Power and White: Race, Class, and Sexuality in Kansas City's Urban Renewal

Abstract

This paper explores the role of non-hegemonic sexualities in urban renewal through a case study of a Kansas City, Missouri redevelopment project. Using document analysis, interviews, and participant observation, I argue that sexual diversity is co-opted in a raced, classed, and gendered way that advances growth objectives and reinforces heteronormativity and the bourgeois cultural and social values of private property and conspicuous consumption. While economically privileged, white, gay males are courted and attempts are made to co-opt them as drivers of renewal, non-conforming sexual expressions, such as sex work, pornography, and much of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) community are excluded. The privatization of once-public spaces effectively reifies bourgeois moral boundaries to protect new consumer spaces from sexual, racial, and class "others," and allows space to become a tool for capital accumulation.