(Politics): Session at the European Association for Urban History Conference: Cities in Motion 2020
This session invites papers that explore the policing of public sex, including the policing of homosexual encounters in the public space. Possible avenues of inquiry are how knowledge of deviant desires was created through policing, the techniques employed by police in order to regulate displays of deviant desire and how urban space was re-formed in order to regulate deviant desires.
The big city has been a symbol of possibility and liberation for sexual minorities since at least the early 1900s. On the other hand the big city has also been a key site for the control and discipline of deviant sexualities, through planning of the urban space and enforcement of specific rationalities through policing. The regulation of performative displays of desire has often been a central aspect of public order policing, especially with regards to the urban micro-geography of corners, parks and urinals demanding surveillance.
Regardless of legal status same, sex encounters seem to have been policed primarily when they took place in the public urban space in post-war west Europe and the US. The police strived to produce a systematic knowledge of the urban sexual landscape, and vice squads as well as special detachments that surveilled homosexuality took on an increasing role as experts on deviant desires. Representations of the surveilled subjects, such as qualitative enquiries and statistics, as well as of the urban landscape, such as maps and other cartographic practices, played an important part of codifying such knowledge and can be said to have played a part in the formation of specific subjectivities as well as of the urban space as such.
An open policing can also be seen as part of the disciplining of the deviant subject. Both in an immediate way with the aim of regulating or forbidding certain displays of desire and in a longer perspective were the policing can be seen as part of the conduct of conduct, i.e. playing a part in the remoulding of deviant subjectivities towards sexual practices more in line with dominating ideology at the time.
This session invites papers that explore the policing of public sex, including the policing of homosexual encounters in the public space. Possible avenues of inquiry are how knowledge of deviant desires was created through policing, the techniques employed by police in order to regulate displays of deviant desire and how urban space was re-formed in order to regulate deviant desires.
- Spokesperson: Andrés Brink Pinto, Lund University
- Co-organizer(s): Peter Edelberg, University of Copenhagen
- Keywords: Urban sexual landscapes | Policing | Homosexuality
- Time period: Contemporary period
- Topic(s): Social | Other
- Study area: More than one continent