Australian human geographical researchers who are concerned with how genders and sexualities intersect in the social construction of places have called for more regionally specific research. The large regional city of Cairns, in far north Queensland, sits somewhere between rural and metropolitan imaginaries. It is also one of Australia's few cities located well within a wet 'tropical' climate. In this context, I am interested in how norms about women's bodily presentation and performance are shaped in and by particular places.  

This paper will explore how different women's embodied experiences are negotiated through normative ideas about bodily representation and how they intersect with living in Cairns. Drawing from a small sample of in-depth semi-structured interviews, queer and intersectional approaches will be used to analyze how different women talk about living in Cairns, and how their diverse subjectivities and identities, such as race, class and sexuality, intersect with their embodied experiences of living in a 'tropical' climate in the contemporary regional city of Cairns, Australia.