Places or polygons? Governmentality, scale, and the census in the Gay and Lesbian Atlas

✍ Scribed by Michael Brown; Larry Knopp

• Book ID: 105361131
• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2006
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 760 KB
• Volume: 12
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1544-8444
• DOI: 10.1002/psp.410

✦ Synopsis

Abstract

This paper responds to recent calls for a Foucauldian population geography by critically analysing the 2004 Gay and Lesbian Atlas (a US‐oriented product of demographers at Washington, DC's Urban Institute, a public policy ‘think tank’). We employ a framework that foregrounds issues of governmentality, sexuality, gender and scale to explore how both the Atlas and the 2000 US Census from which the Atlas's data are drawn socially construct, for governmental purposes, certain sexualised populations and spaces. We pay particular attention to the power of scale‐framing in this process by varying the spatial scales at which location quotients for same‐sex households are situated for census tracts in Seattle. Following the Atlas's classification and coding algorithms, we show how the resulting cartography can reveal elements of a population that has previously been invisible in the census – but only relative to certain larger scales. The question of scale therefore becomes an important matter of governmentality, rather than solely a technical issue. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.