Erasing queerness in the neoliberal city: The democratic limitations of community consultation in planning

Tension between anti-normative queer politics and the assimilative pull of liberal identitarianism are a fixture of queer life and queer space (Cohen, 2019; Warner 1999; Nash, 2006; Nash, 2013). Recently, this is visible in the actively contested commodification and gentrification of queer neighborhoods that often sterilize spaces of their queerness (Nash & Gorman-Murray, 2015; Bell & Binnie, 2004; Patrick, 2014; Doan & Higgins, 2011; Renninger, 2018). Through this lens, it comes as no surprise that a condo development proposed on the site of a prominent Toronto drag bar has been met with strong community concern or opposition. While the developer is leading a community consultation process that ostensibly seeks to maintain the presence of the bar and to support the cultural legacy of the community (Bousfields Inc., 2020), the possibility of the continued sterilization of Toronto’s gay village demands critical investigation. This study applies a queer approach (Cohen 1997; Cohen 2019; Browne & Nash 2010; Foucault 1978) that makes visible the forces of normalization at work, to assess the capacity for community consultation to protect queer interests. I raise several concerns over the democratic limitations of community consultation in planning. The neoliberal logics of urban growth at work are fundamentally anti-queer. As such, the capacity of existing planning frameworks to make space for queer life in Toronto is questionable. At this nexus of shifting queer geographies, community consultation, and urban development in the neoliberal city lie important questions about how power is geographically structured, deployed, and contested. ReferencesBell, D., & Binnie, J. (2004). Authenticating Queer Space: Citizenship, Urbanism and Governance. Urban Studies,41(9), 1807-1820 Bousfields Inc.. (2020). Public Consultation Strategy Report: 506-516 Church Street. Prepared on behalf of Graywood CM GP. Retrieved from, https://506churchstreet.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/PublicConsultation-Strategy-Report.pdf Browne, K., & Nash, C. (2010). Queer methods and methodologies: an introduction. In K. Browne, & C. Nash,Queer methods and methodologies: intersecting queer theories and social science research (pp. 1-24). Ashgate.Butler, J. (1999). Gender Trouble . Routledge. Cohen, C. J. (1997). Punks, Bulldaggers and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics? GLQ, 3(4),437-465. Cohen, C. J. (2019). The Radical Potential of Queer? Twenty Years Later. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and GayStudies, 25(1), 140-144. Doan, P. L., & Higgins, H. (2011). The Demise of Queer Space? Resurgent Gentrification and the Assimilation ofLGBT Neighborhoods. Journal of Planning Eduation and Research, 31(1), 6-25. Foucault, M. (1978). The History of Sexuality. Random House Inc. Nash, C. J. (2006). Toronto's gay village (1969-1982): Plotting the politics of gay identity. The CanadianGeographer, 50(1), 1-16. Nash, C. J., & Gorman-Murray, A. (2015). Recovering the Gay Village: A Comparative Historical Geogrpahy ofUrban Change and Planning in Toronto and Sydney. Historical Geography, 43, 85-105. Patrick, D. (2014). The matter of displacement: a queer urban ecology of New York City's High Line. Social &Cultural Geography, 15(8), 920-941. Renninger, B. (2018). Grindr Killed the Gay Bar, and Other Attempts to Blame Social Technologies for UrbanDevelopment: A Democratic Approach to Popular Technologies and Queer Sociality. Journal of Homosexuality,66(12), 1736-1755. Warner, M. (1999). The Ethics of Sexual Shame. In, The trouble with normal: Sex, politics, and the ethics of queerlife (pp. 1-40). Free Press.

Chagrin d’amour

This essay’s close interrogation of James Baldwin’s 1956 novel Giovanni’s Room allows us to see one aspect of how sexual shame functions: it shows how shame exposes anxiety not only about the feminizing force of homosexuality, but about how being the object of the gaze is feminizing—and therefore shameful. It also shows that the paradigm of the closet is not the metaphor of privacy and enclosure on one hand and openness and liberation on the other that it is commonly thought to be, but instead is a site of illusory control over whether one is available to be seen and therefore humiliated by being feminized. Further, the essay reveals the paradox of denial, where one must first know the thing that is at the same time being disavowed or denied. The narrative requirements of fictions such as Giovanni’s Room demonstrate this, as it requires that the narrator both know, in order to narrate, and not know something at the same time.

The Shame of Being a Man: Humiliation and/as Heroism

Chapter 4 discusses recent fiction and autofiction by canonical male authors, considering the relationship between masculinity and shame, and highlighting the persistent association between shame and femininity in works by male authors. The textual analyses of Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal (2001), Martin Amis’s The Pregnant Widow (2010), and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle II: A Man in Love (2009/2014) suggest that, too often, men’s writing of and on shame seeks to disavow that shame, to project it onto female bodies, and/or to make of its confession a kind of heroism. The Roth and Amis novels are read as displacing male shamefulness (particularly, but not only, sexual shame) onto vulnerable female bodies – bodies that are sometimes also racially othered. The reading of Knausgaard then shows how that text, despite evincing an unusual perspicacity on the subject of masculine shame, ultimately transforms its ‘struggle’ with shame into a literary struggle for ‘authenticity’ and leaves intact the association of shamefulness and the feminine. An analysis of Knausgaard’s critical reception considers also how his positioning as (exceptional, paradigmatic, Proustian) Author counters his narrative of shame and failure with one of literary ‘greatness’, remasculinising him in the process.