Urban Night-Life Space: Masculinity & Heteronormativity Landscape

The topics that we discussed in class in this last two weeks (Urban structure & design, Using public space) remind me an article that I read few weeks ago about pleasure and leisure in the nocturnal city (Hubbard, 2012). I think it is interesting to share it here and maybe some of us have read this article as well. Hubbard (2012) stresses the importance of the city center as the principal focus of urban night-life in which is associated with bright lights, so-called the nocturnal city. The production of light represents a “comprehensive claim to power” (p. 121), which means the ownership and control of a city by the authorities/governments and entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurs are keen to take advantage to provide attractions to people, by build and open hotels, restaurants, cafes, bars, night clubs, theaters, cinemas, and so on. Therefore, Hubbard (2012) examines the illumination of the city goes conjointly with the invention of enormous number of new leisure opportunities and spaces that eventually providing attractions of night-life. Paris, for instance, well-known as La Ville Lumière or the City of Light, provides number of technological and cultural innovations (e.g. payement café, cinema, revue bar) which are tied into rituals of night-walking, windows shopping, and consumption. Or in Berlin and New York where electric lightings implicate in the making of a variety new leisure spaces and produced an ‘aesthetic of astonishment’ where the pedestrians literally intoxicated and controlled of seeing and being seen.

Through the provision of lights in the streets and leisure spaces in the city, people are keen to have a night-walking, that associated with the emergence of a new urban ‘type’ – the flâneur. The flâneur literally means ‘walk around.’ It has a real historical context where wealthy member of the bourgeois class wandered in the city in search of distraction. Despite of the history and literal meaning of the flâneur, feminist scholars point out that the flâneur refers to a “subjective gaze that was profoundly male” (Hubbard, 2012, p. 124). In addition, Wolff (1985) states that “the non-existence of the flâneuse (feminine form of flâneur in French), as another urban type, symbolizes women’s restricted participation in public spaces as well as the gender bias in some of the classical literature on modern cities” (Hubbard, 2012, p. 125). Therefore, it depicts that men have freedom to wander the city at night and the flâneur becomes a manifestation of male privilege. In addition, the idea that the modern city provides a sexual opportunities for men where they could pursue different pleasures in different leisure spaces show that the night-life spaces perform a strong masculinity and are constituted for heterosexual people. Meah et al. (2008) argue that "spaces of evening leisure, where young women and men were allowed to mix freely, were particularly important for naturalizing the ideologies, identities, and practices through which people entered heterosexual relationship" (Hubbard, 2012, p. 130). The city at night itself could thus take on the appearance of a marriage market. There are lots of cinemas, malls, art centers, restaurants, bars, cafes, night clubs that are designed and play role as spaces in order to catch the eye of potential date, dating, and the performance of coupledom. Certainly, urban night-life spaces are constituted for the masculine landscape where men and their power govern the spaces and apply the heteronormativity.

In the modern cities, the visibility of women in night-life spaces has increased. An increasing number of young, single, and waged women begin to experience rhythms of time and labour which have much in common with working men, and lead them to expect similar access to spaces of leisure. Yet, the search of leisure do not lead them to the traditional haunts of working men – pubs and clubs – but rather an emergent range of commercialized recreational – dance halls, theaters, cinemas, tea shops, department stores and restaurants – which appear to offer more respectable pleasure. Even though the increasing number of women’s engagement in night-life spaces indicates the emancipation of women to be in public life at night, women are still disadvantaged and do not have their freedom. Hubbard (2012) argues that the anxiety about the presence of women within the expressive commercial cultures of night-life given the persistence of the cult of domesticity and the promotion of chastity and decorum as feminine traits. This anxiety affirms the idea that women do not belong to the night-life city and remains a persistent myth that even make women to be more controlled by masculine roles and place constraints on women’s participation in the night-time city. In addition, the myth makes women feel anxiety and fear that lead women to be extra careful when working or walking back home at night, women are even advised to dress properly to avoid unwanted attention from men and to prevent sexual harassment and violence. It is even worse where there is lack of lights. Women could have a feeling of vulnerability because they need to limit their access to and control of spaces at night-time, i.e. women feel unsafe walking after dark, they should change the routes taken or search for accompany to walk with, walking in group, carrying a personal attack alarm, avoiding interactions with strangers, take taxi rather than on foot, and know how to do self-defense. Women need to modify their habits or behaviors, even the way of dressing in order to avoid troubles with men. In this regard, it is highly important to adopt gender mainstreaming in urban planning. Women-Work-City project in Vienna, Austria as explained by Foran (2013) is a great example how the urban planners design the city to make life easier and safer for women.

References

Foran, C. (2013, September 16). How to design a city for women. The Atlantic Cities.

Hubbard, P. (2012). On the town: Pleasure and leisure in the nocturnal city. In Cities and sexualities (pp. 119-147). New York: Routledge.