IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/cityxx/v17y2013i6p748-777.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Re-forming the political body in the city: The interplay of male bodies and territory in urban public spaces in Tel Aviv

Author

Listed:
  • Yael Allweil
  • Rachel Kallus

Abstract

This paper aims to rethink the city-nation relationship as overlapping spatial oeuvres where political communities are produced and negotiated. It examines negotiations over inclusion and exclusion from the Israeli political body conducted in enclaves along the Tel Aviv shoreline by seemingly marginal groups of men. The groups studied-homosexual cruisers at Independence Park, the Circle of Drummers at the Dolphinarium and SUV drivers at North Shore cliffs-assert themselves as part of the national political body by making claims to two of Israel's founding mechanisms: masculinity and territory. Negotiations involve appropriation of distinct territories in the urban public space through a mutual re-shaping of territory and male bodies. The examination of these surprising 'urban design' practices, where public spaces are means to negotiate social inclusion, proposes an analytical framework for understanding gender as a bodily and therefore spatial mechanism for identity construction and social struggle. While city and nation are often studied as competing political spheres, this paper identifies city and nation as overlapping spatial oeuvres, where the political body is being formed via concrete sites and bodily performances.

Suggested Citation

  • Yael Allweil & Rachel Kallus, 2013. "Re-forming the political body in the city: The interplay of male bodies and territory in urban public spaces in Tel Aviv," City, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 17(6), pages 748-777, December.
  • Handle: RePEc:taf:cityxx:v:17:y:2013:i:6:p:748-777
    DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2013.849128
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13604813.2013.849128
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/13604813.2013.849128?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Gilly Hartal, 2019. "Gay tourism to Tel-Aviv: Producing urban value?," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 56(6), pages 1148-1164, May.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:cityxx:v:17:y:2013:i:6:p:748-777. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/CCIT20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.