GEOG 4280 3.0 | Imagining Toronto
Department of Geography
Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies
York University
Winter Term 2010-2011
Week 10
Desire Lines: Gender and
Sexuality in Toronto
Literature
Week 10
9 March 2011
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
1
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]
Week 10
9 March 2011
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
2
Reading and Interpreting
Toronto Literature
1.
2.
3.
Thinking about the Toronto context
Thinking about the critical perspective(s) you
are bringing to your reading
Thinking about the meanings of the literary
works themselves
… and doing so as a geographer.
Week 10
9 March 2011
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
3
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 10
9 March 2011
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
4
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.
Week 10
9 March 2011
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
5
Suggested Structure
Section
Content
Pages
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
4
Conclusion.
1 at most
Don’t forget to choose an interesting title and provide
full references and notes as necessary.
Week 10
9 March 2011
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
6
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 10
9 March 2011
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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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 10
9 March 2011
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
8
Week 8
24 October 2007
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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Week 8
24 October 2007
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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Week 8
24 October 2007
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/genista/7407509/
Week 10
9 March 2011
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
12
Week 8
24 October 2007
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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Week 8
24 October 2007
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
14
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 10
9 March 2011
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
15
“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.]
Week 10
9 March 2011
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
16
“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]
Week 10
9 March 2011
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
17
“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 10
9 March 2011
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
18
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?
Week 10
9 March 2011
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
19
• 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)
Week 10
9 March 2011
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
20
• 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 10
9 March 2011
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
21
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 10
9 March 2011
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
22
“[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]
Week 10
9 March 2011
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
23
Objektsexualitat?
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.”]
Week 10
9 March 2011
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
24
“[…] 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]
Week 10
9 March 2011
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
25
“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]
Week 10
9 March 2011
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
26
The Victory Burlesque
“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.]
Week 10
9 March 2011
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
27
“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.]
Week 10
9 March 2011
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
28
“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 10
9 March 2011
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
29
Desire’s Dark Side
“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 10
9 March 2011
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
30
“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 10
9 March 2011
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
31
The Word Made Flesh
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 10
9 March 2011
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
32
“[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”]
Week 10
9 March 2011
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
33
Week 10
9 March 2011
GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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