"It's About Time You Came Out": Sexualities, Mobility and Home

• Published in: Antipode Vol. 43; no. 4; pp. 1380 - 1403
• Main Authors: Waitt, Gordon, Gorman-Murray, Andrew
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford, UK Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01-09-2011; Blackwell
• Subjects: Australia; Behaviour and perception; Bgi / Prodig; Ethics; Gender roles; home; Homemakers; Homosexuality; Housing; Human geography; Human relations; Life narratives; Males; Men; Migration; mobility; New South Wales; Population geography and social geography; Population movement; Privacy; regional Australia; Sex; Sex factors; Sexuality; Social norms; Subjectivities; Subjectivity; Sydney; Urban sociology; Whites; Australia; Young people; Discourse; Ethics; Behaviour; Sexuality; Subjectivity; Mobility; Internal migration; Identity
• ISSN: 0066-4812; 1467-8330
• DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2011.00876.x

:  Helping redress the dominance of metropolitan narratives upon which much literature on sexuality is framed, this article interprets the narrative told by a “white” 16‐year‐old man living in regional Australia. Our aim is to investigate the intersections of migration and homemaking in sexual subject formation. Finding a place to call “home” can be a complex process for young men born in regional Australia and not conforming to the social formations of a “normal guy”. This young man's narrative expressively reveals the fluidity and spatiality inherent in processes of negotiating sexual subjectivities. His story provides telling insights into how migration and mobility change his understandings of home and of self by making possible a third‐space configured by neither the gender norms of his hometown nor the “gay scene” in Sydney.