Scale and Economic and Sexual Justice
Elsewhere I have argued that the relationships between sexuality and economics remain difficult and that sexuality has been marginalised within political economic perspectives on globalization (Binnie, 2004). This is particularly worth noting when we think through the spatial politics of sexual and economic justice. One of the key questions used to formulate discussions in the Barnard colloquium was the question of scale and how it might inform our discussions of the relationships between sexuality and economics. The question was framed accordingly: “What scale is helpful to you as you approach these questions? The national? The global? The regional? The local? The South-South? Something else?” To answer this question properly, we first need to consider the significance of space in the relationship between economic and sexual justice, and to define what we mean by scale more specifically.
This question is concerned with the spatial politics of economic and sexual justice. Reflecting on the spatial politics of social justice, Don Mitchell (in Brown et al, 2007: 9) has stated that: “I can never decide if the fact that everything has to take place somewhere is so obvious as to be banal or quite profound.” Recognition of the significance of space and place within everyday life means that space should not be merely seen as a passive container, the backdrop or canvas across which economic/sexual practices take place, but rather, the pervasive context in and through which such practices are constituted. For instance, consider the notion that the city is a generator of eroticism as Henning Bech argues: “The city is not merely a stage on which a pre-existing, preconstructed sexuality is displayed and acted out; it is a space where sexuality is generated” (1997, page 118).
The question of how to define and approach spatial scale has become a subject of intense heated debate of late. There is even disagreement over whether the notion of scale is relevant, or whether it should exist or be abandoned altogether. For instance, Sallie Marston, John Paul Jones III and Keith Woodward (2005: 416) note that “there is no agreement on what is meant by the term or how it should be operationalized” and that “scholarly positions on scale are divergent in the extreme.” Debates about scale within human geography have largely been based within a political economic framework, concerned with either A) the scaling of capital and flows of goods, capital and labour across national boundaries or B) how governance is being re-scaled under the current regime of accumulation. It is therefore not surprising that sexual politics have rarely figured within these debates.
One of the most commonly understood (but most criticised) conceptualisations of scale is to see scales as objective, factual, contained entities—like Russian dolls, existing in a clear relation to one another in what Howitt (2002: 305) terms a “nested hierarchical ordering of space.” In this model, scales exist in a clear hierarchy: from the body, the neighbourhood, city, region, nation through to the global. This hierarchical understanding has been challenged by those who argue that the construction of scale is itself a dynamic political process. Other writers now argue that we need to go beyond scalar thinking, and focus instead on networks, examining the connections between nodes within transnational (and other) networks. This approach draws attention to the flows and links between transnational actors in different locations, and emphasizes the study of horizontal linkages (for instance across national boundaries) over vertical hierarchies of bounded territorial scales. However, the network approach is itself treated with suspicion and found wanting by Marston et al (2005: 423), who argue that it is complicit within modes of thought that emphasise mobilities and flows of capital:
While we do not find ourselves at odds with the possibilities of flow thinking per se, we are troubled by what we see as liberalist trajectories (absolute freedom of movement) driving such approaches, particularly when these develop alongside large-scale imaginaries such as the global and the transnational. We are often at a loss as to what materiality is grounding these claims to pure flow or absolute deterritorialization.
Marston et al (2005: 419) argue that scale should be abandoned altogether, critiquing the work of Neil Brenner, Doreen Massey and others by claiming that: “We find at the base of all these corrections, and extensions, however, a foundational hierarchy—a verticality that structures the nesting so central to the concept of scale, and with it, the local-to-global paradigm.” While Marston et al champion the abandonment of scale and are critical of the network approach to social-spatial relations, Bob Jessop, Neil Brenner and Martin Jones are keen to stress the limitations of privileging any one brand of sociospatial theory over others. As former advocates of the scalar turn, they now recognise “the limitations of too sharp a sociospatial turn (or any kind) and the need for a multidimensional account of sociospatial relations” (2008: 389).
Jessop et al discern four distinct ways that sociospatial relations have been conceptualised within social sciences: territory, place, scale and networks. Each one privileges a distinctive way of thinking about socialspatial relations. Jessop et al (2008: 397) are critical of what they label “one-dimensional” ways of studying sociospatial relations that focus on one sociospatial lexicon to the exclusion of others, and call instead for multi-dimensional approaches that interrogate the relationships between these approaches: “thinking in multidimensional terms can help to clarify contemporary debates within sociospatial theory (for instance, on the possibilities and limits of ‘scale’ or ‘network’ as geographic concepts).” While these discussions of scale can appear somewhat territorial and pedantic, they are nevertheless instructive for thinking about the relationships between economics and sexuality. Jessop et al’s call for a multi-dimensional approach to theorising sociospatial relations means that we should consider the construction of scale alongside other ways of ordering and conceptualising social-spatial relations such as those focused on territoriality, place and networks. Therefore, while highlighting the flows of sexualised subjects, commodities, capital and ideas across territorial boundaries, we should not ignore other ways in which sociospatial relations are ordered—for instance, within territorially-bounded units such as the nation-state and regional supranational blocs such as the European Union.
Having outlined competing approaches to the study of socialspatial relations, we need to focus on how we might think about the spatial politics of economic and sexual justice. The dramatic growth of research on transnational sexual politics in recent years has brought questions of spatial scale to the fore within issues of sexual and economic justice. For instance, consider how within conservative nationalist discourses, non-normative sexualities have been constructed as non-local threats to the national scale of governance. In recent research on transnational sexualities, some scales have been privileged (e.g. the global) while others have been neglected (e.g. the national). In the next section, I discuss how sexual and economic justice can be considered at the urban scale.
