Guillaume Marche, La militance LGBT aux États-Unis : sexualité et subjectivité

Le mouvement LGBT américain a-t-il perdu plus qu’il n’a gagné ? En dépit de toutes ses réussites institutionnelles, commerciales et législatives au cours des quarante dernières années, le mouvement a-t-il manqué l’occasion d’instaurer la libération sexuelle ? Malgré toutes les promesses radicales de la politique queer au début des années 1990, comment et à quel moment le pouvoir transformateur de ce mouvement social est-il perdu ? Ce sont les questions que Guillaume Marche aborde dans La mili..

Redistributing More Than the LGBTQ2S Acronym? Planning Beyond Recognition and Rainbows on Vancouver's Periphery

Just urban planning recognizes sociocultural differences and addresses inequality by implementing redistributive mechanisms that move beyond urban neoliberal practices of aestheticization and festivalization. Such planning practices are only beginning to address sexual and gender minority recognition in central urban areas while metronormative assumptions about their geographies absolve suburban municipalities of accountability for LGBTQ+ inclusions. In suburban municipalities, therefore, an LGBTQ+ politics of recognition rarely synchronizes with a politics of redistribution to foster sustained and transformative responses across the professional and managerial boundaries between planning and other local government functions. Consequently, a reparative civic "rainbowization" stands in for transformative urban planning, producing only partial and commodifiable inclusions in the landscape that become absolution for inaction on more evidence-based goals and measurable targets. Drawing on a database of public-facing communication records referencing LGBTQ2S themes for three adjacent peripheral municipalities in the Vancouver city-region (Burnaby, New Westminster, and Surrey), this article analyses the tension between contemporary planning’s civic actions of LGBTQ+ recognition and outcomes of redistribution. In suburban municipalities, a rainbow-washing politics of recognition sidelines transformative planning and policy resulting in little more than the distribution of the LGBTQ2S acronym across municipal documents

Queer(ing) Urban Planning and Municipal Governance

To queer urban planning and municipal governance requires explicit civic engagement with sexual and gender minority inclusions, representations and needs in urban plans and policies across departmental and committee silos. This collection questions the hetero-cis-normative assumptions of urban planning and examines the integration of LGBTQ+ issues in municipal governance at the interface of community activism, bureaucratic procedures, and political intervention. The editorial summarizes the contributions to this thematic issue within a tripartite thematic framework: 1) counter-hegemonic reactions to hetero-cis-normativities; 2) queering plans and policies; and 3) governance coalitions and LGBTQ+ activisms

(Re)Reading the 'Loft Living'"Habitus" in Montréal's Inner City

Over the past two decades, converted loft spaces have emerged as an important element of the North American inner-city landscape. Originating within the specific social and economic conditions of Manhattan's SoHo (South of Houston) District in the 1970s, lofts have come to exemplify a conjunction between culture and economy in the restructuring of the contemporary city. In the gentrification literature, however, the idea of 'culture' and its role in urban change remains weakly conceptualized as 'arts-related investment' and 'heritage preservation'. In this paper I untangle this relationship and realign the cultural with socio-spatial practice to examine the production of a loft landscape in inner-city Montréal. This case study illustrates the weak role played by capital accumulation strategies in the production of this landscape in Montréal and highlights the importance of a North-America-wide cultural construction of the SoHo loft and its reproduction in other cities. I argue that the media serves as a site and agent in the re-coding of inner city industrial landscapes by repeatedly representing lofts as the 'authentic' domain of the avant-garde. In the case of Montréal, the reconstruction of a loft landscape further depends on local cultural forms that map and translate the loft lifestyle and aesthetic in the local material environment and build relationships between local conditions and identities, and SoHo. Finally, drawing on interviews with Montréal loft tenants, I illustrate how inner-city identities are constructed through socio-spatial practices. Copyright Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998.

St. Lawrence Boulevard as third city

At the end of the nineteenth century, St. Lawrence Boulevard, popularly known as 'the Main', attained mythical status in Montreal. Due to its particular location in the social and cultural geography of Montreal, the Main, which symbolically divides the working-class Francophone east and the Anglophone bourgeois west, has developed as a mixed-use commercial artery, an eclectic border zone of a bilingual, multi-ethnic city. The heterogeneous character of the Main is reflected in its material landscape---with its old and now largely re-used garment sweat-shops and labour halls, theatres of the red-light district, cafes, and the shops and restaurants of the mid-twentieth century immigrant shopping corridor. Shaped by the diversity of the populations that came to live, work, protest, shop or be entertained in these sites, it is an example of the social and cultural diversity of the metropolis. Such heterogeneous sites have often been interpreted as liminal spaces, but this research demonstrates that the construction and experience of the Main as a border zone have rarely been gender neutral. While physical, social and cultural heterogeneity are components of this landscape, these sites also attest to the importance of gender relations in the experience of the Main as a place of work and social life and, ultimately, as a space of representation. Its border status has often been represented through discourses and images of 'marginal' womanhood, articulated in terms of social, occupational, political, sexual and/or ethnic identity. Many of its locales, moreover, have been sites where women entered urban public life in contentious and distinctive ways.As a place that highlights the social and cultural heterogeneity of a supposedly 'divided' city, the Main is an ideal site from which to explore how ethnicity, language, class, occupation and sexual identity intersect with gender in the experience and representation of urban life. This thesis examines how a multiplicity of female gender identities have been defined and contested along the Main over the past century. It contributes to a broad literature on geographies of gender, difference and urban public cultures through an analysis of the relationships between feminist spatial metaphors and the material production of urban space. Through a series of events that move through time and sections of St. Lawrence, I examine how portions of the landscape of this boulevard have been marked by the enactment of specific sets of gender relations and forms of representation that became central to civic debates regarding gender. I argue that the construction and experience of the Main as a border zone has involved the production of specific relations of gender, alterity and space.A variety of qualitative methods and archival sources are used to illustrate the importance of representations of gender to the production of this place and to illustrate how women have experienced and made use of material sites to express their specific occupational, cultural, religious, social or sexual identities. This thesis demonstrates the crucial role played by the border zones of urban public cultures in the construction of female identities that depart from dominant gender norms in the expression of social, cultural and sexual differences