Regulating and resisting queer creativity: Community-engaged arts practice in the neoliberal city

Abstract

This article draws from and advances urban studies literature on ‘creative city’ policies by exploring the contradictory role of queer arts practice in contemporary placemarketing strategies. Here I reflect on the fraught politics surrounding Radiodress’s each hand as they are called project, a deeply personal exploration of radical Jewish history programmed within Luminato, a Toronto-based international festival of creativity. Specifically, I explore how Luminato and the Koffler Centre, a Jewish organisation promoting contemporary art, regulated Radiodress’s work in order to stage marketable notions of ethnic and queer diversity. I also examine how and why the Koffler Centre eventually blacklisted Radiodress and her project. However, I also consider the ways Radiodress and Toronto artists creatively and collectively responded to these tensions. I maintain that bringing queer arts practice into discussions about contemporary creative city policies uncovers sites of queer arts activism that scale up to shape broader policies and debates. Such disidentificatory interventions, acts of co-opting and re-working discourses which exclude minoritarian subjects, challenge violent processes of colonisation and commodification on multiple fronts, as well as fostering more collective and relational ways of being.

The spark, the spread and ethics: Towards an object-orientated view of subversive creativity

“…This paper has shown how we can theoretically account for such a view of creativity, but what does this mean for urban politics more broadly? More than simply debunking the creative city (Chatterton, 2000; Mould, 2015) and admonishing a neoliberal interpretation of creativity (McLean, 2017, 2018; Peck, 2005), it shows how creative practices of reappropration and urban interventionism can be thought as encompassing more than embodied practices of socio-artistic critique (Campbell, 2012; Garrett, 2014; Marston and De Leeuw, 2013; Pinder, 2005). It shows that they can espouse a city-making process that is less prescriptive and accepting of normalising and opaque functionalities, and more proactive.…”

“…In doing so, this line of academic work has opened up exciting new avenues of geographical inquiry and aids in the resistance to capitalist appropriation. For example, feminist and queer pedagogies have problematized the official masculine and heteronormative creative city policy projects by introducing into it ‘disobedient’ marginal identity subjects (see McLean, 2017, 2018). Additionally, working class based activist groups have utilised direct action, civil unrest and comedic interventions to highlight the specific structural violence of gentrification and austerity within a creative city discourse (see Harvie, 2013; Mould, 2018).…”

Creative city, mobility, and creativity: Finnish artists in Berlin

“…Such interpretation easily applies creativity as a globally consistent model for urban growth that may actually limit spontaneity in cities (Whiting and Hannam, 2017). Instead, everyday vernacular (Edensor et al, 2009), marginal (Gibson, 2010;McLean, 2018), and precarious (Gill and Pratt, 2008) creativity require a focus on individuals, creative collaborations, and subversive practices (Mould, 2015).…”

Reimagining Urban Living Labs: Enter the Urban Drama Lab

“…There is a long tradition for urban research and planning to draw on artistic practices to develop new collaborative formats for urban development (see e.g. Cuff et al, 2020; Dang, 2005; Gkartzios and Crawshaw, 2019; McLean, 2018; Rannila and Loivaranta, 2015; Sachs Olsen, 2019; Sarkissian, 2005). More recently, political and organisation studies have started discussing artistic practice and performance as forms of entrepreneurship and organising (see e.g.…”