This chapter addresses how sexual racism operates in digital spaces among men seeking intimacies. It examines how national racial projects are both structured by and reiterated on spatial media through oscillation between two discourses: colour-blindness and overt racialisation. Drawing from interviews with gay men searching for intimacy on spatial media, such as dating applications, competing and overlapping racial projects are shown to be at the core of individual desire. We demonstrate how these projects contribute to creating, re-shaping, and embracing dominant but silent notions of “Swedishness,” arguing that spatial media not only enables but also prompts and normalises racialisation through digital codes. These findings challenge notions of a colour-blind sexual racism in Western society and instead shift the focus towards how racial differentiation arises in digital everyday intimacies as overt forms of racialisation that echo oppressive aspects of race-consciousness.

Spatial media has received impetus in recent studies, arguing that its function as a mediator of meaning and enabler of intimacy are critical in late modernity. We suggest that spatial media not only liquefies key institutions of modernity but also replaces them. We conducted interviews with men who use spatial media to realize intimacy. In our analysis, we reference the fictional Star Trek universe to illustrate how spatial media may function as an institution. In the figure of the Borg, human-tech borders are eliminated, control is exerted through collective decisions, and bodies are assimilated into an expanding beehive-like community. Similarly, spatial media enables the liquefaction of human-tech borders, the creation of new sets of rules and hierarchies, and the assimilation of intimacy practices. We thereby conclude that digital media not only drive a process of liquefaction but also the forging of new institutional structures that condition the realization of intimacy.

There are few reasons to believe that social segregation is restricted to the working age population. Still, attempts to analyse social segregation among old age individuals have been lacking. The purpose of this paper is, therefore, to explore the extent to which old age individuals who follow different sociodemographic trajectories are geographically segregated. We analyse residential segregation among older age adults, based on an identification of typical sociodemographic life courses in longitudinal, geo-coded, register data for three life phases: young old, 65-79 years, middle old, 75-89 years and, oldest old, 85-99 years. The results show great life-course heterogeneity in these age groups. In each life phase, we distinguish seven different trajectory types that also display distinct geographical patterns. The first group of trajectories is characterized by a high proportion of married individuals with high income concentrated in suburban, single-family housing areas. The second group consists of trajectories with many widows/widowers in small-scale, apartment areas. The third group consists of singleton trajectories in metropolitan areas. The fourth group is overrepresented in low-income areas and consists of trajectories including individuals of nonsurvival in the life phase. The fifth group is composed of trajectories with married or widowed low-income individuals in owner-occupied areas mainly found in rural areas. Thus, there is pronounced geographical variation in what type of neighbourhood life old age individuals live. This indicates that social segregation in the old age population deserves to be given more attention in geographical research.

Obstacles to family formation have been removed in many countries outside of theAnglophone world for quite some time. Conventional knowledge suggests that thisphenomenon should make gay men and lesbians more similar to the general popula-tion. In this study, however, we show that differences linger. By classifying Swedishneighbourhoods into multiscalar neighbourhood landscapes, we show that same-sexmarried individuals differ from both married individuals and the general population. Same-sex married individuals are concentrated in cores in metropolitan citiescharacterised by the ownership tenure form and apartment buildings. In general,same-sex individuals avoid remote rural areas, but same-sex females are quitepresent in rural towns. Same-sex males are concentrated to areas that borderdeprived areas but not to deprived areas. These results suggest that there is a needto move beyond legal agendas and consider what drives the residential mobility ofthe gay and lesbian population.

We examine the 'overlap' or to which degree tenure form patterns are similar to socio-economic segregation patterns. The issue has been discussed concerning mixing policies; does mixing of tenure hinder socio-economic segregation? If mixing tenure is to be an effective policy against segregation, the overlap has to be understood. Using Swedish register data, we cross tenure-type landscapes with patterns of high/mixed/low-income and with European/non-European/Swedish-born. To what degree is there overlap among tenure, income and country of birth? Is the overlap related to geographical scale and polarization? Is the overlap of tenure forms with socio-economic characteristics consistent across regions? We find strong overlap of large-scale cooperative tenure landscapes with very high incomes as well as with Swedish-born. Small-scale tenure-landscapes provide mixing opportunities for incomes wherever they are located; however, these landscapes have a small non-Swedish-born population nearby. Some tenure-type landscapes vary in characteristics depending on location; e.g. public rental concentrated areas are high-income in urban cores but low-income in urban peripheries.

As people continue to flee repressive regimes, discussions of refugees’ state of liminality have intensified. Refugee camps and detention centres tend to force refugees to endure living in liminality for long periods of time. Taking fleeing as a point of departure, this study suggests a change from the notion of fleeing as movement to a search for home and homemaking. This understanding shifts the analysis away from state-controlled spaces to a wider consideration of spaces of importance for homemaking. Widening the discussion on liminality to homemaking indicates that liminality can be experienced in a variety of spaces. Using material from interviews with queer refugees in the Swedish countryside, I discuss their travels, displacements and homemaking. Their stories show that creating a home is a continuous process delimited by norms in families, ethnic networks, host societies and queer networks. Not adhering to these norms renders homemaking difficult and pushes some queer refugees to liminal spaces. Thus, I suggest an understanding of some queer refugees as constantly rejected and pushed into a perpetual state of liminal homemaking. An analysis that illuminates refugees’ displacements from belonging moves discussions of liminality away from state-controlled spaces and highlights the norms that govern the homemaking process.

Housing policies for refugees are a hot topic in many countries receiving refugees. However, most discussions tend to treat refugees monolithically despite the fact that they have diverse experiences. Individuals seeking asylum on the grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity face numerous obstacles during the asylum process. This article aims to explore how asylum accommodations are governed and how this process affects queer asylum seekers. Based on a range of sources, including interviews, documents and media articles, the results show that many queer asylum seekers have been victims of homo- and transphobic violence. The findings also indicate that the Swedish migration agency has implemented temporary solutions to mitigate such violence but refused to change the overall policy. In the analysis, I maintain that there are three underlying assumptions in the system, namely, the primacy of heteronormativity, the metropolitan nature of queers, and the need to adjust but not challenge heteronormativity. I argue that this process renders queer asylum seekers unfit and leaves them in unsafe housing situations to domesticise them in the context of a heteronormative society, i.e. a society in which they do not stand out or claim further rights.