Safe Space

Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence, Christina B. Hanhardt. Durham, Duke University Press, 2013. xii, 358 pp. $25.95 US (paper). Residents of the West Village in New York City held a Take Back Our Streets rally in May 2002, near the location of riots that broke out in June 1969 after police raided the Stonewall Inn bar. In the intervening thirty-three years, however, the terms of political struggle had become markedly different. Rather than sexual outcasts fighting back against police abuse, the 2002 gathering featured privileged (mainly white) gay, lesbian, and straight homeowners calling for police to step up enforcement of quality-of-life laws. And whereas the leaders of the Stonewall riots were sex workers and transgender people, many of them people of colour, the 2002 leaders singled out queer youth of colour and trans women of colour as the sources of their problems. The very association between the West Village and LGBT residential concentration provided political cover for the 2002 rally organizers, protecting them from accusations of discrimination. American Studies scholar Christina Hanhardt's complex and rewarding new book examines the multiple ironies of this turn of events. When did LGBT neighbourhood organizing campaigns shift from safe street patrols, which sought to protect LGBT people from anti-gay violence, to appeals to the police to enforce curfews that targeted queer youth of colour? The answer, she finds, lies with the LGBT rights movement's claims to neighbourhood--space--as a physical location for identity formation and political action. In the second half of the twentieth century, the Castro in San Francisco and Greenwich Village in New York City became centres of LGBT residence and social life. Residential patterns, cultural and social institutions, and commercial establishments defined these areas as neighbourhoods; association with a gay neighbourhood became intrinsic to gay and lesbian sexual identities. Gay neighbourhood-based identities also became markers of whiteness. Focusing on neighbourhood responses to violence, Hanhardt argues that by mooring a dominant understanding of sexual identity to place, the promotion and protection of gay neighborhoods have reinforced the race and class stratification of postwar urban space (9). The book's five chapters move chronologically, each focused on neighbourhood-based LGBT activism. A three-way tension pervades Hanhardt's case studies: liberal attempts to marshal government resources for economic opportunity; neoliberal plans to police personal conduct; and radical-left movements that celebrated alternative modes of free expression and community organizing

Criminology · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Space (punctuation) · European history and politics · Law · Philosophy