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Feminist City. Leslie Kern
Читать онлайн.Название Feminist City
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781788739832
Автор произведения Leslie Kern
Издательство Ingram
When we moved back to Toronto, high rents pushed me further out of the central city than I would have liked, but at least I had some access to shopping and services in my neighbourhood, right? True, but what I started to glean was that these conveniences stemmed partly from the fact that my neighbourhood was in the early stages of gentrification. Gentrification is basically the process whereby working class, lower income neighbourhoods get taken over by middle-class households and businesses. There are a lot of causes and forms of gentrification, but my neighbourhood—the Junction—was experiencing a kind of start-stop slow motion transition when I first moved there in early 2000. My local “amenities” included a Blockbuster Video and a No Frills grocery store. There were a few playgrounds but at least one was often filled with trash and needles. Still, I could walk to the main commercial strip for most of our basic needs, and things weren’t yet too expensive.
Early feminist writing on gentrification noted that a “back to the city” movement for middle-class families works like a geographic fix for the problems women face juggling work and home.59 As women entered the higher-paying professional workforce in ever-greater numbers, postponed the age of marriage and child-bearing, and even opted out of the heterosexual family altogether, they sought urban environments that could accommodate their needs and provide the necessary services. As feminist geographer Winifred Curran puts it, “women were not only potential beneficiaries of gentrification, but drivers of the process” as well.60 Theorists predicted that given these gendered trends in the workforce, family, and housing, major shifts in the land use patterns of cities would surely follow. However, no fundamental changes have occurred that actually alter the city in ways that serve women’s equality. Indeed, we could argue that many changes, including widespread gentrification, have made urban environments less resourceful for the majority of women.
Gentrifying neighbourhoods attract amenities that serve middle-class parents: clean parks, cafés, bookstores, places to buy fresh and wholesome food, etc. They’re often located near good transit routes and centred around good schools, especially in the U.K. and U.S. According to Curran,
Gentrification offered a market-oriented, individualized, privatized spatial solution to the problem of work-life balance. With urban planning failing to catch up to the lived experiences of urban dwellers, those who could afford to found more advantageous spaces in which to attempt the balance, “rediscovering” inner city neighbourhoods which offered easy access to downtown jobs and other amenities.61
But Curran goes on to note that even the class-based advantages brought by gentrification don’t fundamentally disrupt either the gendered division of domestic labour or the urban infrastructure designed to accommodate the movement and work patterns of men. She argues, and I agree: “the narrative of urban living for the affluent tends to minimize, or ignore altogether, the role of care and family in urban design.”62 The lack of play spaces, preschools, and sometimes even grocery stores in proximity to new urban housing developments such as condominiums suggests that planners and policy-makers are still not interested in providing workable/liveable spaces for families, even those who can afford to live in these shiny new urban habitats.63
Care work is still very much an afterthought in cities, and gentrification doesn’t suddenly make things easier, especially for the majority of women for whom the “amenities” of gentrification are out of reach. In my experience those amenities are a bit of a double-edged sword when coupled with the social trend that some have called the “gentrification of parenting.” This concept builds on the idea of “intensive mothering,” a term coined by sociologist Sharon Hays that she defines as “child centred, expert guided, emotionally absorbing, labour intensive, and financially expensive.”64 These accelerated expectations around the amount of dedicated, undivided attention parents are supposed to provide are unprecedented. As maternal scholars like Andrea O’Reilly argue, intensive mothering and a new “mystique of motherhood” emerged just in time to add fuel to the fiery backlash toward women’s increased social, sexual, and economic independence in the 1970s and 1980s.65
This intensification manifests in a variety of conspicuous consumption practices and aesthetics that some have called the “gentrification of parenting.” The norms and cultural signifiers of good parenting have been gentrified as they’re increasingly defined by the particular product brands, styles, and kinds of activities purchased and practiced by middle and upper class urban households. This plays out in the urban environment as middle-class parents demand and draw resources to their neighbourhoods and provide a market for upscale shopping and carefully curated child-centred activities. 66 The amount of time, money, and emotional labour required to do this parenting work is simply not available to most families and mothers in particular.
Reminiscing about those early years of parenting in my gentrifying neighbourhood doesn’t evoke a sense of ease. In fact, it evokes a deep bodily sense of exhaustion. Sure, lack of sleep is typical for new parents. What I’m referring to is the physical exertion of intensive parenting in the city. I picture my younger self, pushing a plastic-wheeled stroller across sidewalks and streets choked with snow and ice. Loading the stroller full of groceries several times a week because we didn’t have a car. Note: this is supposed to be one of the “convenient” parts of city living. Half-carrying, half-dragging that stroller home because a wheel would disintegrate after taking a battering on pocked pavements. Multiple daily trips to the park, a literacy drop-in, or a community centre play space to fulfill my daughter’s “need” for enriching, sociable, exciting activities. Evening transit trips to swimming lessons downtown. The constant back and forth of day care, school, errands, lessons, visits to family and friends. I want to go back in time and tell myself: stay home. Lie down. Do less.
Doing less didn’t seem like an option at the time, although many of the stay-at-home moms in my neighbourhood were stunned to learn I was taking a full graduate school course load. What they didn’t know was that school was the easiest part of my day. Being in my head for a few hours, without being immediately responsible for the tiniest demands of another human and worrying about her mental and emotional growth … it was so peaceful. Even the archetypal suburban mom of the 1950s wasn’t expected to constantly entertain her children. But the supposedly emancipated urban mom of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries must fulfill a complex set of domestic responsibilities alongside all of this child enrichment, usually while working outside the home as well. And she does it in spaces most decidedly not set up to support her labour.
I used to think that Maddy’s city childhood—and my urban parenting—was much different from the suburban childhood I had in the 1980s. It seemed like she had a lot more fun activities oriented to her interests and a lot less sitting in the car waiting for parents to finish their errands. That part is probably true, but certainly intensive parenting was already on the rise in the 1980s. I remember weekends filled with synagogue, dance lessons, baseball practices, swimming, skating, and Hebrew school as well as chores and schlepping across Mississauga on a seemingly endless series of domestic errands. My parents were doing their best to manage the demands of home, work, and parenting in an increasingly sprawling landscape with one car and only one driver’s license between them.
Before she learned to drive, my mom would often walk forty-five minutes or an hour just to run a simple errand. Maybe she just wanted an excuse to get out of the house, a little time to herself in the shops without grumpy children in tow. Looking back, I see that we were performing pretty similar juggling acts as moms. Although living in the city meant that I had better access to transit and services, it was hardly a magic solution to the multiple demands on my time.
More affluent families manage these contradictions by relying on others’ low-waged labour. Immigrants, women, and men of colour perform the outsourced work of social reproduction when families can’t manage on their own or when the state refuses to help (for example, by providing affordable child care). As a graduate student with a partner working in a low-paying blue-collar industry, I didn’t have much to spare for paid services. Even so, when the time and energy demands of all that juggling wore me down, we justified going deeper into credit card debt for extras like grocery delivery and