University of Brighton

Graduate Student, School of Environment and Technology

Thesis Title: Spaces of Privilege

About

Abstract

There have been extensive developments in ‘gay rights’ in the past 10 years. This has prompted the contention that some gay white men are increasingly able to access privilege at the expense of increasing marginalisation for various gendered, raced and sexual Others. Homonormativity therefore describes a process through which gay white male subjects are understood as normalised and accepted within existing relations of inequalities and that this temporality is accompanied by a depoliticisation and tendency towards private domestication. I use evidence from 15 in-depth interviews with men drawn from my socio-sexual network in Brighton, and autoethnographic writings in the form of reflective diary entries and short vignettes to develop a complex and fluid understanding of gay white men’s spatial practises and experiences of privilege.

Compared to processes of marginalisation, the study of privilege has been less prevalent, yet the concept can be found in a broad variety of disciplines and foci of study. Privilege has been predominantly developed ‘on the margins’ of academia to understand how certain knowledges and identities come to be ‘centred’. It is only relatively recently that privilege has been adopted as a critical reflexive tool to explore the production of inequalities by those who benefit from those inequalities. The thesis integrates Foucaultian understandings of power with a feminist conception of performativity and queer critical geographies to contribute an understanding of privilege as processual and situated, able to explore the multiplicity of intersecting spatial practises through which individual experiences of privilege and marginalisation occur.

This thesis significantly contributes to understandings of privilege, building upon previous work to demonstrate how participants normalise their identities and their positioning within relations of inequality. These normalising practises render the spatial production of privilege invisible through specific discourses of legitimation, in the process (re)producing relations of inequality. I develop this spatial conceptualisation of privilege, by exploring where the participants describe becoming privileged, where they feel restricted, how these processes operate and how they are experienced and understood. By using critical theories of space and place this thesis works across multiple identities (such as race, class, gender and sexuality) to show the processes through which different individuals may be simultaneously marginalised and privileged by different apparatuses of power relations. I augment discussions of queer temporalities and the spatialities of everyday lives for gay white men by tracing an apparently normative trajectory from ‘coming out’ through participation in ‘gay scene’ spaces and towards private domestication. This process is facilitated by the participants changing abilities to access privilege in different places as they move through their lives. However my research demonstrates that the participants’ spatial practises are not as linear as this normative trajectory suggests. While men in this research are able to access privilege, this is a fragile process, vulnerable to contestation, demonstrating the continued importance of examining processes of heteronormativity.

Overall my work contributes empirical evidence of the manifestation and maintenance of privilege in the spatial practises of gay white men living in Brighton to develop a more nuanced, complex and explicitly spatial understanding of privilege in everyday life.