Heteronormative cosmopolitanism: visibility and the state-of-the-art in LGBT+ tourism geographies

Tourism geography has a substantial account of how sexual minorities make, inhabit, and are excluded from tourist places. Existing work also shows how others consume LGBT+ space as cosmopolitan distinction. This review asks how that conversion works spatially, and what it cannot register. It traces the development and contestation of ideas about sexuality, space, and sexual citizenship, the gay village and cosmopolitan consumption, and heteronormativity, homonormativity, and homonationalism. It then examines subsequent scholarship on dispersed sociality, resort spaces, digital mediation, destination branding and opposition to sexual inclusion, without treating these as universally successive stages. Ethnographic material gathered in Sitges, Catalonia, Spain, in 2010–2011 provides a historically bounded illustration. It documents how selected, locatable, and male-coded sexual difference was interpreted by predominantly heterosexual British lifestyle migrants. From this the article develops the concept of heteronormative cosmopolitanism, that is, a spatial and relational process through which recognisable forms of sexual difference provide evidence of both a cosmopolitan place and a cosmopolitan self, whilst the observer’s position and the hierarchies organising the encounter remain substantially untroubled. Proximity-without-entry specifies how observers approach and narrate a sexual scene without participating in it. Within this relationship, its thresholds, rhythms, and forms of interpretative authority are examined, alongside a specifically gendered narratability wherein different sexualities have distinct capacities to become material for such place-narratives. The article closes with a research agenda for tourism geographies concerned with how visibility is converted into destination identity, whose belonging that conversion recognises, and the conditions under which claims to openness either persist or fail.