Time, space, and the authorisation of sex premises in London and Sydney

While the regulation of commercial sex in the city has traditionally involved formal policing, recent shifts in many jurisdictions have seen sex premises of various kinds granted formal recognition via planning, licensing and environmental control. This means that ‘sexual entertainment venues’, ‘brothels’, or ‘sex shops’ are now not just labels applied to particular types of premise, but are formal categories of legal land use. However, these categories are not clear-cut, and it is not simply the case that changes in the law instantiate a change whereby these premises are bought into being at a particular point in time. Countering the privileging of space over time that is apparent within much contemporary research on sex and the city, this paper foregrounds the varied temporalities in play here, and describes how the actions of those policy-makers, municipal bureaucrats and officers allow sex premises to variously ‘fade in’, accelerate, linger or disappear as legal land uses within the city. We examine the implications of these different temporalities of the law by exploring how sex premises have been subject to regulation in London and Sydney, showing that the volatile, contradictory and fractured nature of legal space-making does not necessarily provide the certainty sought by the law but produces overlapping and contested understandings of what types of premise should be subject to regulation. More broadly the paper highlights how attention to the contingency and complexity of municipal law can help us better understand the ways that commercial sex is differently manifest in different citie

Respectability, morality and disgust in the night-time economy: exploring reactions to ‘lap dance’clubs in England and Wales

The night-time economy is often described as repelling consumers fearful of the ‘undesirable Others’ imagined dominant within such time-spaces. In this paper we explore this by describing attitudes towards, and reactions to, one particularly con- tentious site: the ‘lap dance’ club. Often targeted by campaigners in England and Wales as a source of criminality and anti-sociality, in this paper we shift the focus from fear to disgust, and argue that Sexual Entertainment Venues (SEVs) are opposed on the basis of moral judgments that reflect distinctions of both class and gender. Drawing on documentary analysis, survey results and interview data collected during guided walks, we detail the concerns voiced by those anxious about the presence of lap dance or striptease clubs in their town or city, particularly the notion that they ‘lower the tone’ of particular streets or neighbourhoods. Our conclusion is that the opposition expressed to lap dance clubs is part of an attempt to police the bound- aries of respectable masculinities and femininities, marginalizing the producers and consumers of sexual entertainment through ‘speech acts’ which identify such enter- tainment as unruly, vulgar and uncivilized. These findings are considered in the light of ongoing debates concerning the relations of morality, respectability and disgust

Encouraging sexual exploitation? Regulating striptease and ‘adult entertainment’ in the UK

Over the last decade, dedicated adult entertainment venues offering forms of striptease have proliferated in the UK. In many locales these venues attract considerable opposition, with campaigners alleging nuisances ranging from noise and drunkenness through to harassment of local residents. Local authorities consider such complaints when they decide whether or not to grant licenses for such venues, but under current licensing laws, are not able to consider objections made on grounds of morality or taste. Focusing on the ongoing opposition to proposed adult entertainment venues in the UK, this paper explores the case made for the reform of licensing laws as they pertain to nude dance venues. In doing so, it notes the lack of empirical evidence suggesting such venues deserve to be treated differently from other spaces of public entertainment, and argues that the impending reform of licensing law is underpinned by possibly flawed assumptions about the gendered and sexed nature of adult entertainment. The paper accordingly emphasizes the ability of the naked body to excite both desire and disgust, and questions the radical feminist argument that sex work is always exploitative

Why key thinkers?

Abstract included in text

Battleground geographies and conspiracy theories: a response to Johnston (2006)

In Thinking Geographically (Hubbard et al. 2002), a student-centred guide to the theoretical landscape of human geography, we began by noting the different ways of writing geography’s histories. One way, we suggested, was to present the disciplinary landscape as a battlefield populated by warring factions, each led by totemic figureheads who fire intellectual potshots at one another in the attempt to overwhelm other forms of geographical thinking. While alliances may be drawn, and truces occasionally brokered, the overwhelming picture is one of intellectual spats, simmering resentments and outright hostility between those situated in different ‘camps’. In short, if we follow this metaphor through, we reach the conclusion that geography is a discipline riven by division, with the clash of personalities and intellectual positions manifest in constant battles. Even when the war is seemingly won, and a particular way of thinking becomes dominant, civil wars break out, and the cycle of violence begins again

The bizjet set: business aviation and the social geographies of private flight

The bizjet set: business aviation and the social geographies of private fligh