Scene Spaces — Inclusions and Exclusions

Abstract

Here I consider interviewees’ experiences of scene spaces, defined as the range of city venues in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester and Yorkshire, such as cafes, pubs and clubs, frequented and recognised by lesbians as the typical and commercialised lesbian and gay space on offer in their towns and cities. All too often research into scene space has concentrated upon London (Binnie, 1995; McDowell, 1997) Manchester (Moran et al., 2004; Skeggs, 1999, 2001) and Brighton, in the United Kingdom, San Francisco, in the United States of America and other emerging urban ‘gay ghettos’ in Sydney and beyond (Binnie, 2000; Brekhaus, 2003). Scene spaces are leisure spaces, where people go to meet others, consume and spend time in a ‘friendly’ space, but such leisure space is also formed and fractured by material and interpersonal inequalities, with consequences for the enactment of sexual — and classed — identities. I argue for the necessity of including the experiences of classed individuals, in order to understand the socio-economic inequalities operating in scene space, which have been given attention in terms of the structuring of scene space, via commercialism, regeneration and ‘sophistication’, serving to produce upmarket and ‘classy’ scene space (Chasin, 2000; Hennessy, 2000; Warner, 1993). While the general ‘structural’ forces defining the trend of commodification have been well commented upon, there have been few attempts to understand it from the perspective of the meaning that individual lesbians find in commercialised scene spaces.