Public Duty and Private Prejudice: Sexualities, Equalities and Local Government

Rather than critiquing social institutions and practices that have historically excluded lesbians and gay men, as did earlier social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, since the 1990s the politics of sexuality has increasingly been about demanding equal rights of citizenship. These citizenship demands have, at least to a degree, been answered via a raft of recent legislation in the UK including the Adoption and Children Act 2002, Employment Equality (Sexual Orientation) Regulations 2003, Gender Recognition Act 2004 and the Civil Partnership Act 2004, and by associated changes in policy making and practice that emphasize ‘Equality and Diversity’. In this article we consider how the implementation of sexualities equalities policies is related to processes of privatization and individualization. This is illustrated by using sexualities equalities work in local government as a case study to indicate how processes of change and resistance are aided by these processes. The article draws on findings from a study of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) equalities initiatives in local government in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, which examined the views of those who now have a public duty to implement recent legislative and policy shifts and are obliged to develop equalities initiatives concerning ‘sexual orientation' and ‘gender reassignment’

Challenging heteronormativity in tourism studies: locating progress

This article reviews work that challenges heteronormativity in tourism studies primarily from, but not restricted to, the discipline of geography. Indeed, tourism studies has benefitted greatly from the growth of interdisciplinary research between geography, anthropology, sociology, as well as more recent interactions with queer, gender and leisure studies. In this context, as geographers, our aim is to use an explicitly geographical perspective to provide critical insights into recent research which contests, reinforces, or omits to challenge heteronormative positions in tourism studies. To this end, we provide four thematic ‘locations’, or scales, through which to review progress of this inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary literature: the globalization of sexuality; marketing the (homo)sexualized nation; touring the (homo)sexualized city; and the tourist body as a gendered and sexed subject