Three recent scenes in the affective life of gentrification in San Francisco’s Polk Gulch

Abstract

Drawing on the ‘reparative turn’ in queer feminist scholarship, we situate a commemorative march that took place in late March 2018 in the Polk Gulch neighborhood of San Francisco as an entry point into the affective conditions of living in and through a period of intensifying urban development. Complete with a brass band, drag queens dressed in mourning, and black banners, participants stopped at the sites of former gay bars and other commercial establishments where they laid wreaths, offered eulogies, and affectively asserted the social and historical significance of these places. Nine months later, we interviewed organizers and participants and analyzed recordings of the event in order to register the sensate conditions that preceded, pervaded, and followed in the wake of the March. In so doing, we unravel the ‘undecidability of the urban’ in which residents call into question the impacts of gentrification. Through our tripartite engagement with the affective contours of the March, we situate the procession less as a discrete ceremonial event to re-inscribe collective memories in urban space or to lay claims to a right to urban territory, than as a momentary effort to work out and through the ongoing, shared feelings of loss in an increasingly unlivable city. By attending to the felt conditions of urban development, we argue for foregrounding shared sentiments as a viable pathway to opening up relief from, if not alternatives to, the ongoing displacements and dispossessions of the neoliberal city.