Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

Recent years have seen efforts to critique the dichotomy of ‘nature’ and ‘society’ in Western thought, and to demonstrate their coconstruction under specific material conditions. As yet, however, little work has uncovered the discourses of animality that lie buried within a social field whose ontological status until recently has been securely ‘human’. In this paper, I show how Western concepts of animality have circulated across the nature border and into a politics of social relations. Concepts of savagery and vulgarity can, in particular, be found within racialised representational systems with whose historicity, I will be suggesting, we can make fresh critical engagements. In much recent work on colonial power formations, ‘othering’ practices have been implicitly conceived within a psychoanalytic frame—one in which the white self's ‘interior beasts’ are anxiously displaced onto an externalised other. Whilst not refuting the efficacy of repression I wish to historicise the workings of a peculiar western model of the Human self, ‘split’ into physical ‘animal’ and cultural ‘human’. This is done both through an extended theoretical account, followed by a microstudy of geographies of savagery and civility in Sydney, Australia.

In this paper I examine the interplay of race and sexuality in 19th-century British colonial legislation concerning prostitution. I demonstrate that British systems of regulation of prostitution predated the introduction of the Contagious Diseases Act in 1864, and that rather than spreading from Britain to its colonies regulationist measures developed from the interplay of metropolitan-colonial relations. The example of Hong Kong serves to illustrate both the priority of colonial systems for the regulation of prostitution and the explicitly racialised nature of this legislation. I argue that colonial practice served as more than a merely legislative precedent for domestic measures, however, as racial discourse and practice can be seen to mark all attempts at the regulation of prostitution, at home and abroad; and the conception of ‘racialised sexuality’ is useful for understanding both colonial and domestic measures for the regulation of prostitution. Understanding the historical geography of regulation therefore undermines conventional analyses of relations between imperial metropole and colonial periphery, and directs our attention to the articulated categories of race, class, sexuality, and gender in the complex colonial spaces of the British imperium.

This paper is an investigation of the social, economic, legal, and cultural factors underlying the move, in New York City, to regulate the sale of pornographic materials through the promulgation of zoning laws. The campaign to zone out pornography, a point of solidarity around which a number of disparate and often hostile interest groups have rallied in order to reclaim public space in the name of community (as though the term itself were transparent and monovocal) is linked to both gentrification and the socioeconomic dynamics underlying the emergence of what Neil Smith has characterized as the revanchist city. ‘Quality of life’ issues stand euphemistically for the domestication and sanitization of an urban landscape whose perceived unruliness is emblematized not only by the presence of large numbers of homeless people, but also by the outré display of sexually explicit imagery associated with XXX-rated businesses. By focusing on the discursive strategies that seek to identify sex shops with so-called ‘secondary impacts’ such as increased crime and decreasing property values, I aim to uncover the social biases and economic motivations that work to shape the urban landscape. I argue that the move to zone out pornography in New York City is imbricated within larger spatial practices that operate both to maximize the productivity of social space and to reproduce the social values of the majority.

In the decade following the 1969 Stonewall Riots, identity politics in New York City enabled the construction of a socially and recreationally defined homogeneous gay identity. But contrary to common self-congratulatory accounts that have made their way into the social scientific literature, this gay identity was woefully unprepared to launch an effective political response to AIDS in the 1980s. The AIDS activism movement which did finally emerge in the form of ACT UP/New York was born from within the gay identity, but it embraced a more expansive coalitional politics. Its amplified vision called for a critique not only of medical research procedures and public funding initiatives but also of the larger political-economic and social structures that had translated a medical emergency into a social catastrophe. This more expansive politics gave rise to the Queer movement, premised less on essential identity than on affinity of commitment. But this political evolution was not internally uncontested: the more privileged white middle-class men within ACT UP resisted any movement away from a narrowly medical approach to AIDS for those with access. The resulting conflict eventually crippled ACT UP, perhaps irrevocably. Some gay and queer geographical theorizing has learned from the Queer movement and has embraced the politics of affinity, in that it has been willing to incorporate in its analyses an investigation of the ways in which gay identity politics is implicated in the wider systems of stratification along axes of gender, race, and class. But most gay geography remains trapped in the rather narrow vision of identity politics.

In this paper we contribute to recent discussions of ageing and ageism in human geography. Findings are presented from a qualitative study of older people which explored the association of old-age identities with different spaces. By focusing in particular on leisure spaces, some of the ways in which the identities and spaces available to older people are constructed by class, ability, and gender are highlighted. These sites have different meanings and associations, reflecting positive as well as negative discourses of ‘old age’, allowing some individuals to negotiate ‘old age’ through maintaining distinct and separate leisure activities and spaces.

‘Jerusalem’ conveys intensely spiritual meanings seeming to preclude political accommodation. A total solution that is absolutely clear to all parties seems impossible. Yet the several names, conceptions, and geographical denotations associated with the city offer options that lend themselves to creative and flexible negotiations that emphasize coping based on exploitation of the ambiguity inherent in the city's nature. More precisely, the intention is to blunt the emotions, whose source is religious, that the name ‘Jerusalem’ awakens, in a way that will allow coping in the realms of political and adminstration with greater success.