Urban spaces and their meanings are continually reinvented by daily life and representational practices. Public spaces provide an avenue to analyse the construction and contestation of political and social power in the city. The geography of Montreal's gay men's communities underwent profound changes during the 1980s. The traditional gay areas of the downtown core and the "Red Light" districts have disappeared in favour of a new gay quarter, the Village. This transformation raises questions about the exercise of power in space since the heart of the gay neighbourhood and the downtown area were one in the same. The accumulated symbolism of downtown Montreal was contested and subverted by the growing visibility of sexual minorities. This analysis of urban space reflects a transformation in public discourse that evolved from a tight control of morals, to the confinement of private morality to private spaces, and finally to the constitution of a discourse centered on human rights. A variety of qualitative methods including interviews and documentary sources, such as the community press, have been used to show the political dimension of public space and the manipulation of the symbolic economy allowing the establishment of rights to urban space. / Dominion Square is the spatial focus around which collective and social phenomena have been analysed. The impacts of these phenomena on our collective imaginations have been reconstructed. The transformation of central urban space by modernist architecture and urban functionalism, reconfigured public spaces in the downtown core, along with its definitions, its representations and its control. A mapping of gay geographic imagination shows the importance of sexuality, language, social class, religion and national identities in the development of a sense of belonging in space. It has been shown that gay geographic imagination is necessarily linked to other aspects of identity and diverse manifestations of power. This imagination questioned the privileged representations of hegemonic social values through the practices of daily life, the subversion of the meaning of space and political protest. Police repression showed itself to be only one of the strategies used by the municipal establishment in its censorship practices.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.38199 |
| Date | January 2001 |
| Creators | Guindon, Jocelyn M. |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | French |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of Geography.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001871874, proquestno: NQ78695, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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