Queering social reproduction: Sex, care and activism in San Francisco

Urban Studies ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 004209802094787
Author(s):  
Max J Andrucki
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Urban Activism ◽  
The Social ◽  
Sex Practices

In this paper I ask what is at stake when we move past static ontologies of the ‘gayborhood’ as a form of commercial and residential concentration in decline to theorise gay urban activism as a mode of queer social reproduction, through which queer caring labour ‘redeems’ the dislocations of the neoliberal city structured by oedipalised and capitalist social relations. Through well-documented formal and informal collective action, queers in the urban West have organised in response to health crises, exclusion and systemic threats of violence. Returning to socialist feminist imaginaries of care beyond the ‘social’, and to Guy Hocquenghem’s often-overlooked theory of the sociality of the anus, this paper draws on excerpts from the film Milk, the poetry of Thom Gunn and a discussion of gay men’s volunteering to examine San Francisco as a queer urban space constituted through a network of encounters, crossings, intimacies and labours enacted through the mundane caring practices of everyday life. I ask in what ways we can think of gay urban space as continuously made and remade through non-monogamous sex practices that perform the messy marrying of public and private, and erotic and platonic.

Social reproduction, finance and the gendered dimensions of pawnbroking

2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 581-597 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrienne Roberts ◽  
Ghazal Zulfiqar
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Household Debt ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Feminist Literature ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Relationship

While the feminist literature on social reproduction is broad and diverse, one area that has remained relatively under-explored relates to the linkages between social reproduction and finance, particularly between social reproduction and household debt. In our contribution to this Special Issue, we seek to document and to analyse the structural linkages between social reproduction and debt, with a specific focus on pawnbroking in early modern England and contemporary Pakistan. We have four main aims in this article. Our first aim is to contribute to feminist theorizing about social reproduction by showing both how the daily and generational reproduction of households has relied upon historically specific forms of credit and how these social relations of credit/debt have been central to the development and reproduction of capitalism in different times and places. Second, we show how particular forms of ‘everyday finance’ are gendered and, specifically, how they are feminized. Our third aim is to elucidate the relationship between pawn loans, which have received almost no attention from feminist or other critical political economists, and the social reproduction of households in England and Pakistan. Fourth, we elucidate some of the gendered implications of the growing incursion of masculinized capitalist finance into new spaces of everyday life.

scholarly journals Site of Resistance or Apparatus of Acquiescence? Tactics at the Bakery

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 160-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Ciro Martínez
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Public Policies ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
The Social ◽  
Resistance State ◽  
Laws And Regulations

This article explores the importance and impact of a set of actions through which bakers manipulate laws and regulations that seek to organize and regulate how they do business. It builds on eighteen months of fieldwork conducted in Jordan, twelve of which were spent working in three different bakeries in the capital, Amman. Moving away from the idea that public policies are simply imposed, the article looks in detail at the social relations through which they are enacted. By honing in on the bakery, and examining arrangements between bakery owners, workers, consumers and ministerial employees, it illuminates modes of political agency that escape conventional binaries of domination/resistance, state/society and legality/illegality. I argue against seeing these practices as easily categorized forms of resistance or frivolous acts of corruption. Nor are they simply reinforcements of hegemonic control. Instead, ‘tactics’ at the bakery subvert the order of things to serve other ends. Foregrounding them in this analysis seeks not only to challenge views of power relations as strictly binary but to elucidate some of the ways in which citizens inhabit and engage with the neoliberal and authoritarian logics that pervade everyday life in Jordan.

scholarly journals Feminist everyday political economy: Space, time, and violence

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juanita Elias ◽  
Shirin M. Rai
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
International Political Economy ◽  
Space Time ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Power And Agency ◽  
A Site

AbstractIt goes without saying that feminist International Political Economy (IPE) is concerned in one way or another with the everyday – conceptualised as both a site of political struggle and a site within which social relations are (re)produced and governed. Given the longstanding grounding of feminist research in everyday gendered experiences, many would ask: Why do we need an explicit feminist theorisation of the everyday? After all, notions of everyday life and everyday political struggle infuse feminist analysis. This article seeks to interrogate the concept of the everyday – questioning prevalent understandings of the everyday and asking whether there is analytical and conceptual utility to be gained in articulating a specifically feminist understanding of it. We argue that a feminist political economy of the everyday can be developed in ways that push theorisations of social reproduction in new directions. We suggest that one way to do this is through the recognition that social reproductionisthe everyday alongside a three-part theorisation of space, time, and violence (STV). It is an approach that we feel can play an important role in keeping IPE honest – that is, one that recognises how important gendered structures of everyday power and agency are to the conduct of everyday life within global capitalism.

The main causes of social anxiety in the context of social action

2020 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 112-117
Author(s):  
I.S. Duisenova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Anxiety ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Social Activity ◽  
Important Place ◽  
Social Actions ◽  
The Social

The article deals with the problems of social anxiety in the context of social activity. Social action is one of the phenomena of everyday life, so the study of anxiety that suddenly occurs in familiar conditions for a person, and its manifestations in social relations occupies an important place in sociological science today. Attempts to explain this were made using the works of T. Parsons, Y. Habermas, and G. Garfinkel. Various manifestations and forms of social anxiety affect the social actions of society.

Ato Quayson's Oxford Street, Accra: Tracing Autobiographical Narrative in Analytical Method

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (2) ◽  
pp. 496-504
Author(s):  
Anjali Prabhu
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
African City ◽  
Creative City ◽  
The Social ◽  
Implicit Argument ◽  
Oxford Street ◽  
The City ◽  
Autobiographical Narrative

In his fascinating study of accra, ato quays0n quickly alerts his reader to the idea that one must not separate ways of knowing shakespeare from ways of knowing Accra. “Reading” the city as a literary critic, but much more, Quayson gives a discursive framework to his historical account of the material, social, and esoteric life of the city. Underlying the text is an implicit argument with other prominent accounts of African cities, which take a more utopian view and present these cities as mapping the innovative, exciting, and creative possibilities of urban space for the rest of the world. Quayson's mode of history is explicitly linked to storytelling in a number of ways beyond his disclosure that “[t]he retelling of Accra's story from a more expansive urban historical perspective is the object of Oxford Street” (4). From the start, it is also clear that his approach will utilize a broadly Marxian framework, which is to see (city) space in terms of the built environment as well as the social relations in and beyond it: “space becomes both symptom and producer of social relations” (5). But ultimately Quayson's apprehension of his city is Marxian because it recuperates ideas, desires, and creativity from the realm of the unique or inexplicable, of “genius,” to effectively insert them into various systems of production or into spaces that lack them. In so doing Quayson enhances, not hinders, our appreciation of those forms of innovation. Also Marxian is his employment of the “negative,” which refers to the way he splits apart many of the accepted relations between things in the scholarship on the development of the city, the postcolonial African city in particular, and pushes beyond the evidence of the “booming” or “creative” city. Quayson thus binds a more philosophical method of reasoning to his analysis of urban social relations while he straddles different disciplines. His work is illuminated when we locate a personal impulse, which we will track through the autobiographical narrative, to intervene not just in the ways the city is understood but also in the ways it is actually developing.

Citizenship Across the Life Course

2018 ◽  
pp. 33-50
Author(s):  
Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho
Keyword(s):  
Life Course ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Mainland Chinese ◽  
Chinese Migrants ◽  
International Borders ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Life Course ◽  
The Way

Analyzing emigration, immigration, and re-migration concurrently, under the framework of contemporaneous migration, directs us toward evaluating what it means to stake claims to different components of citizenship in more than one political community across a migrant’s life course. This chapter examines the way the Mainland Chinese migrants negotiate social reproduction concerns that extend across international borders, their multiple national affiliations, and aspirations for recognition and rights as they journey between China and Canada across the life course. Patterns of re-migration are transforming the social relations of citizenship, re-spatializing rights, obligations, and belonging. Source and destination countries are also reversed during repeated re-migration or transnational sojourning. Transnational sojourning forges citizenship constellations that interlink how migrants understand and experience citizenship across different migration sites.

Three recent scenes in the affective life of gentrification in San Francisco’s Polk Gulch

2020 ◽  
pp. 147447402094955
Author(s):  
Damon Scott ◽  
Trushna Parekh
Keyword(s):  
Urban Development ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
Brass Band ◽  
The Social ◽  
Gay Bars ◽  
Opening Up ◽  
Urban Territory

Drawing on the ‘reparative turn’ in queer feminist scholarship, we situate a commemorative march that took place in late March 2018 in the Polk Gulch neighborhood of San Francisco as an entry point into the affective conditions of living in and through a period of intensifying urban development. Complete with a brass band, drag queens dressed in mourning, and black banners, participants stopped at the sites of former gay bars and other commercial establishments where they laid wreaths, offered eulogies, and affectively asserted the social and historical significance of these places. Nine months later, we interviewed organizers and participants and analyzed recordings of the event in order to register the sensate conditions that preceded, pervaded, and followed in the wake of the March. In so doing, we unravel the ‘undecidability of the urban’ in which residents call into question the impacts of gentrification. Through our tripartite engagement with the affective contours of the March, we situate the procession less as a discrete ceremonial event to re-inscribe collective memories in urban space or to lay claims to a right to urban territory, than as a momentary effort to work out and through the ongoing, shared feelings of loss in an increasingly unlivable city. By attending to the felt conditions of urban development, we argue for foregrounding shared sentiments as a viable pathway to opening up relief from, if not alternatives to, the ongoing displacements and dispossessions of the neoliberal city.

The power of “wealth, nobility and men:” Inequality and corruption in Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories

2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 512-531
Author(s):  
Amanda Maher
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Deleterious Effect ◽  
Economic Inequality ◽  
Political Corruption ◽  
Civil Conflict ◽  
Organizational Forms ◽  
The Social ◽  
Modern Era

This article draws a connection between socio-economic inequality and political corruption based on a reading of Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories. Prevailing interpretations of the Histories attribute the moral corruption and civil conflict Machiavelli condemns as the source of Florence’s republican failure to the unique historical conditions of early-modern Florence. In this article, I trace Florentine corruption and factionalism to the perennial problem of inequality. Through his narration of the two centuries of Florentine history leading up to Cosimo de Medici’s ascent to first citizen, I contend, Machiavelli demonstrates the deleterious effect of inequality on the social relations, organizational forms, and modes of collective action in Florence. At the same time, his depiction of Florence’s transformation from a quasi-feudal commune dominated by a nobility with private armies to a modern commercial city ruled through patronage illustrates the contingent modality of inequality and the particularly subversive way it can manifest in the more civil republics of the modern era.

‘Chicken and Duck Talk’: Life and Death of Language Training at a Japanese Multinational in China

2017 ◽  
Vol 32 (5) ◽  
pp. 887-905 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yu Zheng ◽  
Chris Smith
Keyword(s):  
Language Learning ◽  
Skill Acquisition ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Language Training ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
The Social ◽  
Chinese Workers ◽  
Individual Asset

This article examines social relations in language learning through a case study of two cohorts of Chinese workers in a Japanese multinational company (MNC). The two cohorts weigh learning Japanese in the context of internal and external opportunities, and pursue different strategies – deliberative acquisition and deliberative opposition. Exploring the broader meanings of language learning beyond skill acquisition, the article suggests that language is more than an individual asset or a common code for workers to build collective power. Social reproduction of language is embedded in workers’ choice of pathways for social mobility which was created in the social transition and has shifted over time in China. These findings make a contribution to the sociology of language training in work, by challenging structural and cultural theories that underplay the agency of workers in assessing language as a resource for labour power development.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document