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Week 8 3 March 2010 GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 1 Week 8 Desire Lines: Gender and Sexuality in Toronto Literature GEOG.

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Presentation on theme: "Week 8 3 March 2010 GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 1 Week 8 Desire Lines: Gender and Sexuality in Toronto Literature GEOG."— Presentation transcript:

1 Week 8 3 March 2010 GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 1 Week 8 Desire Lines: Gender and Sexuality in Toronto Literature GEOG 4280 3.0 | Imagining Toronto Department of Geography Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies York University Winter Term 2009-2010

2 Week 8 3 March 2010 GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 2 The difference between reading a story and studying a story is the difference between living the story and killing the story and looking at its guts. Cory Doctorow, Eastern Standard Tribe. Tor: 2004]

3 Week 8 3 March 2010 GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 3 Reading and Interpreting Toronto Literature 1.Thinking about the Toronto context 2.Thinking about the critical perspective(s) you are bringing to your reading 3.Thinking about the meanings of the literary works themselves … and doing so as a geographer.

4 Critical Geographical Perspectives Analyses of race and culture: postcolonial perspectives (e.g., informed by the work of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Slavoj Zizek) Analyses of class, labour, alienation: (Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, James Rinehart, Marxist approaches) Analyses of gender and sexuality feminist approaches; Judtih Butler on body as performance; queer space (e.g., Gill Valentine, David Bell) Discourse analysis: Foucault Hybridity & “thirdspace”: Edward Soja Phenomenology: Heidegger, Yi-fu Tuan, Edward Casey, Robert Mugerauer, Martin Heidegger Psychogeography: de Certeau, Debord Etc. Week 8 3 March 2010 GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 4

5 Week 8 3 March 2010 GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 5 Suggestions for Writing Begin with a strong, clearly articulated thesis statement that explains WHAT you are going to explore, HOW you will explore it and WHY it is meaningful or important from a geographical perspective. Recommended: use separate sections for different parts of your paper and argument. Define all terms and concepts Use interesting and well-chosen examples and quotations. Do not try to do too much. A carefully crafted paper on a narrower subject is far more likely to succeed than a sprawling effort that tries to explain everything. Do not hesitate to write in the first person if it makes sense to do so.

6 Week 8 3 March 2010 GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 6 Suggested Structure SectionContentPages 1 Introduction (thesis statement, summary of arguments you will use) 1 or 2 2 Context / background (brief description of texts, clear explanation of the critical perspective you are bringing and how it is relevant to the works and to Toronto literature as a whole) 2 to 3 3 Analytical section and subsections: somewhere between three and five sets of closely related examples / evidence / dimensions are usually best. 6 to 8 4Conclusion.1 at most Don’t forget to choose an interesting title and provide full references and notes as necessary.

7 Desire Lines Originally a term used in transportation planning to refer to the “efficient” paths between commuting destinations (e.g., home, work, shopping). See Henry Fagin, 1960, “Improving Mobility Within the Metropolis”, Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science, 27(1): 61, referencing a 1944 traffic survey) Initially, “desire lines” focused on origins and destinations; the emphasis was on the economy, efficiency and rationality of movement. Throgmorton & Eckstein (2000) argued that such a narrow approach overlooked other flows between city spaces (especially those related to culture, family, recreation, etc.) Myhill (2004) redefines “desire lines” as “ a worn path showing where people naturally walk” and adds that “desire lines are an ultimate expression of human desire or natural purpose.” Tiessen (2007) argues that desire lines are as much about natural spaces as they are about human desire, in the sense that they reflect natural contours and seasonal cycles. Week 8 3 March 2010 GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 7

8 What do Desire Lines Reveal? Disobedience Play Transgression Autonomy, individuality Inefficiency, immediacy Tensions between order and disorder In short, “desire lines” have all the character of desire itself. Week 8 3 March 2010 GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 8

9 Week 8 3 March 2010 GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 9 Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/genista/7407509/

10 The Embodied City “Their bodies were as beautiful as a city not cared for much. His belly and hers were two bridges facing each other across a ravine. Their hair waved like the flags over the embassies. Their mouths were two open doors leading into a single building and, lying beside each other, they spread out like one smog cloud over two smokestacks. They ran like water, like the subway, from one end of the city to the other.” [Stephen Marche, Raymond and Hannah. Doubleday, 2005] Week 8 3 March 2010 GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 10

11 Week 8 3 March 2010 GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 11 The Sexual Geography of the City Sex and the city intersect in myriad ways. In an important sense the city is riddled with sex. Like sex, the city is plural, perplexing, perverse, transgressive and shifting. At the material level, we identify spaces and places charged with sexual significance: ‘red light’ districts, massage parlours, the Yonge Street ‘strip’, ‘the stroll’. Also more intimate locations: bedrooms, alleys, bushes. These are places where ‘sex happens’. Cities are also sites where sexuality is constructed and regulated. (the French philosopher Michel Foucault suggests sex is constructed [by whom?] in order to be regulated). The moral economy [ecology] of the city. Social constructions of sexuality: Frank Mort argues that sexual and moral identities are formed and transformed through the regulation, occupation, and experience of urban place. The reverse is also true: space is transformed by sexual practice, too. Examples?

12 Week 8 3 March 2010 GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 12 The moral economy [ecology] of sexuality: the ways sex / sexuality are permitted or prohibited (and the ways sexual practices resist regulation); the distinctions between public and private spaces; the most banal elements of urban planning and regulation (e.g., public washroom design and security? E.g., segregated shelters? E.g., sex in parks?) The point is that space/place are not passive in the experience, representation and regulation of urban sexualities. Judith Walkowitz explores the city as contested sexual terrain (cited in Mort): overlapping sexual narratives. These narratives are inscribed not only in physical place, but also in symbolic and imaginary urban landscapes, and are shaped by “social scripts of melodrama, science, and masculine and feminine [and also queer, transgendered, etc.]versions of cosmopolitanism.” And so: cities are also sexually symbolic. Buildings may be described in sexual terms (e.g., skyscrapers or the CN Tower as phallic symbols)

13 Week 8 3 March 2010 GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 13 There is also a performative aspect to urban sexualities. Examples? (e.g., club going, Pride weekend, the sexual politics of dress) After Chauncey, Mort observes that the diverse, fluid nature of cities underscores “the extremely porous nature of modern sexual identities” Mort distinguishes parallel and opposite urban projects: the first, to regulate and discipline sex; the second, to resist such efforts. He suggests a study of the interaction of these projects helps us examine how civic politics work: “Sexual bodies within city space present ambiguous and contradictory cultural values, which in many ways epitomize both the difficulties and the possibilities of the present-day metropolis.” (312-313) He asks, “How in the contemporary city can individuals talk to those who are other than themselves?” He suggests such projects should be explored locally, and suggests that different cities will manifest different sexualities. Where and how are sexualities constructed in Toronto? How might they differ from other cities? How possible is tolerance?

14 How do desire lines encourage us to rethink the embodied, gendered, sexualized city? Narratives told from the perspective of men: the male flaneur who possesses, controls and consumes the city The distinction between private and public, between visibility and invisibility, between city and suburb? What of the (female) prostitute, the “street walker”? (e.g., Nord, 1991) How do masculinized and feminized narratives of the city differ? (Nord suggests women’s narratives reflect a sense of transgression, awareness of being ‘othered,’ of being objectified and subject to the male gaze, of physical constraint, of in/visibility, of the need for disguises) How do we perform our sexuality in urban space? (exhibitionism, modesty, presence/absence, play, pursuit) Week 8 3 March 2010 GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 14

15 Week 8 3 March 2010 GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 15 “[T]hat summer I took a good long stare up the asshole of the monster that had become Canadian poetry. Prior to then, I had thought of poetry mostly in aesthetic terms. … I discovered a massive and absurd mutual admiration society where poetry was nothing more than the currency that brought greater currency – grants, teaching positions … sex and ever-illusive fame. … Canadian poetry had become a huge and corrupt institution. It was ugly, cynical, full of pettiness and hatred. I loved it. I too wanted a slice of the pie. I was going to be A Poet.” [Daniel Jones, from the Preface to the brave never write poetry. Coach House, 1985] Daniel Jones’ “Things”

16 Week 8 3 March 2010 GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 16 Opens with perverse but perhaps prosaic masturbatory descriptions. Fantasy. Then turns outward: the city as sexual stimulant; perhaps as an architectural fetish. (how) is the human body mapped onto the urban landscape? (Self-?) aggrandizement: the absurd and the colossal. The ecstasy is inverted: instead of the narrator’s pleasure, it is the city / the Tower that is spent. The narrator’s sexual role is narrated as a “sacrifice”; perhaps as a bottom/sub to the dom(inant) city “YOU ARE FREE NOW TORONTONIANS?” Why/how? Reading Jones

17 Week 8 3 March 2010 GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 17 Would Daniel Jones’ poem, “Things That I have Put into My Asshole” read differently if it was written from the perspective of a woman? How? Why? What is Daniel Jones really urging Toronto (and/or Toronto literature?) to "free" itself from? Behind its explicit and perhaps shocking nature, is there something urgent at stake in his plea? How might Jones’ poem be read in the context of Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For ? Some Questions

18 The Word Made Flesh: Birth and the City In many traditional cultures the placenta – the maternal organ that nurtures the unborn fetus until being expelled shortly after birth – is buried in the ground. Burying the placenta is believed variously to nurture the newborn child, predict future fertility and protect against evil. Burying the placenta in the soil also reminds us of the forces that bind us to place. Pregnancy and birth as intensely spatial experiences. The terrain of fine striations across the expanding belly becomes a bodily cartography, a permanent map of the glacial progress of pregnancy. Beyond the body, however, birth pushes us into unfamiliar territory, a displacement perhaps most acute in the city. Katrina Onstad’s Toronto novel, How Happy to Be (McClelland & Stewart, 1984): “When I try, here in the doctor’s office, to conjure up an image of myself with a child, my own arms holding my own child in my own apartment in my own city, I come up with white space and static.” Week 8 3 March 2010 GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 18

19 Patricia Pearson, Playing House (2001): Freddie tries to create a nest for her unborn child in a borrowed house while whispering to herself, “I just didn’t know for certain where home was.” Her ambivalent partner finds the shifting landscape of pregnancy equally unrecognisable: gazing upon fetal anatomy exposed via ultrasound, he compares it to a map of Bosnia, a place neither has ever been and which both can hardly imagine. After giving birth, Freddie emerges for air in the bleary winter light and finds the city’s landscape changed utterly as space, time and the narrative of her own life have all been ruptured and must now be re-written. Margaret Atwood, “Giving Birth” (1977): Shortly after giving birth, the narrator looks through her hospital window and observes, “the building is so thin, so fragile, that it quivers in the slight dawn wind. Jeannie sees that if the building is this way (a touch could destroy it, a ripple of the earth, why has no one noticed, guarded it against accident?) then the rest of the world must be like this too, the entire earth, the rocks, people, trees, everything needs to be protected, cared for, tended.” Week 8 3 March 2010 GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 19

20 this city I live in I built with bones and mortared with marrow; I planned it in my spare time and its hydro is charged from a blood niagara and I built this city backwards and the people evolved out of the buildings and the subway uterus ejected them – For i was the I interior the thing with a gold belt and delicate ears with no knees or elbows was working from the inside out. [Gwendolyn MacEwen, from A Breakfast for Barbarians ] Week 8 3 March 2010 GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 20

21 Week 8 3 March 2010 GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 21


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