Jon Binnie,
"Envisioning Economic and Sexual Justice Spatially"
(page 2 of 3)
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.
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