Feminist City: A Field Guide

192 Pages·1.681 MB·English

by  Leslie Kern

Feminist City
A Field Guide
LESLIE KERN
Between the Lines
Toronto
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: City of Men
Disorderly Women
Who Writes the City?
Freedom and Fear
Feminist Geography
Chapter 1: City of Moms
The Flâneuse
A Public Body
A Woman’s Place
The City Fix
Gentrifying Motherhood
The Non-Sexist City
Chapter 2: City of Friends
Friendship as a Way of Life
Girls Town
Friendships and Freedom
Queer Women’s Spaces
Friends ’til the End
Chapter 3: City of One
Personal Space
Table for One
The Right to Be Alone
Women in Public
Toilet Talk
Women Taking Up Space
Chapter 4: City of Protest
Right to the City
DIY Safety
Gendered Activist Labour
Activist Tourism
Protest Lessons
Chapter 5: City of Fear
The Female Fear
Mapping Danger
The Cost of Fear
Pushing Back
Bold Women
Intersectionality and Violence
City of Possibility
Index
Endnotes
Copyright
For Maddy
Acknowledgements
I’d like to thank everyone at Between the Lines Books and in particular my
editor Amanda Crocker, for enthusiastically saying “yes” to this book and
supporting me throughout the publication process. The team included
Chelene Knight, Renée Knapp, David Molenhuis, and Devin Clancy.
I tend to keep my projects pretty close to my chest until they’re nearly
done (it’s a Scorpio thing), but I want to thank those folks who gave me
early encouragement and advice as I let the news trickle out: Erin Wunker,
Dave Thomas, James McNevin, Caroline Kovesi, and Pamela Moss.
The fierce, creative, rigorous, and engaged community of feminist
geographers has been my intellectual home for many years now and I could
never do this work without their work. Our gatherings, conferences, and
book parties are so meaningful to me. I’ve been especially lucky to have
Heather McLean, Winifred Curran, Brenda Parker, Roberta Hawkins, Oona
Morrow, Karen Falconer Al Hindi, Tiffany Muller Myrdahl, Vannina
Sztainbok, and Beverley Mullings as friends, co-authors, and collaborators.
My mentors and advisors from graduate school continue to inspire me
and I’m grateful for everything they’ve done to help me succeed: Sherene
Razack, Helen Lenskyj, Gerda Wekerle, and Linda Peake.
My colleagues and students at Mount Allison University have fostered a
warm and invigorating environment for my work over the last ten years.
Special shout out to everyone who’s ever taken Gender, Culture, and the
City: this book is a pure distillation of what a particularly-engaged cohort
once called “Kernography.” Our conversations helped frame the goals for
this book.
My urban and not-so-urban adventures have been filled with fun and
sisterhood and travel and tattoos and cheese and impractical footwear
because of my two girl gangs, the Pink Ladies of Toronto and the Sackville
Lady Posse. In order of appearance in my life: Jennifer Kelly, Kris
Weinkauf, Katherine Krupicz, Sarah Gray, Cristina Izquierdo, Michelle
Mendes, Katie Haslett, Jane Dryden, Shelly Colette, and Lisa Dawn
Hamilton.
I’ve always had the unfailing support of my family, including my
parents, Dale and Ralph, and my brother Josh, as well as a big network of
extended family—biological and otherwise. My partner Peter makes the
coffee every morning, which basically allowed me to write every word of
this book. My daughter Maddy is an absolute light. I love you all and
deeply appreciate everything you do for me.
Introduction
City of Men
I have an old picture of my little brother and I surrounded by dozens of
pigeons in London’s Trafalgar Square. I’m guessing from our matching
bowl cuts and bell-bottom corduroys that it’s 1980 or 1981. We’re happily
tossing out seeds that our parents purchased from a little vending machine
in the square. You won’t find those machines anymore because feeding the
pigeons is strictly frowned upon, but back then it was one of the best parts
of our trip to visit my dad’s family. We were in the centre of everything, our
excitement palpable. In our glowing faces I see the beginning of our mutual
lifelong love of London and city life.
Josh and I came into the world via downtown Toronto, but our parents
raised us in the suburbs. Although Mississauga’s population makes it one of
the largest and most diverse cities in Canada, its essence in the 1980s was
car-centred suburban mall-scape. My brother and I each moved to Toronto
as soon as we could, rejecting suburbia faster than we could say “Yonge-
University-Spadina Line.” But our experiences of city life have been vastly
different. I doubt Josh has ever had to walk home with his keys sticking out
from his fist or been shoved for taking up too much space with a baby
stroller. Since we share the same skin colour, religion, ability, class
background, and a good chunk of our DNA, I have to conclude that gender
is the difference that matters.
Disorderly Women
Women have always been seen as a problem for the modern city. During the
Industrial Revolution, European cities grew quickly and brought a chaotic
mix of social classes and immigrants to the streets. The Victorian social
norms of the time included strict boundaries between classes and a firm
etiquette designed to protect the purity of high status white women. This
etiquette was fractured by the increased urban contact between women and
men, and between women and the city’s great seething masses. “The
gentleman and, worse still, the gentlewoman were forced to rub shoulders
with the lower orders and be buffeted and pushed with little ceremony or
deference,” writes cultural historian Elizabeth Wilson.1 The “contested
terrain” of Victorian London had opened space for women to “claim
themselves as part of a public,” especially with respect to debates about
safety and sexual violence, explains historian Judith Walkowitz.2 However,
this chaotic transition time meant it was increasingly difficult to discern
status and a lady on the streets was at risk of the ultimate insult: being
mistaken for a “public woman.”
This threat to the supposedly natural distinctions of rank and the
shakiness of barriers of respectability meant that for many commentators of
the time, urban life itself was a threat to civilization. “The condition of
women,” explains Wilson, “became the touchstone for judgments on city
life.”3 Women’s gradually expanding freedoms were thus met with moral
panic over everything from sex work to bicycles. The countryside along
with the newly expanding suburbs would provide a suitable retreat for the
middle and upper classes and most importantly, safety and continued
respectability for women.
While some women needed to be protected from the city’s messy
disorder, other women were in need of control, re-education, and perhaps
even banishment. Growing attention to city life made the conditions of the
working class more visible and increasingly unacceptable to the middle
class. Who better to blame than women, who had come to cities to find
work in factories and domestic service, thus turning the family “upside
down,” according to Engels. Women’s participation in paid labour meant
some small amount of independence and of course less time for domestic
responsibilities within their own homes. Poor women were cast as domestic
failures whose inability to keep clean homes was to blame for the
“demoralization” of the working class. This demoralization expressed itself
through vice and other kinds of problematic private and public behaviours.
All of this was viewed as a deeply unnatural state of affairs.
Of course, the greatest social evil was that of prostitution, which had the
potential to destroy the family, shake the foundations of society, and spread
disease. In the pre-germ theory understanding of the time, disease was
believed to be spread by an airborne miasma carried by noxious sewer
odours. The concept of a moral miasma emerged as well: the idea that one
could be infected by depravity via sheer proximity to those who carried it.
Writers of the time were scandalized by the common presence of
“streetwalkers” who openly plied their trade, tempting good men into a
world of vice. Women were also “constantly exposed to temptation, and,
once ‘fallen’, a woman was doomed, many reformers believed, to a life of
increasing degradation and an early and tragic death.”4
The solution proposed by many, including Charles Dickens, was for
fallen women to emigrate to the colonies where they might marry one of
many surplus settler men and be restored to respectability. Out here, the
need to protect white women settlers from the menace of the “native”
provided one rationale for the containment and elimination of Indigenous
populations from urbanizing areas. Popular novels of the day depicted
sensational stories of kidnap, torture, rape, and forced marriage of white
women by marauding, vengeful “savages.” These new fortified settler cities
would mark the transition from frontier to civilization and the purity and
safety of white women would complete the metamorphosis.
On the flip side, Indigenous women were seen as threats to this urban
transformation. Their bodies carried the capacity to reproduce the
“savagery” that colonizers sought to contain. They also held important
positions of cultural, political, and economic power in their communities.
Stripping Indigenous women of this power by imposing European
patriarchal family and governance systems while simultaneously
dehumanizing Indigenous women as primitive and promiscuous laid the
groundwork for the legal and geographic processes of dispossession and
displacement.5 Thus, the degradation and stigmatization of Indigenous
women were part of the urbanization process. Given the extraordinary rates
of violence against Indigenous women and girls today in settler colonial