We argue that, although lesbian and gay identities might now be considered increasingly mainstream and even “ordinary”, each of these temporal frameworks represents the continued differing experiences of time and space between homosexual and heterosexual lives.

Guest editorial: Historical geographies down under

This special issue appears as Australian Geographer celebrates its 90th year of publication. The sub-disciplinary field of historical geography is an apt focus, forming a bridge between the discipline’s rich and varied past, and its burgeoning future. The twelve contributions to this special issue not only demonstrate the vitality of Australian historical geography but also underline its significance and value for geographical thinking and our understanding of contemporary society and space. Investigations ‘of the lines of influence and connection which bind... together’ the disciplines of history and geography (Ogborn 1999, 97) are not new; nevertheless, the development of historical geography, as a defined sub-discipline of geography in the anglophone world, has been attributed to the fairly recent work of Henry Clifford Darby. Between the 1930s and 1960s, Darby led British scholars in the establishment of ‘a new historical geography, distinct from history but sharing with it a broad borderland without clear boundaries’ (Coppock 2002, xv). In Darby’s view, historical geography was one of the two ‘pillars’ of geography (the other being geomorphology) as ‘[a]ll geography is historical geography, either actual or potential’ (1953, 6). Darby’s version of historical geography, which focused on cartography and its use in the investigation of landscape change, gradually spread to other areas of the English-speaking world, such as Australia and New Zealand. In the USA, meanwhile, Carl Sauer, of the Berkeley School, was developing a distinct brand of North American historical geography that drew from the German Landschaft tradition and thus took on a much more ‘cultural’ approach to investigations of geographies of the past (Heffernan 2009, 333). The quantitative revolution of the 1950s and 1960s left little room for investigating ‘the history behind geography’ (per Darby 1953, 6). However, under the guidance of Darby and Sauer, the number of scholars engaging with historical geography in the West proliferated (including Andrew Clark, Fred Kniffen, Alan Baker, Robin Butlin and Donald Meinig), such that in 1975 the British–Canadian Symposium on Historical Geography (later the International Conference of Historical Geographers) was born, as was the Journal of Historical Geography (Baker 2016; Schein 2001). By the 1980s, following the development of humanistic geography, calls were made to ‘bring history back in’ to the study of human geography (Driver 1988, 497). Since then, geographers such as Jeanne Kay, Mona Domosh, Karen Morin, Lawrence Berg, Gillian Rose, Miles Ogborn and Felix Driver have utilised poststructural, feminist and postcolonial perspectives to draw particular attention to issues of power in the practice of historical geography and in the practices of geography in the past. This includes methodological concerns about using the archives, the links between colonialism, empire building and the history of geography, and the androand ethno-centric nature of the historical geography tradition. With increasing engagements with larger debates in the social sciences, the past 20–30 years have been termed the ‘phase of eclecticism’ as definitions and approaches to historical geography continue to be varied, contested and nuanced (Clayton 2000, 338; Heffernan 1997; Morin and Berg 1999; Schein 2001). Recent research in the sub-discipline has focused on a plethora of topics including environmental histories (often intersecting with political histories of Europe’s settler colonies), questions of empire (such as representations of people, places and landscapes