Pinkwashing Policies or Insider Activism? Allyship in the LGBTIQ+ Governance–Activism Nexus

How can the ‘dark side’ of urban policy and planning be transformed into a ‘light side?’ How can displaceability and exclusion of an urban minority be reversed? How can marginalized groups enter the mainstream and achieve recognition, security and a stake in urban resources? The critical literature on the ‘dark side’ of planning rarely deals with the transformation from oppression to justice for excluded groups. The story of queer (LGBTQ+) space in Beersheba, Israel, which illustrates such a process, is analyzed here through the struggle to organize a gay parade and be allocated municipal assets for community use. The paper traces the transformation of the relationships between the community, the mayor and the City Council. The analysis shows how urban citizenship became a site of struggle constructed “from below,” coupled with the ability to mobilize support from other cities and political pragmatism. In order to locate this struggle in a broader context, the LGBTQ+ struggle is compared to that of another minority, Beersheba’s Bedouin-Arab community. The latter’s plight shows that while the LGBTQ+ commrecognition and moving towards the ‘light side,’ the Arab community was experiencing the ‘dark side,’ with increasing urban oppression and displacement. The study thus shows how a liberal, gay struggle may also be used to “pinkwash” on-going displacement of other communities in the urban periphery.

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What Would an Inclusive City for Gender and Sexual Minorities Be Like? You Need to Ask Queer Folx!

Duplan

2023

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From fights against racism to women’s inclusion, from access to education to integration of migrants: “Inclusion” and the “inclusive city” have been used in many ways and at different scales, running the risk of becoming a kind of catchall. Following increasing use by public authorities, media, and urban professionals, the inclusive city now serves as a normative framework for urban development. Although it is aimed at social cohesion, one nevertheless wonders whether it has not become more of a buzzword that obfuscates the reproduction of power relations. Moreover, while being somehow mainstreamed into institutional discourses, the inclusive city has been quite overlooked so far by academics, and an effort is needed to clarify its conceptualisation and democratic potential. This article provides a theoretical and critical perspective on how the concept of inclusion is used in urban public policies in relation to gender, by examining the public these policies address. Using a multiscalar analysis and drawing on Warner’s framework of publics and counterpublics, I examine more specifically which public is targeted in inclusive policies, concerning gender and sexualities, and how this participates in the reshaping of (urban) citizenship and sense of belonging, as well as the implications this has for social justice. Thus, I argue that while the inclusive city has become a normative idiom imbued with the neoliberal grammar of public politics, it also offers a paradoxical framework of democratic cohesion that promotes consumption‐based equality. A focus on (counter)publics serves to highlight the need for a more queerly engaged planning practice—one that draws on insurgent grassroots movements—to seek to destabilise neoliberalism’s attempt at pacification in its use of inclusion and citizen participation.

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Pinkwashing Policies or Insider Activism? Allyship in the LGBTIQ+ Governance–Activism Nexus

Cited by 5 publications

References 39 publications

Privilege and Performative Allyship Within Organizations

Privilege and Performative Allyship Within Organizations

The light side of urban planning: Queer space in Beersheba between displacement and recognition

What Would an Inclusive City for Gender and Sexual Minorities Be Like? You Need to Ask Queer Folx!

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