Sex and the Revanchist City: Zoning out Pornography in New York

Abstract

This paper is an investigation of the social, economic, legal, and cultural factors underlying the move, in New York City, to regulate the sale of pornographic materials through the promulgation of zoning laws. The campaign to zone out pornography, a point of solidarity around which a number of disparate and often hostile interest groups have rallied in order to reclaim public space in the name of community (as though the term itself were transparent and monovocal) is linked to both gentrification and the socioeconomic dynamics underlying the emergence of what Neil Smith has characterized as the revanchist city. ‘Quality of life’ issues stand euphemistically for the domestication and sanitization of an urban landscape whose perceived unruliness is emblematized not only by the presence of large numbers of homeless people, but also by the outré display of sexually explicit imagery associated with XXX-rated businesses. By focusing on the discursive strategies that seek to identify sex shops with so-called ‘secondary impacts’ such as increased crime and decreasing property values, I aim to uncover the social biases and economic motivations that work to shape the urban landscape. I argue that the move to zone out pornography in New York City is imbricated within larger spatial practices that operate both to maximize the productivity of social space and to reproduce the social values of the majority.