| Summary: | <p>My thesis seeks to reconceptualize the “safe space” metaphor at a self-described “safer space” in New York City, Pocketbooks. Typically understood as places of comfort, safe spaces are often disparaged for encouraging emotional fragility and stymying intellectual growth. However, the potential of sites like these to offer cultural critique and provoke new ways of thinking about safety (and violence) has been overlooked. Pocketbooks, a feminist bookstore in a hyper-gentrifying neighborhood of Manhattan, is one such place. Although Mayor Giuliani’s “quality of life” laws are often credited for making NYC the safest it has ever been, Pocketbooks positions itself as a “safer space” from a city (and society) that has become increasingly unsafe.</p>
<p>With a view to (re)conceptualizing safe spaces and interrogating the meaning(s) of safety in neoliberal America, my thesis posits the following ethnographic question: How does the Pocketbooks community (re)imagine, negotiate, and enact notions of safety to build a micro-society that is, in their words, “equitable, cooperative, and free?” Integrating fifteen months of fieldwork with a variety of literatures—including but not limited to the anthropologies of violence and counterpublics—I attempt to reconceptualize the safe space metaphor. I argue that Pocketbooks act as a feminist counterpublic whereby people of subordinated and sociospatially-excluded populations can find community and self-expression, acquire skills to reduce the extent of their marginalization elsewhere, develop language to articulate their identities and experiences, and even unlearn violent habitus. Moreover, in an attempt to translate utopian imaginaries into practice, Pocketbooks becomes a place to think from and about safety, and a place to consider how to forge justice in an unequal world. My research challenges the dominant discourse that neglects the structural nature of violence and overlooks safe spaces as creative sites of cultural critique and production, contestation, and hope.</p>
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