Rainbow Theme Parks and Twenty Dollar Margaritas: Stonewall National Monument and the Commodification of Radical Spaces and Places

Keywords: queer, urban, social movements
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 32

Abstract

Stonewall National Monument is a US national monument located in New York’s Greenwich Village. It was designated as a monument by President Obama in 2016 to commemorate the Stonewall riots in June 1969, where queer patrons of the Stonewall Inn bar rioted against the NYPD after years of police harassment and violence. It was also designated as a National Historic Site in 2000. Yet, despite the good intentions of creating such a monument, it also creates several major issues, not least of which is the increased commercialization and commodification of the monument. This, I argue, has the effect of depoliticizing and effectively neutralizing the radical history of the monument. Through semi-structured interviews and an examination of archival records, I intend to demonstrate that this commodification is at least partially the result of a variety of mainstream LGBTQ organizations and historic preservationists that, through social movement professionalization and the resulting conservative turns that professionalization can bring (Staggenborg 1988, Voss and Sherman 2000), results in a sort of neoliberalization of this monument. This, in turn, creates a symbolic landscape that, instead of being a foil to the larger gentrifying neighborhood surrounding the monument, becomes part of this symbolic landscape of exclusion and violence against poor people and people of color (Bourdieu 1989). This paper will also examine some of the activist responses to this commodification through direct action such as “vandalism,” and other artistic reinterpretations of the monument.