Producing People, Place, and Space

 Gina Ulysse’s Downtown Ladies and “A Global Sense of Space” by Doreen Massey both work to illustrate the interconnectedness of space, place, and identity constructions.  Ulysse investigates the varied means by which women, specifically ICIs, form their notions of identity within their professional lives and geographic locations; “I highlight the significance of the connections between space, place, and social relations among traders, customers, organizations, and civil society at large” (Ulysse, 159).  The disenfranchised and impoverished of Kingston, Jamaica’s “downtown” are described as highly masculinized, upholding violence and intimidation in order to weave throughout the sociopolitical realms in which they live and embody; “…masculinity is realized through the gun, female tuffness is expressed through embodiment of protective shields” (Ulysse, 182).  The clutches of global capitalism dictate and reify the distinctions between uptown and downtown societies, while at the same time gain from the latter’s attempts to compete (ICI work and drug smuggling) or subsist.  This reminded me so much of Thomas More’s Utopia in which he wrote, “…if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy…what else is to be concluded from this but that you first make thieves and then punish them” (More, 12).

The dominating forces of the empowered few set the rules, create the players, and reap the rewards in their capitalistic games.  Subjectifications require rigid categorizations in order to demarcate the privileged and the “other” within similar their shared geopolitical and socioeconomic spaces.  Only through acceptance and appreciation of the multifariousness and interconnectedness of space, place, and identity can more fluid, global relations occur.  Gina Ulysse highlights the struggle to do so, “Our inability to capture this complexity stems from the fact that global capitalist structures of power maintain a ‘possessive investment’ in stereotypes” (Ulysse, 190).  In order to accept the diversity and intersectionality of peoples, we must understand and welcome these notions within our places and spaces throughout time.  Massey writes, “It is a sense of place, an understanding of ‘its character,’ which can only be constructed by linking that place to places beyond” (Massey, 9).