Urban Politics as the Unfolding of Social Relations in Place: The Case of Sexually Transmitted Disease Investigation in Mid‐Twentieth‐Century Gay Seattle

Abstract

Recent debates in urban politics stress the need to broaden conceptions of what counts as urban politics, as well as of where they take place. This means shifting attention to include more quotidian and prosaic social relations, including those taking place in spaces of civil society. We answer this call with a case study of the relations between an emerging gay male community in mid‐twentieth‐century Seattle, USA and the local public health department’s disease investigators (DIs). We focus on both the biopolitics and cultural politics of the investigation process, from the perspectives of both DIs and gay men. We point out certain tensions and paradoxes in these processes as a form of governmentality, and interpret them through a ‘noir’ cultural lens that is consistent with a notion of urban politics as the unfolding of social relations in place. We conclude by stressing how our findings and framework can augment urban political inquiry both intellectually and empirically.

THE SCALAR ARRHYTHMIA OF LGBTQ2S SOCIAL INCLUSION POLICIES: An Analysis of the Peripheral Municipalities of a ‘Progressive’ City‐region

“…Within seemingly ‘progressive’ polycentric city‐regions such as Vancouver, Canada—the focus of this article—the municipal scale hides important spatiotemporal differences in social inclusion policy adoption between the central city and its peripheries that have significant social justice implications for how everyday suburban LGBTQ2S lives are lived. The ‘when’ and ‘“where” of urban politics—especially the urban politics of sexuality’—matter (Knopp et al ., 2018: 405) and become particularly apparent in suburbs through place‐based adjacencies. More than ‘insignificant niches in a spatial hierarchy’ (Knopp and Brown, 2003: 413) that lag behind city centres and passively receive policy innovation from elsewhere, peripheral municipalities vary in the level and types of LGBTQ2S services, programming, policies and symbolic inclusions that they provide (Bain and Podmore, 2021a; 2021c).…”