Space and Place. Gender and Race (and Class).

Doreen Massey begins her essay by referencing Marx’s idea of “the annihilation of space by time" (1) This idea suggests that globalization has constructed lines of greater connectivity, allowing for almost instantaneous communication with people all across the globe and access to information and knowledge, while seeming to eliminate the spaces between. My first instinct was to ask, “how interconnected are we really?” or "how much of an “annihilation of space by time” has occurred"? The reason these questions popped into my head is because we certainly have greater access to knowledge and information about events around the world. This past summer, we felt frustrated or enraged about the Michael Brown's death and police brutality in Ferguson while following the mindless destruction of life in the Israel-Palestinian conflict. At the same time, some of "us" Westerners get to sit back, removed from these events by the sheer vastness of space, and the distance from place. “We” can observe from a distance what is happening “over there,” while being “grateful” that “that” isn’t happening to “us”. I would say that this is a matter of privilege when "we" get to choose to be connected and when "we" can be detached. 

Massey addresses the issues surrounding place and space, where both have been seen as static and/or as reactionary when compared to time. Her examples include space/place being connected to a "rise of defensive and reactionary responses such as nationalism and offense taken to the influx of newcomers and outsides" to a supposedly homogeneous community/city/country (2). Massey suggests instead that there is a positive politics surrounding space, especially when we look beyond capitalisms development of space. "Blaming" capitalism for all the problems involving space and place is a similar rhetorical device as blaming the patriarchy for all oppression felt by all oppressed groups. Capitalism may have allowed us to draw new lines and networks across the globe, but gender, race and class must be considered as having an effect on mobility, space and place. Using the often-felt experiences of gendered or racialized bodies moving through space, Massey shows that these experiences of limited mobility, violence, and surveillance is not solely influenced by capitalism and capital (2). Other factors influence how these bodies feel moving through public spaces.  I think it is easy to erase or ignore the political weight of space/place. I think that it is easy to mistaken our movement as through a void, rather than understanding that certain spaces are infused with a certain type of politics, as well as constraints and surveillance. The “public” by its very nature is always “political”. We only need to look outside the window to see that gendered and racialized bodies have an extremely hard time moving (and are controlled when trying to move) through public, political spaces.

What Massey contributes to this instinctual/intuitive understanding of (my) movement and relation to space and place is this concept of power geometry of the time-space compression. “It goes beyond who moves and who doesn’t (although that’s an extremely important part of it), but also includes power in relation to the flows and the movement. Different social groups have distinct relationships to this anyway differentiated mobility”(3). Speaking in terms of “differentials” some groups have much control and mobility in their position of power. Others add to the global cultural marketplace while never leaving the space that they inhabit because they don’t have the material and financial capacity for mobility. Still others are inundated by the global flows and processes despite residing in a very particular place.  Massey shows us that “mobility and control over mobility, both reflects and reinforces power” (4).  Some people can exercises power through their mobility while simultaneously weakening the leverage of mobility of others.  I thought the great example of this is the movement from shipping to air travel. This change in travel changes the nodes and networks between places. Islands in the Pacific now go untouched because of the limitation or elimination of shipping routes, where these islands were once “outposts” of trade and travel. Now they are bypassed and ignored because the flows have changed. 

Although I am very much convinced by Massey's thesis, I question Massey’s understanding of power. Even though I understand her point about how the “mobility of some groups can undermine the power of others,” does power always reflect this sort of zero-sum game, and does it have to? If we democratize or popularize one form of mobility, is there a decline in the other types? In writing out this question, I would say yes and no. I think of suburbanization in the 1950s and 1960s in the United States and how we’ve moved away from public transport to driving around in private, personal cars. Clearly there’s a class disparity with this (ex. who can afford privatized transportation), but it also detracts from funds allocated to maintain and improve the public transportation systems in place. In this way, Massey’s idea of power geometry is on point. However, I can’t get away from a Foucauldian understanding of power—that power is relational, that it is not just repressive but also productive. People and groups are not solely being limited or repressed by those who have power through mobility. I would like to think that these same groups also have productive and reproductive power in these mobility differentials, but I'm not quite sure what this looks like.

To help explain what I mean, I think that this would be a good time to bring in Ch. 5-6 of Gina Ulysse’s Downtown Ladies. I was particularly struck by how the ICIs move through the spaces of downtown Kingston and patriarchal, misogynistic society and the creation of “tuffness” (Ulysse, 182). “Tuffness” is the exterior and façade that the ICIs had to display in order to move through public space and the arcade. With heightened violence in Jamaica in the 1980s, 90s, and 00s, this is a response of survival, so that these women can be free of the day to day violence and harassment brought on by men. The survival mechanism is also class, race and gender based. However, I found Ulysse’s reflections not only on how the ICIs moved through space and how Ulysse experienced this cultural difference inspiring, having been brought up in the United States. It appeared as though this assertive, tuff exterior was a common practice among these women, and (from Ulysse’s telling) it appeared to have a tangible effect. I think about the double bind I feel when confronting street harassment as a female body. I’ve several options and none of them seem like effective choices: (1) ignore it, (2) confront it, or (3) awkwardly laugh it off, although I don’t think this is a viable third option. I’m particularly moved by the ICIs as they have been able to establish, in their own way, a way to curtail the violences committed against them by performing this tuffness (which is simultaneously a performance of non-femininity). However, I’m far from saying that this performance is the best way of confronting violence against women—it places responsibility in the hands of the victim or oppressed person. Through these two chapters, I clearly see the many different levels of control and surveillance that are exercised upon the ICIs and their movement both within and outside of the country. Rather the point I’d like to make is that this tuffness has productive power, which may not transcend social and cultural norms. No, it hasn’t deconstructed the corrupt and violent practices of a patriarchal and misogynistic society, and Ulysse argues that it reinforces the stereotype and naturalization of the “black superwoman” and the “tough black woman” (160). I think what it does do is challenge dominant notions of femininity, while also curtailing and controlling the responses by men through the signs and symbols displayed by these women.

To further unpack the idea of space and place, I move to Chapter 6, where Ulysse discusses how the bodies and business of the ICIs becomes the site of control whenever violence and, more recently, the illicit drug trade erupts. Rather than look to the gangs supported by political parties or the middle-class groups that are predominately helping funnel drugs into the country, the ICIs become the first group to be limited, controlled and surveilled. They are the first to be denied access to their work, because the state constructs them as “the enemy” and “the problem”.