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Saving “America’s Iconic Liberal City”: The Late Liberal Biopolitics of Anti-Gentrification Discourses in San Francisco

Sundar, Divya

Abstract Details

2014, Master of Arts, Ohio State University, Comparative Studies.
This thesis argues that liberal anti-gentrification discourses play a powerful if unacknowledged role in the late liberal governance of social difference in our contemporary neoliberal moment. The thesis examines anti-gentrification discourses in San Francisco that oppose gentrification in defense of treasured liberal ideals of the good life and just city—namely, the belief that liberal subjects have successfully disaffiliated from histories of xenophobia, and the attendant desire to foster social harmony by celebrating and living alongside “the otherwise.” Liberal anti-gentrification discourses posit these regulatory ideals as a corrective to the unapologetically exclusive and violent “revanchist city.” An appeal to keep “the otherwise” inside the project of citizenship amidst the competing valuations of the market, these discourses are a site at which late liberal governmentality negotiates the terms of social inclusion and reasons about the simultaneous worth and dangers of social difference. Liberal anti-gentrification discourses enlist a range of biopolitical technologies to figure differential inclusion in the image of liberal social harmony. They create a field of uneven exposure to gentrification, and in so doing quietly and unwittingly endorse and prolong longstanding patterns of xenophobic exclusion and violence in the U.S. city. Articulated in the name of an anti-gentrification politics that stakes its claim on including, accommodating, and celebrating “the otherwise,” this late liberal biopolitics make differential inclusion seem politically and ethically sensible, right, and good.
Leo Coleman (Advisor)
Shannon Winnubst (Committee Member)
Maurice Stevens (Committee Member)
90 p.

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Sundar, D. (2014). Saving “America’s Iconic Liberal City”: The Late Liberal Biopolitics of Anti-Gentrification Discourses in San Francisco [Master's thesis, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1406289984

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Sundar, Divya. Saving “America’s Iconic Liberal City”: The Late Liberal Biopolitics of Anti-Gentrification Discourses in San Francisco. 2014. Ohio State University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1406289984.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Sundar, Divya. "Saving “America’s Iconic Liberal City”: The Late Liberal Biopolitics of Anti-Gentrification Discourses in San Francisco." Master's thesis, Ohio State University, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1406289984

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)