Sexism and the City: Sue Ferguson Reviews Leslie Kern’s Feminist City: A Field Guide
What Matters Now
This world isn’t built for women, literally. Our cities are designed and built in ways that perpetuate and accent women’s vulnerability and oppression. But cities are also spaces in which new and better worlds – feminist worlds that include racialized, disabled, Indigenous, queer and other marginalized communities – can be imagined and sometimes forged. This two-sided truth about cities is explored in Leslie Kern’s Feminist City: A Field Guide.
Leslie Kern. Feminist City: A Field Guide. Between the Lines. $22.95. 192 pp., ISBN: 9781771134576
Early in the book, Kern recounts an illicit trip to downtown Toronto. As a teenager, she and a girlfriend, lacking train fare back to the suburbs, wandered Yonge Street with two boys they just met. Moving between fast food joints, park benches and building stairwells, the foursome had random encounters with strangers and chatted until dawn. Nothing bad happened. Rather, Kern discovered the feeling of freedom that comes with inhabiting a place and time from which, as a girl, she otherwise felt excluded.
That night introduced Kern to the magic of a city: the sense of possibilities that emerges from its sheer size, architecture and, well, urbanity. But Feminist City is as much critical analysis as it is a celebration of urban living.
As a young student and mother living in Toronto and London, UK, Kern realized she was negotiating cities that also constrained her. Everything from guidelines for wind tunnels, to snow plow routes, to public transit reflect the gendered presuppositions of city planners, designed “to accommodate the movement and work patterns of men.” While women also work, Kern explains, they tend to be responsible for the kids, and use the city differently. Although bus routes and transit fares, for instance, assume single destinations, women (who use public transit more regularly than men) tend to make multiple stops at schools, daycares, grocery stores and so on. And toilets – which barely exist outside of commercial establishments – are rarely fit for diaper changes or dealing with the messes of menstruation. When it comes to urban design, laments Kern, “care work is still very much an afterthought.” So is safety. Public toilets and other city services are common spaces of sexual and transphobic harassment.
Just as cities open up possibilities for women, then, they regularly shut them down, making women’s lives difficult and dangerous. Difficult and dangerous not only for “pretty privileged” (white, cis, settler, able-bodied, professional) women like her. For cities, she tells us, are not just buildings, roads, dense populations and municipal services. They are expressions of lived relations among people – relations that are infused with unequal social power.
Because cities are complicated in this way, solutions for some women often make things worse for others. The prime example she cites is “the rise of feminized spaces.” Mom-friendly coffee shops with bookshelves and couches, or condos with hi-tech security features and 24-hour concierge services may make life better for women who can afford to take advantage of them. But such “revitalization” ends up displacing, excluding, and intensifying the surveillance of poorer and otherwise marginalized people.
With the term “field guide” in its title, Feminist City claims to help readers navigate these complicated power relations. At this most practical level, the book partially succeeds. Kern offers examples of feminist urban designs for public transit, street lighting, housing, and even snow-plowing. While applauding their adoption by a few cities, however, she is adamant that design alone is not going to cut it: “Single stalls won’t eliminate transphobia [….] No amount of lighting is going to abolish patriarchy.”
Kern pins greater hope for systemic change on women’s own efforts to reshape their worlds in ways that better meet their needs. What that looks like on the ground varies widely. On the one hand, it looks like female friendships that make possible an alternative way of being in the city – one in which women rely on each other for transportation, child and elder care, housing and well-being. Valuing and expanding such relations, says Kern, challenges both family and state, tilting “the status quo . . . in ways that are frightening and fantastic.”
On the other hand, it looks like organized, conscious forms of resistance. Kern’s examples range from African American women who established community spaces in Newark, NJ, offering refuge and political solidarity, to street protests such as Pride Strides and Slutwalks, to the online #MeToo movement. Kern discusses her own involvement in Toronto’s Take Back the Night marches, mid-nineties Days of Action against the Mike Harris government, and the 2010 G20 protest. Despite reservations about the sexism and ableism that often accompany such activism, she celebrates it for claiming a “right to the city” by and for marginalized people. “Rights aren’t won and defended in a classroom, on social media, or even via electoral politics,” she writes. “The work has to happen on the ground.”
Beyond that broad principle, things get murky. Kern discusses strengths and limitations of specific strategies in an ad hoc manner. As a result, the book is less a field guide than a menu of options. Some options (like Black Lives Matter and Idle No More), she calls “transformative.” But readers do not learn why, or how more precisely one might assess, or contribute to them in relation to less transformative but equally significant options, such as friendship networks and alternative communities of care and resistance. This is especially frustrating because Kern insists throughout the book on the need for structural change.
The magic of the city works on many different levels. Kern’s book helps reveal them. She rightly proposes that to move beyond the oppressions structured into cities, we need utopian visions. At the same time, I wish she spent more time elaborating and clarifying the alchemical properties of transforming visions into real possibilities.
Susan Ferguson recently retired from Wilfrid Laurier University, where she taught in the Digital Media & Journalism and Youth & Children’s Studies programs. Her book, Women and Work: Feminism, Labour and Social Reproduction, was published in November 2019 by Pluto, and is available in Canada from Between the Lines.