Space and Gendered Behavior

    Throughout Downtown Ladies, Gina Ulysse discusses the differences between downtown and uptown Kingston as a combination of certain physical features and social behaviors and attitudes.  While the perceived physical boundaries between downtown and uptown effect how these behaviors and attitudes are propagated and concentrated, the boundaries are defined best as socially determined.  That is, as Ulysse says throughout the book, but most explicitly in her discussion of the arcade, downtown is defined through the behaviors of the people that inhabit it.  

    This is most obvious when Ulysse discusses violence and tuffness.  Violence is depicted as occurring mostly downtown, and it is shocking for her to see it move out of those defined boundaries.  After seeing a man pull an AK-47 in front of her window, she says that “violence cannot be predicted and knows no spatial boundaries in Jamaica.”  The shock of this realization, to a certain extent, enables her to have greater ease with the violence she sees downtown.  However, once she reaches a limit of mental and emotional ability to cope with violence, she can always head somewhere else.  While she is certainly not beyond the reach of violence, it is seen as occurring mostly where it is valued as part of the presentation of masculinity, which is still downtown.  

    Tuffness is described as an approach to survival in areas of masculine violence adopted by downtown females.  That is, it is a collection of behaviors that portray a certain disregard for the possibility of violence, which result in a lessening of violence toward a person using it.  This assertion of disregard can be seen as a rejection of uptown ideas about female behavior and a use of downtown male norms to assert similarity with downtown men.  This similarity prevents much of the gatekeeping violence.  The uptown females, on the other hand, occupy a certain space of female decorum appropriate to the context they generally find themselves in.  This marked female-ness is not similar to the downtown behavioral norms, resulting in violence from the gatekeeping men.  

    How might females use aspects of tuffness to assert their identity in contexts dominated by other females?  What kinds of behaviors might be used in interactions between downtown and uptown females?  How might these affect the range of strategies used by these females in their interactions with males?  What effects might this have on the construction of downtown and uptown space?