LGBTQ+ friendship, spatial commitments and rural England with Joe Jukes

We get by with a little help from our friends, and for LGBTQ+ people, sometimes our friendships are what sustain us. In this episode I (Joe Jukes) reflect on the chapter "LGBTQ+ friendship and spatial commitments: queer socialities in the making of a new rural" (2025) to explore why a queer friendship is not the same as a "chosen family", as soothing as that phrase may be. I also talk about my home region, the West Country in South West England and the particular, queer carspaces I experienced there during my PhD research. Ultimately, along with my colleague Derek Ruez, we think about queer space's capacity to bring people together and create places of political solidarity.

Shownotes:
- For Space (Doreen Massey, 2005)
- The Radical Faeries of Albion
- The Wurzels
- Critical Friendship Studies
- Men Like That: A Southern Queer History (John Howard, 1999)
- The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence
- “Friendship as a Way of Life” in Michel Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth (Paul Rabinow, 1994)
- Friendship as a Way of Life: Foucault, AIDS, and the Politics of Shared Estrangement, (Tom Roach, 2011)
- Asexual Geographies

Podcast e-mail: spaceandsexuality@proton.me

Podcast visuals by Chan Arun-Pina (theworkroomofchan)

Podcast intro and outro based on 'Peridot' - Gunnar Olsen [CC]