I recently had a piece published in Ebb Magazine on gentrification in Manchester and its roots in historic and ongoing imperialism. It’s been a long time in the works and I’m pleased to see it out in the wild.
You can read it here; [link]
One thing I couldn’t make room for in this essay was interpreting Manchester’s local politics via an existing body of work on (mostly USAmerican) queer critiques of gentrification. Since the 1980s, books by such prominent writers as Sarah Schulman, Samuel Delany, and Matilda Bernstein Sycamore have described the formative interrelationship of sexual politics and urban redevelopment, whereby a rhetoric of queer respectability justifies practices of social cleansing, which in turn act to eliminate alternative sexual cultures, especially those mediated via sex work.[1] These processes are not unique to the United States. I have written before about the creation of Manchester’s Gay Village as continuous with the policing of street cruising in the ex-industrial zones around the canals. I found out recently that the police commissioner responsible for these operation around Canal Street, James Anderton, was also instrumental in the application of techniques of “riot control” developed in Hong Kong to the British mainland.[2] Had I known this earlier, maybe I would’ve been drawn out further some of the links between British imperialism in the South China Sea, domestic policing, and Hong Kong housing developers active in Manchester - which I make in the piece - and sexual politics.
But I would prefer not to rely on the coincidence of one man between two sets of police practices, at least not without further research on Mr Anderton himself. And as crucial as policing is to Manchester’s developmental regime, I’m not sure that by itself it would fully account for the sexual politics of gentrification in the city. For that, you would need accounts of how sexual cultures in the city have changed over the past 50+ years, how street cultures have changed, how specific development programmes and policies have shaped this change. For Delany and Sycamore, these accounts are largely first hand. I myself don’t have first hand experience of such changes in Manchester (for a whole host of reasons) and I haven’t been able to find many others either.
Or, at least, I haven’t been able to find many that don’t narrate a simple path out of the darkness of repression into the glorious light the Village, christened by the NGOs. There is, of course, plentiful documentation of these institutions, more or less adulatory, more or less silent on their relationship to redevelopment in the city more broadly. Nonetheless, through this silence, these institutionalised histories participate in this redevelopment, in a political economy of knowledge by which other urban forms - sexual, social, political - are reduced to so much debris in the wake of Progress’ triumphant advance.[3] These other urban forms are necessarily only visible as warnings or romanticisms in the face of the hard reality of the commercial nightclubs and respectable NGOs by which queer life is visibilised in Manchester.
Or maybe I just didn’t do my research properly and I’m blaming the institutions because it’s easier. Who can say. I’m not sure it’s my job to report to my editors and then a general readership where sex workers gather, for example, after Canal Street’s ‘regeneration’. But there are questions I might have liked to ask that I didn’t find myself able to, at least not without taking a long diversion from the directly responsive form of the essay, to address an emphasis on ‘foreign capital’ in current research and writing about gentrification here. Questions like, how has the transition from a predominantly industrial to predominantly service economy changed gender and sexual relations in the city? How have gender and sexuality been used to police the spatial divides created by gentrification economies? What sexual and gendered forms are suggested by existing movements against imperial-capitalist dispossession in the city, in all their plurality?
Book after book could be written on such things. But maybe they shouldn’t. Or at least maybe it would require a different kind of writing.
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[1] I am speaking of Delany and Sycamore’s work, as I haven’t read Schulman, but know of her influence.
[2] Shooting in the Dark: Riot Policing in Britain, by Gerry Northam, published in 1989. Some googling will reveal some other choice comments and operations of Andertons, apparently a notorious figure in British policing.
[3] bet you thought i was referencing benjamin? more fool you, i was in fact referencing sylvia rivera cusicanqui referencing benjamin. see here: [link]
Edit: I forgot to add a link to my earlier newsletter about the Gay Village. You can read that here; [link]
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