Gender and Sexuality

The final chapter in Part II explores some of the diverse gendered geographies of people whose lives are shaped either directly or indirectly by hegemonic, normative and at times ‘toxic’ gender norms. While gender is incorporated throughout the book in the same way that race (Chapters 7 and 8), and class (Chapter 2, Chapter 4, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 11) were, we nonetheless felt it justified to carve out a space for exploring the complex gendered geographies of social justice, relationalities and spaces of encounter. We also seek to highlight how sexuality intersects with gender in complex ways, by tracing the encounters where hegemonic and non-hegemonic sexualities and genders intersect. The spatial scale here is primarily the body in terms of how justice is lived and felt. While embodiment was defined in Chapter 1 , it will be fully illustrated in this chapter. The recognition strand of social justice is most striking here, but the distributional also raises its head, when we consider how access to the labour market for women affects the distribution of wealth. The chapter disentangles the relational spaces of encounter occupied by people embodying or performing different forms of gender-based and sexual identity politics, including women, the contested masculinities of men, and the non-hegemonic experiences of non-binary and LGBTQ+ people. It thus considers gender beyond solely a male/female binary and takes care to consider the intersectionality of non-conforming genders and sexualities with inequality therein.