ABSTRACT
In 1995 Kath Weston published ‘Get Thee to the Big City’, in which she critically examined the construction of the ‘great lesbian and gay migration’ to big cities and its role in shaping narratives of gay and lesbian liberation in North America. While this publication drew attention to the metronormativity of gay and lesbian studies, it was Halberstam’s (2005) queer critique that coined and critically advanced the term. At that point, geographers had been empirically critical of the lack of attention to sexualities beyond the metropolis for some time (Bell and Valentine, 1995b; Binnie and Valentine, 1999; Phillips, Watt and Shuttleton, 2000). Since then, many have taken up the project of studying LGBTQ lives beyond metropolitan centres by focusing on rural areas (Gorman-Murray, Pini and Bryant, 2013; Gorman-Murray, Waitt and Gibson, 2008; Smith and Holt, 2005) and, more recently, smaller or ‘ordinary’ cities (G. Brown, 2008; Browne, 2008; Muller Myrdahl, 2013). In tandem, metronormativity has become a central queer critique of lesbian and gay studies, exemplified by works such as Herring’s (2010) examination of the history of American queer anti-urban movements or Tongson’s (2011) relocations of queer life to the landscapes of new suburbia, both of which demonstrate the limitations and erasures involved in constructing the urban as the authentic space of LGBTQ lives and liberations.
