Towards a Feminist Political Epistemology of the City

• In Event: Insurgencies and Assemblies: Towards a Politics of the Street

Abstract

At the close of her 1990 Justice and the Politics of Difference, feminist political theorist Iris Young argued for the city as a normative ideal for a feminist democratic politics. Young argued that the experience of “social relations of difference without exclusion” is central to her politics of difference and is best found in the experience of city life. Young’s city as normative ideal is an articulation of the city’s potentiality rather than its actuality, since she is frank about the real existing social injustices that characterize the contemporary city. But the city she was reading in 1989 is quite different from the city we read now in 2019; the master text of the city has been rewritten. In this paper I argue that the potential of unassimilated difference that Young saw in the city is increasingly out of reach. Instead, difference in the city is ‘curated’ for a certain dominant audience, just as the variety of goods in our grocery stores and thrift shops are. This curated experience of difference is offered as authentic, however, and the loss of unassimilated difference disavowed through “a process that hides the apparatus of domination from the dominant themselves” – the process that Sarah Schulman, in her 2012 Gentrification of the Mind, identifies as gentrification. Drawing together work from feminist political theory, critical urban geography, neoliberalism, racial capitalism, architecture and theories of space, I develop political epistemology as a method for reading the city in order both to bring this apparatus of domination into view and to fight back against it.

Author

• Sina Jo Kramer, Loyola Marymount University