Between Being and Looking Queer Tourism Promotion and Lesbian Social Space in Greater Philadelphia

Abstract

t “Between Being and Looking” is a political and personal investigation of lesbian social space in Philadelphia, set within the context of mainstream promotion of queer tourism in the city. It is also part of a body of work I have been doing for the last few years, the goal of which is to develop alternative methods of generating, analyzing and communicating geographic information through a variety of accessible texts and tools of visualization drawn from geography, the arts and popular culture. Central to this effort is a desire to offer new and potent ways of telling geographic stories that emanate not so much from ‘authoritative’ sources such as government officials, planners, marketers, the news media and the geographic mainstream as from the populations themselves that are generally studied and represented by these authorities. Project findings include evidence that lesbians do not generally maintain the same relationship with capitalist spaces of consumption as gay males do, though queer tourism promoters have conflated lesbian tourism with gay male tourism. In a society where the presence and agency of lesbians and bisexual women are both ignored and overly generalized, “Between Being and Looking” seeks to encourage further investigation into their relationship to space and place within critical social geography and critical cartography.