| Abstract | In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 7.2 (2001) 195-243 How does the city figure in narratives of memory and history forthcoming from that loose group of individuals whose social existence is a product of the city itself? If lesbians, gays, and queers of all sorts owe their emergence to the modern metropolis, where they were hailed as a new "city type" in police and newspaper reports and, no less scandalously, in the first urban poetry (Charles Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal or Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass), then how do they figure the city in genealogies of their own telling? How do they see themselves arising and enduring within urban culture but without the traditional means of social reproduction afforded by family, ethnicity, nationality, and religion? If the city is the site of the "coming out" of vaguely constellated desires into a community of love that dare speak its name, is this erotic society not then radically susceptible to the shocks and catastrophes that structure urban modernity? Can social belonging be established by something as volatile as the modern metropolis? Memory is possible because it is collective. An individual knows herself or himself as a being of enduring, if evolving, character because she or he possesses memories that are collectively articulated, revised, and confirmed. Thus Maurice Halbwachs contended in La mémoire collective, published in Paris in the wake of World War II when memory, traumatic memory, and memory's very survival became an urgent concern among sociologists. Though schooled in Bergson, Halbwachs departed from the idea that memory is a matter of durée, the persistent recognition of images, dually facilitated by neurophysiology and phenomenology of brain/mind. Halbwachs argued that memory is much more material than that, that it is a matter not just of consciously lived time but of socially lived space and the collective representation of that space. Older districts of foreign cities, cities we have never traveled, are able to recall us to ourselves--"indeed, the scene seems by itself to evoke [familiar impressions]"--because they trigger "other remembrances and the remembrances of other people." The city, for Halbwachs, is a paradigmatic image of collective memory. Relationships between individuals, and between individuals and groups, are established in relation to the things and designs of the city as part of the process of habitation. The durable, inorganic materials of urban habitations generally outlive their inhabitants. The most enduring image city dwellers possess is that of "the stones of the city" itself. When a neighborhood suffers demolition or decay, the individual inhabitant feels that "a whole part of himself is dying," whereas the group resists that assault "with all the force of its traditions" and "endeavors to hold firm or reshape itself in a district or on a street that is no longer ready-made for it but was once its own." Backed by tradition, collective memory arrests progress and preserves the past through urban restoration. What tradition could this be, save one of wealth and class privilege, that Halbwachs sympathetically identifies as "long time old aristocratic families and longstanding urban patriarchs" (134-35)? How, then, might the city function as an image of collective memory for socially disenfranchised groups, including sexual minorities? For queers whose relationship to the world is distinctly urban, whose habitation are primarily the inner city of big cities, where wreckage and renewal are most intense, is the city not a central image and yet a most compromised one? How can queer collective memory be fixed by an image of the city when that image is stormed by development and dilapidation without resistance afforded by aristocratic families and urban patriarchs? How can queer city space serve collective memory when it is threatened by legal and social violence, as in, for instance, the frequent invasion and vandalizing as well as endemic poverty and marginality of "women-only spaces," or the raiding, razing, and closing of venues for gay men, as with New York's gay bathhouses? Finally, how does the city function as a vision of collective memory when official history and mass media dominate the universe of image production in ways that either abolish and disfigure the representation...
|
