Privilege, Power and the Policing of 2SLGBTQ+ Communities in Urban Greenspace

Keywords: access, inclusion, parks, queer, policing, homophobia, public space
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 33

Abstract

Hostility towards 2SLGBTQ+ occupants, discriminatory police patrolling in parks, and institutional homophobia play key roles in creating barriers to access public naturalized spaces for 2SLGBTQ+ communities. In Toronto’s urban greenspace, policing isn't just carried out by the police but also driven by privileged public and private interests who look to defend not only (by)laws, but cultural standards and social practices. Urban geographers have expressed that in the policing of public space more broadly, operations target marginalized individuals and groups with punitive policing, resulting in acts of reprimandation extending beyond what is necessary for the seriousness of threats to safety (Boone 2021; Mitchell, 2014). The goals of removal and displacement act to make any subversion of normative life invisible in order to uphold the status quo and visual purity values (Catungal & McCann, 2010). This research unpacks how moral meaning is a guiding principle for the policing of 2SLGBTQ+ park occupants in urban greenspace through criminalization or fear of being reprimanded. Strategies of control employed by police in greenspace purposely or implicitly link queerness to danger, or as a threat to the community, creating a barrier for 2SLGBTQ+ communities to access naturalized landscapes and sites for connection to nature in the city. Queer corporeality, kinship and love subverts deeply entrenched heteronormative social values and understandings of sexuality, partnership, gender and domesticity. These destabilize institutional understandings of morality and daily life and thus need to be regulated, where the easiest path to achieve so is discouragement through criminalization, and ultimately, removal.