Sexuality and the Politics of Violence and Safety by Les Moran Beverley Skeggs

Author:Les Moran, Beverley Skeggs [Les Moran, Beverley Skeggs]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780415300926
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 10419005
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2003-10-16T00:00:00+00:00

Taking home seriously: practical and policy reflections

Finally, we shift attention to focus on some of the practical and policy issues that flow from the analysis offered so far, beginning with an extract from one of our key informants, ‘Terry’, a gay men’s worker for the Manchester City Council. We use this extract to illustrate the significance of home in the context of practical attempts to create safer public spaces. We also use it to offer an instance of the analytical significance of comfort and home for a critique of policy and practice. Finally, we point to some of the problems with strategies of home.

The following comments were made in the context of a reflection on the Manchester City Councils interventions in ‘the gay Village’:

I think the council’s initiatives, in improving street lighting and improving the cleaning and taking down of fly posters … we take down fly posters which make the area look bad — that’s all about … environmental improvement … If you have safety, cleanliness and environmental improvement all tied together, people feel good about themselves … We would hope to encourage pride and self confidence as opposed to all the self oppression that can be implied by having to occupy a dirty, unkempt, uncared for, dangerous, slovenly space.

(Terry, KII, Man., 1999)

Various things are of interest in this extract. Environmental improvements are presented here as practices through which lesbians and gay men, ‘feel good about themselves’, gain ‘confidence’ and ‘pride’. This explicitly connects local government environmental hygiene policies and practices to ontology. It also joins these themes to questions of safety and security. Terry’s comments highlight the connection between public hygiene and public security (Neocleous 2000). The task of cleaning dirt from the streets, Neocleous suggests, is also about cleaning moral filth and social dirt. The safe and secure city in this scheme of things is not only physically clean but also socially clean. Thus in response to danger, which, in this instance, takes the form of ‘homophobia, discrimination, prejudice and anti-lesbian and gay violence’ environmental intervention will bring this disorder to an end. Of interest here is the relation between the practices and objectives of ‘environmental improvements’, ontology, and the rhetoric, practices and politics of comfort and home.

The fifth gay men’s focus group in Manchester provided an opportunity to explore these relations. We asked our participants whether the environmental strategies of public hygiene, suggested by Terry, would make them feel more comfortable in the Village. Stewart did not think that it would. He explained:

Well to me everyone’s got different opinions and you can’t satisfy everyone. I might like one thing, you might like one thing but we’re both gay. When you’ve got different opinions you’re never going to have a right or wrong answer.

In response to a further question, ‘Would neater, tidier, cleaner streets make you feel more comfortable?’ Stewart added:

No, because the streets would have to be cleaned twenty-four hours a day. You’re never going to satisfy somebody twenty-four hours a day … Everyone’s got a different perspective on how they want it to be kept clean.

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