Activity six - Zachary

This activity proved far more challenging than I thought it would. I expected to come back with a list of specific observations. Instead, I came back with a slew of general remarks and a few specific observations.
The easiest thing to find were services intended for working parents. Weirdly, however, they were all concentrated in a single square-block. I found a child development center, a pre-school, and a women's and pediatric health clinic all on a single block. Around the corner was a day care. All of this was at the far eastern edge of Chinatown, while the rest of the neighborhood, so near as I can tell, is entirely given over to restaurants, beauty salons, pharmacies, markets, and weird trinket shops.



I expected it to be quite easy to find specifically gendered spaces, but it proved quite difficult. Columbus Park is approximately 1/4 basketball courts. These courts were the most obviously gendered spaces I found as they were entirely populated by men. The rest of the park, however, seemed ambiguous at best. The playgrounds contained a mix of men and women watching children with no clear bias in either direction. The picnic tables were similarly diverse, in part, I am sure, due to the concert that was happening today. At other times I've noticed that these tables are used primarily by older men who play board games. I did not take pictures of the park because I felt extremely uneasy about photographing large numbers of children without the consent of their parents.
One fascinating thing about Chinatown is the lack of gendered hair and beauty salons. I saw over a dozen but, strangely, every one I looked into contained both men and women in a roughly equal mix. They aren't advertised as unisex and the choice of the phrase "beauty salon" initially led me to believe that they would be oriented towards women, but this was not the case.
Further, although I didn't find any specifically female spaces, I did notice a lack of certain kinds of markers of the street as a male space. Specifically, the quasi-pornographic advertisements that are so common almost everywhere else in Manhattan (just a few blocks down Canal street there are a slew of posters depicting a woman exposing her breasts to a security camera...which is apparently an advertisement for jeans) are entirely absent. There are, first of all, almost no corporate advertisements at all. What advertisements I did see were mostly associated with much smaller businesses and did not depict anything particularly gendered.
A place that I consider distinctly gendered is the Manhattan Criminal Courts building. Everything in my life has led me to believe that most cops are men. Further, I haven't taken a Women and the Law class just yet, but I know enough to know that women are frequently on the receiving end of legal repression. At the very least, I feel confidant in saying that the police have been used throughout American history to enforce the dominance of straight, white men and to control spaces in a way that imprints their desires onto the city.

One of the things that made this activity so difficult is that a 70 degree Saturday in Chinatown means swarms of human beings and, since what I am looking for requires me to pick up on subtle visual cues, this made things extremely difficult. What I saw, mostly, was a seething, chaotic mass of people filling every available inch of sidewalk.
This made it particularly difficult to find queer or gay individuals claiming space. Because of the hectic sidewalk life, it's entirely possible that I would have passed by extremely active and significant queer spaces and not noticed. Chauncey deals with this invisibility in 'Privacy Could Only Be Had in Public': Gay Uses of the Street: "[Gay men] were aided in [constructing a gay city in the midst of, yet invisible to, the dominant city] by the disinclination of most people to believe that any "normal"-looking man could be anything other than "normal"" I saw no one that had intentionally marked themselves as queer but, given the number of people I saw today, I find it difficult to believe that I did not see a single queer or gay person. I simply did not know.
I believe the crowding also explains why every space I found was absolutely given over to public activities. In over an hour I didn't even see a couple trade a kiss. What I did see were huge numbers of people, probably tourists, roaming about in traditional family units or with backpacks and maps. If I wanted to do anything that was usually private in a public space, I would have picked a different neighborhood. My guess is that most people did.
I looked up some gay maps of the city and found that the area I explored (the area bordered by Centre street, Canal Street, the Brooklyn bridge and the Manhattan bridge) was empty of anything of interest to the map-makers. That said, I imagine that only the tip of the iceberg of any subculture will make its way onto the internet. Google follows reality at a distance and social groups colonize spaces at a pace that exceeds even word of mouth.