Is London open? Mediating and ordering cosmopolitanism in crisis

This article analyses cosmopolitan imagination and ambivalent morality at times of urban crisis. It focuses on #LondonIsOpen – the city’s media campaign in response to the nation’s Brexit vote. In this case, cosmopolitanism’s discursive tools – especially the ideals of the Open city and hospitality – are mobilised to summon a range of actors in defence of the city. The article analyses the mediation of cosmopolitanism in a campaign film and in Londoners’ online and offline responses to it. These responses reveal #LondonIsOpen as a compelling example of cosmopolitan imagination, but also of cosmopolitanism’s moral fragility in the neoliberal city. As shown, urban dwellers overwhelmingly embrace the cosmopolitan value of openness. Yet, their visions are divided between neoliberal cosmopolitanism and vernacular cosmopolitanism. By analysing the moral space of mediated cosmopolitanism, I argue that, unlike the nation, representational struggles in the city increasingly take place within, rather than against, cosmopolitanis

The independent group looks at London's west end

In the early 1950s, British culture was dominated by welfare-state visions of urban reconstruction. These projections of a stable civic society were premised on a particular way of looking at and reading the metropolitan environment. At odds with this project, the Independent Group's discussions and collaborative work developed an alternative urban semiology, which found the city to be already rich in visual resources for fashioning a more profound form of social democracy. Soon, this critical engagement would develop in different directions, represented here by Lawrence Alloway's commentary on Piccadilly Circus in his essay 'City Notes' and the London footage inserted by John McHale into his film for the Smithsons' Berlin Hauptstadt project (both 1959). By the end of the 1950s, members of the erstwhile Independent Group had produced two contrasting critical accounts of how the metropolitan centre should be looked at, which challenged the strictures of post-war reconstruction in distinct and conflicting ways. © The Author(s), 2013

An intimate and imperial feminism: Meliscent Shephard and the regulation of prostitution in colonial India

This paper seeks to construct an antinostalgic portrait of an imperial feminist. As the representative of the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene (AMSH) in India between 1928 and 1947, Meliscent Shephard was an embodiment not only of the feminist urge to challenge patriarchal gender relations, but also of the imperialist urge to classify and fathom the world through a series of racist typologies. Despite an earlier belief that blame for the exploitation of prostitutes lay with the colonial state and economy, she later fell back on explanations based on notions of Indian society and religion. Operating in a period of heightened anticolonial nationalism, these latter views thwarted any hope of her forging successful connections with emergent Indian social reform groups. This failure to cultivate intimate relations with Indian colleagues marks a failure at the level of national and racial politics. Shephard did, however, cultivate an intimate relationship with correspondents at the AMSH in London, while her experiences of the sexual geographies of Indian cities provided a form of intimate interaction that would inspire her mission to close down tolerated brothels. As such, this paper marks an empirical engagement with the intimate frontiers at which the affective grid of colonial politics was marked out

Garotas de loja, história social e teoria social [Shop Girls, Social History and Social Theory]

Shop workers, most of them women, have made up a significant proportion of Britain’s labour force since the 1850s but we still know relatively little about their history. This article argues that there has been a systematic neglect of one of the largest sectors of female employment by historians and investigates why this might be. It suggests that this neglect is connected to framings of work that have overlooked the service sector as a whole as well as to a continuing unease with the consumer society’s transformation of social life. One element of that transformation was the rise of new forms of aesthetic, emotional and sexualised labour. Certain kinds of ‘shop girls’ embodied these in spectacular fashion. As a result, they became enduring icons of mass consumption, simultaneously dismissed as passive cultural dupes or punished as powerful agents of cultural destruction. This article interweaves the social history of everyday shop workers with shifting representations of the ‘shop girl’, from Victorian music hall parodies, through modernist social theory, to the bizarre bombing of the Biba boutique in London by the Angry Brigade on May Day 1971. It concludes that progressive historians have much to gain by reclaiming these workers and the service economy that they helped create

Commercial sexual practices before and after legalization in Australia

The nature of sex work changes over time for many reasons. In recent decades around the world, there has been movement toward legalization and control of sex economies. Studies of the possible impact of legalization mainly have focused on sexually transmitted infections and violence, with little attention to change in the diversity of sexual services provided. This study examined the practices of sex workers before and after legalization of prostitution. Cross-sectional surveys of comparable samples of female sex workers were conducted in 1991 (N = 200, aged 16–46 years) and 2003 (N = 247, aged 18–57 years) in Queensland, Australia, spanning a period of major change in regulation of the local industry. In 2003, male clients at brothels and private sole operators (N = 161; aged 19–72 years) were also interviewed. Over time, there was a clear increase in the provision of “exotic” sexual services, including bondage and discipline, submission, fantasy, use of sex toys, golden showers, fisting, and lesbian double acts, while “traditional” services mostly remained at similar levels (with substantial decrease in oral sex without a condom). Based on comparisons of self-reports of clients and workers, the demand for anal intercourse, anal play, and urination during sex apparently exceeded supply, especially in licensed brothels. Within this population, legalization of sex work coincided with a substantial increase in diversity of services, but it appears that in the regulated working environments, clients who prefer high risk practices might not dictate what is available to them