Tourist Attractions, Displacements and Feminist Resistance

Tourist Attractions, Displacements and Feminist Resistance

When I was invited to open Queer Sidesteppers & Feminist Boss Ladies, I found the serendipity amusing. For the previous few weeks I had been thinking rather obsessively about gentrification, mass tourism and who gets to be part of a city and in which terms. Mostly, I had been trying to map the feminist connections between these three seemingly unrelated issues. And then I read the introduction to the HERA Sexing the City Conference and its focus on the phenomenon of gendered dimensions of rapid urban changes through themes of autonomy, respectability and precarity. The question posed was “how is life in the city for anyone that is “Othered”? Or, “what are the strategies of political intervention for the “Other”?

Needless to say, I have no answers to these questions. Instead, what I do have are a few reflections. First of all, I would like to focus this talk on my local, lived reality. I do not feel qualified to offer perspectives about places where I have either not lived in for decades or that I only know superficially through news or as a visitor. Besides, if the personal is political, the best contribution I can offer is one regarding my specific environment. Certain topics, even though they might be local to Europe or The Netherlands are repetitions of issues faced across communities the world over: racial politics, sexuality, militarization, etc. Even though the examples might be local to me, the thread of neoliberal globalization runs across most of these.

I would like to start with a few painful observations from the last couple of weeks. Four examples out of many possible of the material consequences of being a visible Other in Europe:

And these violent episodes follow the recent forceful stripping of a beach goer in France. This attack on a Muslim woman by agents of the State is nothing less than a sexual assault. How else are we going to name the forceful removal of her attire so that she is compliant with the dominant culture’s notions of appropriate dress code?

So, it is in this context of emboldened bigoted violence that we have to reflect on urban strategies of political intervention. While thinking these strategies, I am reminded of the dialog that emerges from the work of these two feminist thinkers:

“I see protest as a genuine means of encouraging someone to feel the inconsistencies, the horror, of the lives we are living. Social protest is to say that we do not have to live this way. If we feel deeply, as we encourage ourselves and others to feel deeply, we will, within that feeling, once we recognize we can feel deeply, we can love deeply, we can feel joy, then we will demand that all parts of our lives produce that kind of joy. And when they do not, we will ask, “Why don’t they?” And it is the asking that will lead us inevitably toward change.”

Audre Lorde — Conversations with Audre Lorde

“A killjoy: the one who gets in the way of other people’s happiness. Or just the one who is in the way — you can be in the way of whatever, if you are already perceived as being in the way. Your very arrival into a room is a reminder of histories that “get in the way” of the occupation of that room. How many feminist stories are about rooms, about who occupies them, about making room? When to arrive is to get in the way, what happens, what do you do? The figure of the killjoy could be rethought in terms of the politics of willfulness”.

Sara Ahmed — Feminist Killjoys (And Other Willful Subjects)

It is in this permanent tension of seeking joy that we find ourselves as the killjoys of the dominant culture we inhabit. While Audre Lorde speaks of protest as a tool for finding joy, Sara Ahmed reminds us that our political interventions will invariably carry the sour taste of becoming the killjoy.

So what is the role of the joy seeking queer feminist killjoy in these urban precarities? One of the roles assigned to us by the dominant culture is that of tourist attraction.

The city of Amsterdam, to use an example that everyone here knows of, uses sex workers, queers and gender non comforming people as part of the marketing of the city. In every way, queers, sex workers and gender non conforming people are stigmatized and judged, except when the time comes to make the city some money. While the city continues promoting itself as a “Disneyland for adults”, we receive 15+ million tourists a year in an urban setting with less than one million permanent inhabitants. In this city’s marketing, queer people and sex workers are used as an attraction, presented as part of Amsterdam’s charm and openness.

Meanwhile, the situation with mass tourism has gotten so out of hand that sex workers are losing customers due to the sheer volume of rude, violent visitors.

Translation: Catcalling in De Wallen (the official name of the Red Light District) costs sex workers customers.

Tourists regularly go to the Red Light District and harass, catcall and intimidate sex workers as part of their “fun weekend in the city”. The same people that the City of Amsterdam use to promote itself as a tourist destination are not assured a work environment free of violence. The State sees no problem marketing these sex workers as part of the “entertainment” while providing no protection for their safety and well being.

In turn, and vis-à-vis the emergence of services like AirBnB that make it more profitable for landlords to rent their properties for short stays, this mass tourism has resulted in a shortage of housing and the displacement of the local communities further and further outside the city. Successively, these communities suffer the side effects of this predatory tourist industry by having local services decline in quality and availability with resources only allocated to the well off areas visited by tourists (for example, these neighborhoods are cleaned with significantly less frequency than those deemed of interest for tourists, resulting in mass rat infestations and trash that lingers for months before the Municipality takes action).

Working class queer people, sex workers, gender non comforming people, and basically everyone that does not fit the white dominant, middle and upper class culture is cast to either the outskirts of the city or to entirely different towns. The periphery becomes material rather than merely political. Living “outside the ring”, as it is usually called in Amsterdam.

However, this urban exploitation does not end with mere displacement. Because once the “Othered” groups are cast away through tourism, gentrification, labor and/ or economic precarity, a new form of the white gaze emerges: the neighborhood safari. Amsterdam has produced, throughout the past six or seven years, several instances of “organized tours” of neighborhoods that have been labeled non white, immigrant and/ or working class. These “safaris” seek to “promote” the “difficult” neighborhoods as sites of friendliness, social life and welcoming attitudes. The municipality subsidizes and markets these “safaris” to promote the disadvantaged areas using descriptors such as “an opportunity to meet special people”. The “Other” as a rarity to be met in its natural habitat.

Now, I would like to contextualize a few points about these safaris: these are State Sponsored racialized interventions in our urban spaces. That the Municipality actively markets these as part of their official communications make these safaris not just a project of meeting the Other but an Institutional “othering” which those of us living in the neighborhoods cannot escape. Existing in these neighborhoods while these safaris take place means to be subjected to the dominant gaze in ways which we cannot control. We become part of the dominant narrative in their terms. Their joy of meeting us comes at the expense of our right to exist undisturbed, unobserved, un-Othered.

The Mexican academic Monica Cejas, in Tourism “Back in Time”: Performing “the Essence of Safari” wrote an astute observation about the history of the safari:

Safari, according to the Oxford English dictionary, is an organized journey for viewing wild animals, and it sometimes includes hunting wild animals, especially in Africa (Oxford English Dictionary web site). Safari, a Swahili word, made its entrance to English in 1890 in the core of British imperial power. It refers to a journey undertaken with a specific objective: expedition, pilgrimage, trek, or voyage[…]

[T]he explorer was the dominant actor in a narrative that legitimized his actions in Africa. He was looking for the undiscovered (from the Western point of view) in order to possess it. Africa’s experience was linked to hardship and privations (drinking polluted water racked by malaria). In the end, the award was the glory of a ‘new’ discovery. […] Exploration was a practice that unveiled an omnipresent discourse of alterity, established an irreducible other, and produced an imaginary idea of Africa as a land of the “unknown, a place inhabited by exotic and hostile African tribes such as the Maasai and the Sukuma, and dangerous wild animals”.

Nowadays, the “explorer” does not need to travel far to meet “the Other”. The City of Amsterdam provides the well organized and subsidized guided tours and the possibility to meet “special people” (sic) in the process.

The media, in turn, participates in this Othering by naming these neighborhoods “Gaza in Amsterdam” or “the Molenbeek of The Netherlands”.

Another role for the populations displaced by tourism and gentrification is that of “prop” for military exercises.

Translation: Military Practice in multi cultural neighborhoods of Amsterdam. Next week military troops will exercise in the West and New West districts of Amsterdam to practice interview techniques in a multicultural society. It’s important that the battalion that focuses on communications has a chance to practice in a so-called “live environment”.

The military exercise in this video took place in the same neighborhood as one of the safaris mentioned above.

The idea of these exercises was to train the military in situations and demographics that are supposedly similar to Afghanistan. The Othered body, again, subjected to inescapable State intervention. While the “neighborhood safari” is presented as an entertaining cultural exchange, the military intervention treats these neighborhoods from a racialized utilitarian perspective: we are the local version of the scary Other to be used by military personnel to advance and improve their careers and efficiency.

So, to address the questions posited by Queer Sidesteppers & Feminist Boss Ladies: How to live, love and make love in times of precarity? What happens to those who are (in)visibly (re) producing, (re)claiming and (re)defining city life on the peripheries of societies? Or, to bring it back to these topics of institutional(ized) violence, displacement and gentrification, how do we resist?

How do we create strategies of political action that would ameliorate the effects of precarity and improve labor conditions? How do we navigate these disciplinary forces that intervene our urban spaces? How do we uplift ourselves from these different violences inflicted upon Othered bodies?

My tentative answer lies in the dialog established at the beginning. It is in the tension between Audre Lorde’s remarks that “once we recognize we can feel deeply, we can love deeply, we can feel joy, then we will demand that all parts of our lives produce that kind of joy” and Sara Ahmed’s incisive handbook of the feminist killjoy as a willful subject.

In between this tension, that of seeking joy and being a killjoy pivots the resistance. We live in the interstice between protest and nurturing; between production and withdrawal of cooperation with these forces that occupy our spaces. We live in the cracks between precarity and the fierce joy of holding one another. We live in anger and we live in love. And that, right there is where we resist.

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