GEOG 4280 3.0 | Imagining Toronto
Department of Geography
Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies
York University
Winter Term 2011-2012
Week 12
Week 12
21 March 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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• 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 12
21 March 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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• Disobedience
• Play
• Transgression
• Autonomy, individuality
• Inefficiency, immediacy
• Tensions between order and disorder
• In short, “desire lines” have all the character of desire itself.
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GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/genista/7407509/
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Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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“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]
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21 March 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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“He had arrived in love, in a new city. From out of Tim’s presence and his paths through Toronto, David had begun seeing another city, began writing it in his head. In reality, gay Toronto was a small town: its meeting places were few, faces repeated, it was banal and provincial, with the pallor of oppression. The red-brick buildings obscured the reality that hatred as well as neighbourliness and discrimination as well as friendliness could co-exist in the expanse of Metro that stretched beyond the restricted confines of the gay ghetto. For David, it seemed to hold a whole lost civilization in its ways of moving and feeling. It was an eternal city, greeting him with a kind of tacky
Latinity.”
[Gordon Stewart Anderson, 2006. The Toronto You Are Leaving.
Toronto: Untroubled heart.]
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21 March 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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“He wanted to get it down, to make it real. He wrote himself notes, scraps of dialogue, short poems. It was called Toronto but then impossible things sent you sailing off the map. Ontario opened on the sea, tasted salt and human.
Young men with names like Tim and David fell in love at non-existent intersections. Poets dropped by, famous lovers […] And his city’s dizzying architecture, its high-hearted manner, its delicious language, shaped themselves along the lines of Tim’s body.”
[Anderson, 1996: 91]
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21 March 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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“He kept telling himself to hurry, to get down the words that held it. Tim, its founder and foundation, was real and solid enough, but the city wasn’t. It wasn’t a feeling of any sort. It was all intuitive, from off to the side of the mind. It came around you only at lucky moments, like a city in the wind.”
[Anderson,2006: 91]
Week 12
21 March 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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• 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?
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21 March 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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• 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)
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21 March 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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• 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?
Week 12
21 March 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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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)
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21 March 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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“[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]
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21 March 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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Saliva and semen and butter and baby oil, tongues and thumbs and fingers of women,
[…] the intersection of Bathurst and Queen,
Honest Ed’s Warehouse,
Hamilton Ontario,
And just today the CN Tower:
I came all over Bay Street, as the world’s highest disco rotated upon my prostate.
[…]
GO FREE TORONTONIANS!
The small scarifice
Of a very large asshole.
[Daniel Jones, “Thing s That I Have Put Into My Asshole.”]
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21 March 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
19

“[…] there in the dim light he signalled; I followed him into some intricate recess of patterned buildings, where with him
I entered into congress grim and lovely, felt his manhood’s slim mastery, his boyhood’s loneliness.
[…] tortured and lost; we made our way by separate paths out of that place, a sort of courtyard, foul by day, where neighbouring skyscrapers embrace and mingle, leaving lust a place to seek out from the winter cold, in cities where love is bought and sold.
[Edward Lacey, “Quintillas; late 1950s]
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21 March 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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“This is a bust, you goddamn cocksuckers!” the beefier of the two thugs yelled at Bob, as he now held him in a hammerlock on the floor of the cubicle. “Get your goddamn clothes on and line up in the showers with the others.” […] A few minutes later they were lined up with the other victims in the shower area, and a uniformed cop at a table was processing them slowly, one by one, filling in some kind of paper. The last thing Bob could remember before he fainted was a cop saying he sure wished those heating pipes had gas in them, the Germans really knew how to deal with queers.”
[John Grube, “Raid.” In I’m Supposed to Be Crazy and Other Stories.
Toronto: Dartington Press, 1997]
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21 March 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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“Under the wedding cake marquee of the theatre we saw photographs of large-breasted women, with nothing but pasties and G-strings. I had to look closer to see if they were live women. Their pink-and-white bodies had the matte look of delicious bread. Further down were movie posters of scantily-clad females in soft-porn romantic adventures. […] The inside lobby was dark and cavernous.
It was an old movie palace long past its prime. A huge candy bar counter jutted out into the lobby, where the walls were festooned with more pictures of nude women.
Off to the side, in a little alcove, stood the most amazing thing I had ever set eyes on. A golden plaster statue about seven feet high of a burlesque queen down to her G-string and pasties offered us the full wonders of the female body.”
[F.G. Paci, from Sex and Character.]
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21 March 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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“Look all you want, her face seemed to say, but you can never get inside. Wish and hope and drool, you cannibals, but you haven’t got a chance. My door’s closed. And toward the end of the performance I could clearly see that underneath her showmanship she was laughing at us. That the more she exposed her body, the more she hid herself behind her contempt. And when her abnormal breasts were fully exposed for a few seconds before the red velvet curtain closed at the end of the performance, dipping down to her navel like two huge udders, I caught the unmistakable sneer on her face.”
[ibid.]
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21 March 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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“Upstairs, second storey strip parlor built all wrong, the audience is in the dancer’s lap. That close, the dancer becomes just another girl, a woman with no clothes, sweat and stretch-marks, tiny webs of veins, everyday life bruises. Perfect distance is needed to measure a vision. I hesitate to place beauty: its hopelessness is the only reality. She risked that distance, making male masturbation motions, huge hard pumping, hissing through a red slashed mouth. As the lights died and she stooped to pick up her things the man in the front row reached through the unfair distance, touched her ankle, and leapt back, stumbling, escaping. The man left, furious, humiliated, ice-cold in the finger-tips.”
[Robert Markle, “Blazing Figures’]
Week 12
21 March 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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“The hideous ones. Those were the longings about bodies hurt or torn apart or bludgeoned. No one had actually confided details to Tuyen. She had intuited these, perceived them from a stride, a dangling broken bracelet—a rapist’s treasure, each time he rubbed the jagged piece he remembered his ferocity […] Some Tuyen got from newspaper articles—one about twin brothers dying at a karaoke bar: Phu Hoa Le and Lo Dai Le. The four men in bandanas came into the bar and started shooting.
What were their longings—the ones dying and the ones shooting? Or, on the same page, the owners of a puppy farm with a hundred puppies mistreated in a filthy barn.
Their longings would certainly surprise—she knew how people lived two lives, one most times the antithesis of the other.”
[Dionne Brand, What We All Long For]
Week 12
21 March 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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“When I saw her picture on The Metropolitan’s front page, I recognised her instantly. I had seen her often, shopping at
Angelo’s with her mother. Five years old, curly red hair, a fondness for bananas. […] Last seen alive on a Wednesday afternoon, around four-fifteen, at the mini-park one block over from ours. “
“Four days later they found her body in a refrigerator in a second-floor apartment rented by a man, supposedly from out west, who had been going by the name Devlin
Smythe. […] His landlady called the police to say she hadn’t seen him, not since that little girl disappeared, and that he was overdue with the rent. A string of minor breakins in the neighbourhood came to an end about the same time. The police figured she hadn’t lived much more than an hour after her disappearance from the playground.
She’d been suffocated.”
[Linwood Barclay, Bad Move]
Week 12
21 March 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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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 12
21 March 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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“[T]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.”
[Margaret Atwood, “Giving Birth”]
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21 March 2012
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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