Safe spaces in the city: security, scale and masculinity during the Geneva summit

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Article

Reference

Safe spaces in the city: security, scale and masculinity during the Geneva summit

FALL, Juliet Jane, DE DARDEL, Julie

FALL, Juliet Jane, DE DARDEL, Julie. Safe spaces in the city: security, scale and masculinity during the Geneva summit. Political Geography , 2021, p. 102484

DOI : 10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102484

Available at:

http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:154446

Disclaimer: layout of this document may differ from the published version.

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Political Geography xxx (xxxx) xxx

Available online 8 August 2021

Guest editorial

Safe spaces in the city: Security, scale and masculinity during the Geneva Summit

A R T I C L E I N F O Keywords

Feminist geography Security Global intimate Scale Geneva summit Safe space Masculinity

On June 16, 2021, the city of Geneva was transformed to allow President Joe Biden and President Vladimir Putin to meet in a luxurious villa in a park for a couple of hours, accompanied by their trusted ad- visers. Hundreds of meters of barbed wire were unrolled in the pre- ceding days, 900 police officers were brought in from across Switzerland, and the Swiss military moved into pop-up camps with armored vehicles. The entire area around the lakefront in the heart of the city was sealed off in a Red Zone. For Geneva, this was an unprec- edented urban mise-en-sc`ene, distinct from the diplomatic comings-and- goings that habitually take place in this pocket-sized global capital, home to the United Nations, embassies, consulates and international organizations. Although many drew parallels with the historic meeting in Geneva in 1985 between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, the security dispositif on the ground, in the air, and in cyberspace was very different. Downtown neighbourhoods were transformed into an over- sized, securitized geopolitical stage, crafted with spectacular sites and vistas for the media. This was an important moment both for the Swiss government and for the city to show off its diplomatic hospitality. All local inhabitants were asked to stay away for 24 hours; disciplined by the pandemic and by our ambiguous pride at seeing our city chosen as host, we complied (Figs. 1–3).

Two days before, the city centre had been made safe in a very different way for a few hours. The Geneva Feminist Strike brought together over 15,000 participants marching from the Place des Nations in front of the United Nations to the Parc des Bastions across town. After months of a pandemic that had set back women’s rights, choices and freedoms across the world, this march echoed the massive and successful Gr`eve des Femmes*, Gr`eve F´eministe (Women and Feminist Strike—the asterisked ‘Femmes’ signaling trans and non-binary inclusivity) orga- nized across Switzerland on June 14, 2019, a day designated for strikes by feminist collectives since 1991. The hope for change generated in 2019 had given way to rage, tiredness and, for some, increased deter- mination. Amid music and a sea of purple banners, demonstrators came

together to construct a safe, inclusive space of sisterhood, creating security by the simple fact of being together en masse in one place. Co- presence has historically been an effective political strategy used by social movements across the world, who knowingly build collective strength and security from crowds. Beyond using the integrity of our own bodies to ensure collective security, we used speeches and placards to call for international solidarity, increased women’s leadership, and the safety of women everywhere. A representative of the local chapter of the Foulards Violets (“Purple Headscarves”), a collective of Muslim feminists, spoke powerfully about liberation and choice. Others marched bare-breasted. The founders of the Geneva chapter of the Women’s Liberation Movement, established in 1971, were still marching (de Dardel, 2018). Our young daughters danced in the street, surrounded by an extraordinary diversity of their peers representing refreshingly diverse expressions of gender identity. Police presence was peripheral and relatively discreet, despite the intense military focus in the city that week. Marchers kept to the agreed route, skirting the fenced-off zone where the Biden-Putin meeting would take place two days later (Figs. 4–6).

As geographers, we have a particular strength in understanding the connections between different kinds of spaces and in uncovering the contradictions within particular temporal-geographical contexts. This perspective compels us to link up these two events that shaped our city during an exceptional week. We had, on the one hand, two powerful men locked in a room presumed to hold the keys to world peace and global security, and, on the other, streets filled with fleshy bodies, keeping each other safe. We must reflect on these juxtaposed material events that constructed distinct safe spaces to understand how security continues to be defined, narrowed and legitimized by state power, and to challenge its reproduction through masculinist and military paradigms.

As feminist geographers, we have learnt to recognize framings that centre militarized masculinities and that associate statecraft with manliness; we also recognize violence and domination as intrinsically Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Political Geography

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102484 Received 25 July 2021; Accepted 4 August 2021

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2 patriarchal, andocentric and heteronationalistic (Enloe, 1989; Sloot- maeckers, 2019). These framings rely on elevating some masculinities over others, and over all femininities. Masculinity is an identity

tenuously constructed through time and space, fashioned through repeated acts. In our patriarchal cultures, political authority is bolstered by gendered statements, symbols and actions, often reinforcing and Image 1.Caption: Eve of the Geneva Summit on June 14, 2021, installation of the high-security zone. Author: J. Fall.

Image 2.Caption: Eve of the Geneva Summit on June 14, 2021, Rolls of barbed wire to protect the perimeter of the park. Author: J. Fall.

Guest editorial

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Image 3.Caption: View on the Lake of Geneva from inside the high-security zone on June 14, 2021. Author: J. Fall.

Image 4.Caption: Feminist March in Geneva city centre, June 14, 2021. Author: E. Sohier

Guest editorial

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4 legitimating nationalistic discourse. Feminist writers have drawn attention to moments after political crises when remasculinization takes place, with visual representations of leaders carefully crafted. Riabov and Riabova (2014), for example, have argued that in Russia, this has meant explicitly conjuring up an image of charisma and virility for

Vladimir Putin. The same could be said of aviator-glasses-wearing Joe Biden speaking tough in his press conference in Geneva, playing the part of the strong but wise patriarch after a Trump presidency punctuated by ignorance and hubris.

In the days leading up to the Biden-Putin Summit, as the rolls of Image 5.Caption: Juliet Fall (foreground) and friends at the Feminist March, June 14, 2021. Author: Juliet Fall.

Image 6.Caption: Julie de Dardel (right) and friends at the Feminist March, June 14, 2021. Author: J. de Dardel.

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Political Geography xxx (xxxx) xxx barbed wire were being unraveled, it was clear that we were watching

the construction of a theatre. Ironically, after months of shuttered cultural venues, cinemas and concert halls, our whole city was transformed into a stage. It did not seem real, even after a year in which ‘normal’ daily life had shifted so radically. “If a simple conversation between two men could bring lasting political change to an insecure world, why couldn’t it take place over Zoom?“, we joked. Surely, this event was about more than reopening fraught diplomatic channels. Viewed on live TV worldwide, the diplomatic staging of the summit seemed as much about upholding old-style patriarchal statehood and masculinity as it was about endorsing militarily-imposed global geopolitics. This was not a new dawn of global politics, but the old guard sharpening its claws:

global security, reincarnated and made man(ly). The instrumental deployment of hypermasculinity, materialized in the scenography of the Geneva Summit, involved the muscular equation of self, state and international security. This was performed through an exaggerated set of masculine cultural norms intended to create legitimacy and power itself, benefitting both men. Our own self-effacing but exceedingly traditional Swiss President Guy Parmelin, whispering a quiet welcome and stepping back to leave the big men to chat, performed his supporting role. Mas- culinities are diverse and hierarchized.

Ironically, though, while these two men surrounded by barbed wire might have imagined they were projecting hegemonic militarized masculinity, they were also revealing their agedness and fragility, with bodies vulnerable to disease, tiredness and threats. Masculinities that rely on an entire city being shut down to be made visible are fragile rather than strong. Biden and Putin needed others to put themselves in danger on a daily basis to keep them safe, constantly surrounded by bodyguards, tracked by military intelligence, preceded by tasters sam- pling the very food they put into their ageing bodies. They needed a Swiss Cheffe du Protocol to choose flowers in colors that would not upset them, in accordance with established diplomatic protocols. They needed comfortable seats to be moved across town to sit on. They needed a whole city to move out so that they could chat, locked in a park in a curated domestic space, safe from imagined terrorism. They needed concrete blocks to seal off little side streets: the same blocks used to seal off international borders from a virus during yet another geopolitical performance the year before (Fall, 2020).

Just as this case calls attention to the connections and juxtapositions of spaces, it also confounds the tidy conceptions of scale that inform political and academic discourse. Drawing attention to the fleshiness of these global leaders’ bodies as well as to our own helps us see how these separate moments rely upon different scales as well as different un- derstandings of security. For feminist political geographers, scale is a leaky category that is fluid and contingent, with public and private – or political and non-political – spaces seen as fundamentally overlapping.

There is not one scale of international politics, and another of domestic daily life. We know that the global and the intimate construct each other: they do not inhabit separate spheres or bounded subjects (Mountz

& Hyndman, 2006). Contrary to what the heroic staging seemed inten-

ded to make us see, Biden and Putin shaking hands was no more or no less an incarnation of an abstract global scale than were the bodies of the feminist demonstrators. Having their bodies touch and experience being next to each other, even in a socially-distanced manner, was one of the justifications for holding the meeting in person. Likewise, the women marching together in one place signaled explicitly that sisterhood is both global and intimate, that no woman can be free until all women are safe everywhere. In drawing out the contrasts but also the connections between the demonstration and the summit, our point is therefore not that we should look at these events as examples of different scales of politics or security, but rather that we need to understand how they intimately constitute each other. We need to tease out the interwoven stories hid- den behind the geopolitical staging. We need to see the bodies of political leaders and diplomats as just as gendered and uncertain as those of the women in the street. The safe space of the summit is as much a political and rhetorical construction as the safe space of the street.

Because we understand how interwoven these scales are, we are enraged by the way our political systems systematically rank one as more important politically than the other. We must ponder why demonstrators meekly adapted our route across the city so as not to cause any fuss, while summit participants could effortlessly enroll almost- endless state power.

As our city was transformed for a few short days in such radically different ways, we looked for points of dialogue, for signs of contaminations between these two Genevas: we wondered if a policewoman guarding the march looked at us as secret sisters; we searched for any mention of the Women’s March in the press coverage of the Summit. We asked our friends to share their photos, their stories, searching for points of contact, for signs of change in the established order of things. While we did find radical graffiti that called for “+de meufs, - de keufs” (more chicks, less cops), the treasure hunt soon petered out. We soon realized we were looking for something that wasn’t really there. That, above all, we were looking for hope —for traces of leakage between the bubbles, contaminations between two conceptions of security inscribed in sealed spaces. After all, these two worlds paradoxically both relied on creating spaces removed from ordinary life to exist.

At best, our search made us aware of fleeting possibilities. We heard whispers of the promised Monde d’Apr`es—the possibility of new, post- pandemic lives evoked during the darkest hours of lockdown. Our uto- pian dreams of not returning to business-as-usual sustained us when ordinary social life was suspended. But the option to rethink our frantic lifestyles was rapidly crushed by the pressing economic calls to reopen everything. For a few days, as the city shut down again, we seemed to return to the slow pace of the first Covid-19 lockdown, rekindling memories of alternative worlds in which we might live free from fear: a lakeshore as a space of leisure and encounter; a car-free city; time to catch our breath and to set new priorities. But, just as our dreams during the lockdown relied on the disturbing deathly presence of a virus, our ability to dream now hinged on soldiers in our streets.

The barbed wire is now gone from Geneva. The armored vehicles have rolled out. The world’s media have moved on. But we continue to ground our own geographies in that week’s paradoxes and the possibilities it offered to rethink what security means and to imagine alter- natives to militarized state power; to learn from the radical safe spaces opened up by power from below, from solidarity, from encounter, from radical care for others; to continue to build geographies of empathy, not enclosure.

Conflicts of interest

We have no conflict of interest connected to this paper.

References

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Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Fall, J. J. (2020). "Fenced in." environment and planning. C, Government and Policy, 38 (5), 771–794.

Mountz, A., & Hyndman, J. (2006). Feminist approaches to the global intimate. Women’s Studies Quarterly, 34(1/2), 446–460.

Riabov, O., & Riabova, T. (2014). The remasculinization of Russia? Gender, nationalism, and the legitimation of power under Vladimir Putin. In Problems of post-communism march-april (pp. 23–35).

Slootmaeckers, K. (2019). Nationalism as competing masculinities: Homophobia as a technology of othering for hetero- and homonationalism. Theory and Society, 48(2), 239–265.

Juliet J. Fall^*, Julie de Dardel Department of Geography and Environment, University of Geneva, Switzerland

*Corresponding author.

E-mail address: juliet.fall@unige.ch (J.J. Fall).

Guest editorial