Women and Gender Studies Professor Nan Alamilla Boyd gave the following presentation at SF State’s opening faculty meeting September 12.
Hi, everybody. First, thank you Senate Chair Hanley, Provost Rosser and President Wong for inviting faculty to talk about their research in this forum. Also, welcome new faculty. You’ve joined a tremendously talented group of people—I think you’re going to like it here.
As for my research, my current work is on the history of tourism in San Francisco. How did I get from the history of queer San Francisco to tourism, you ask? In two words, gay marriage. In 2004 when Gavin Newsom made his decree that same-sex marriage was legal in San Francisco, I was in the middle of a tricky gay divorce and feeling pretty grumpy, so I wrote a cynical article on the money to be made by same-sex marriage, and it was published it in the Radical History Review. (The wedding industry is hugely lucrative, you know.)
This set me on the path of “follow the money,” which was new for me because I’d been trained as a grassroots social historian where one tends to ignore details like corporate interests and profit margins. Still, I had hinted at the relationship between GLBT civil rights and money-making in the conclusion of my 2003 book, Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco, and as I did more research I found myself increasingly interested in the post-World War II economic shift from liberalism to neoliberalism. What I mean—to be kind of reductionist—is the shift in San Francisco from industrial capitalism to an economy defined by high- and low-end service industries. (Think San Francisco waterfront.) And I started to think about tourism.
Just as an aside, you should know that tourism is San Francisco’s largest industry. You think it’s dot-com or biotech, but visitors to San Francisco spent almost $9 billion in San Francisco in 2012, up 5.5 percent from 2011—and that does not include the salaries of tourist industry professionals or increased property values, which is where I’m headed.
Anyway, I was living in the Western Addition at the time and I began to think about the impact of tourism on so-called blighted neighborhoods, or neighborhoods that, historically, have been highly policed but also defined by race or sexuality—areas disregarded or neglected by the city—and I began to notice that many of these neighborhoods had become (or were becoming) tourist attractions as part of the process of postwar redevelopment and ongoing urban renewal.
My current book-in-progress, tentatively titled Eating the Other: Tourism and Gentrification in San Francisco, analyzes the transformation of four San Francisco neighborhoods into tourist districts. I’m looking at Chinatown, North Beach, the Castro and the Fillmore. Each of theses neighborhoods represents a phase in the history of San Francisco’s evolving tourist industry. Each also highlights the way racial and sexual entertainments have become important to San Francisco’s lucrative tourist economy. An analysis of these neighborhoods provides a broad overview of San Francisco’s 20th-century history, but my book also takes a close look at how some neighborhoods became a commodity as San Francisco’s economy shifted away from industrial production.
To cut to the chase, as neighborhoods transform, property values soar, and many of the people who had heretofore defined the neighborhood are forced to leave the city. And this is obviously important to notice, but what I’m also interested in, and what makes this project relevant to Women and Gender Studies, is how racial and sexual meanings are transformed by tourism. What does it mean when outsiders tour a neighborhood previously (or currently) under surveillance? So I’m thinking about the cultural function of voyeurism. And what does it mean when the city and local business community get behind certain civil rights initiatives with economic interests in mind? And, again, I’m thinking about gay marriage. In sum, I’m studying tourism in order to think about how racial and sexual meanings are being put to work in new ways in the context of neoliberalism in order to produce new markets by transforming people and their communities into commodities.
So, to those of you new to the city, as you’re exploring San Francisco’s wonderful neighborhoods but also wondering why rents are so high, you can think about some of these interlocking relationships. But don’t let that stop you from having a good time!
Links
- Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco
- “Sex and Tourism: The Economic Implications of the Gay Marriage Movement,” by Nan Alamilla Boyd, Radical History Review, winter 2008 (paid subscription required)
- Nan Alamilla Boyd
- Women and Gender Studies Department
- Opening faculty meeting recap, SF State News, September 13, 2013