Borderline bodies

This chapter is about borders that are made and broken at gay pride parades. Specifically, I examine the discursive and material borders maintained in tourism discourse. Binary oppositions such as self/other, straight/gay, and tourist/host provide a focus for this chapter. I am interested in where these borders wear thin and threaten to break and disrupt social order. I explore the bodies of gay pride parades because it is bodies such as these that threaten the borders of corporeal acceptability

Letter: Equal Rights Supporter

A form letter from Edna L. Saffy , chairperson, Florida Parades for the ERA to Equal Rights Supporter inviting them to participate in “Florida Parades For The Equal Rights Amendment” in Tallahassee Florida. Date: April 14, 1975

Independence Day 1866

The grand national holiday was a quiet one in Adams County in 1866. Gettysburg was a ghost town. No fireworks. No parades. No mass celebrations. In the woods around the county, small knots of citizens gathered for picnics. Escaping the hot, dusty streets of the towns was obviously a boon for anyone who, as the Adams Sentinel put it, “embraced the opportunity of rusticating for the day.” [excerpt

Imagining a New Belfast: Municipal Parades in Urban Regeneration

This work highlights civic events and celebration as functional components of Belfast, Northern Ireland's ongoing post-conflict regeneration. Exploring the broad networks that fund and organize such events through a material semiotic approach, this dissertation sketches an outline of the process that produces parades, and examines the motivations and intentions behind them. It finds that parades function within a negotiated process of "place-making" to convey idealized visions of a peaceful "New Belfast". In particular the tropes of multiculturalism and European identity are repeated as aspirational ideals for Belfast's regeneration. The parades display, and in doing so reify these ideals as a temporary reality. Longer-term effects of the parades are difficult to determine, but they may potentially change public opinion regarding the social space of the city center, leading to more integrated and liberal use of the city center. In these events, issues central to Belfast's political life--from tourism, physical redevelopment, to European integration--are addressed through carnivalesque play and performance, as the events' producers and participants imagine Belfast's future urban identity

Signs of Spiritual Crisis or Evidence of Unexpected Commitment? Attitudes to Compulsory Church Parades in the First AIF

This study explores the attitude of Anzac soldiers to the compulsory Church Parades, drawing evidence from a reading of the diaries and letters of over a thousand soldiers. It examines the complex reactions to Church Parade and draw conclusions about the varied attitudes of soldiers who recorded attending Church Parades in their letters and diaries. Far from producing definitive evidence for the irrelevance of religion to Australian soldiers during the Great War, the study highlights the range of religious attitudes, including the surprising number of soldiers who recorded positive responses to these parades. Even negative attitudes to Church Parades could stem not just from the secular soldiers, but also from the disappointment which religiously committed soldiers felt during times of forced religious activity. Responses to compulsory religious activities in the army do not uniformly support the irreligious nature of the Anzacs. Rather they show that a significant minority — larger and more expressive than generally imagined, and not all of them devout — valued religion and recorded their sentiments about it in their personal writings

Cultural Vitality in Communities: Interpretation and Indicators

This report introduces a definition of cultural vitality that includes the range of cultural activity people around the country find significant. We use this definition as a lens to clarify our understanding of data necessary, as well as the more limited data currently available, to document arts and culture in communities in a consistent, recurrent and reliable manner. Specifically, we define cultural vitality as evidence of creating, disseminating, validating, and supporting arts and culture as a dimension of everyday life in communities. We develop and recommend an initial set of arts and culture indicators derived from nationally available data, and compare selected metropolitan areas based on these measures. Policy and planning implications for use of the cultural vitality definition and related measures are discussed

Phantom German Air Raids on Canada: War Hysteria in Quebec and Ontario during the First World War

In late August of 1914, Canada entered the First World War following the unanimous vote of a special session of Parliament. This event occurred amid great exuberance and unanimity, and was marked by parades, decorations, cheering crowds and patriotic speeches. Canada was situated far from the European front lines, and its distant, vast land mass and cold climate also contributed to a feeling of insulation from attack or invasion. However, despite a general feeling of distance from the war\u27s unfolding events, there was a rapidly growing realization that German sympathizers and enemy agents might pose a more immediate threat

Post-Katrina Suppression of Black Working-Class Political Expression

New Orleans politicians, with the aid of the federal government, used the destruction and displacement caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to implement policies that discouraged low-income and working class black residents from returning to New Orleans. Impacted communities felt the need to revitalize street parades (second-line parades), a traditional communal neighborhood activity, as an instrument of political protest. In response the City used minor municipal ordinances to more vigorously regulate these parades, doubling the fees imposed for street parades and effectively shutting them down. The City’s response raised important constitutional questions about government suppression of speech and freedom of association. This article is an examination of how the racially biased use of city permitting structures impacted working-class blacks in New Orleans post-Katrina. It is a cautionary tale about how cities can enforce social control by manipulating tiny details in municipal laws. It is a lesson for other diverse communities about what can happen to minority subcultures in the wake of recovery efforts after a natural disaster. The devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and its aftermath dramatically impacted the City’s black working-class, almost half of whose residents were spread across the country (McKernan and Mulcahy 2008). The collapse of the levee walls flooding eighty percent of the city “not only caused immense damage to homes and public institutions... [it] also destabilized the culture of New Orleans, perhaps irrevocably ” (McKernan and Mulcah

A soundtrack to the insurrection : street music, marching bands and popular protest

What happens in social movements when people actually move, how does the mobile moment of activism contribute to mobilisation? Are they marching or dancing? How is the space of action, the street itself, altered, re-sounded? The employment of street music in the very specific context of political protest remains a curiously under-researched aspect of cultural politics in social movements.... By looking at the marching bands of different socio- political and cultural contexts, primarily British, I aim to further current understanding of the idea and history of street music itself, as well as explore questions of the construction or repositioning of urban space via music'how the sound of music can alter spaces'; participation, pleasure and the political body; subculture and identity

Parade Disputes in Northern Ireland: Roadblocks on the Path to a Lasting Peace

Since the 1998 Belfast Agreement, the peace process in Northern Ireland has seen mixed success. One area that has seen less success is the disputes over Unionist parades. The majority of the routes used for Orange Order parades remain undisputed, but tensions arise in interface areas, where Republican neighborhoods connect with those of the Loyalists. Even though these parades have been conducted since the 1800s, they have not been contested until recently. The reasons for the creation of disputes could be political leverage or financial gain for certain community groups and political parties. By examining the case study of the historic dispute surrounding the Drumcree parade in Portadown that began in 1986, interviewing academics who are subject matter experts, and utilizing archival data, this project will analyze the recent and ongoing parade dispute in the Ardoyne area of Belfast to understand how this and future disputes disrupt the peace process