Saskatoons Downtown

Wandering through Victoria Park as well as Regina’s downtown on a hot summer day, I was observing the use of public space within gender and sexuality. I am looking at Victoria Park again during the day to see the movement of identities through the space during a neutral time of day after my evening encounter a couple of weeks ago. One of the dominant questions in my mind was whether public space has a gender, and how that gender is perceived.

My classifications of gender within space are relying on whether the space is aggressive rather than passive, industrial rather than natural and I am only furthering the gendered binary by pursuing a classification based on traditional views of gendered constructions.

The spaces of downtown consisted of a conglomeration of identities, and the genders were well represented and confident within the space. People were moving for all sorts of reasons and despite the architecture of space which may inhibit movement at night, all gender identities moved freely through the space. While people still formed into heteronormative couples and families, the space was not exclusive of homosexual identities and many people traveled alone or in groups without a noticed sexual identity. I am sure that the predominantly heteronormative crowd created conformed dress and attitude in so many identities.

Sexuality was prevalent around the sunny downtown of Saskatoon, men walking shirtless and women dressing in bikinis trying to tan. I am surprised at how the park is treated like a beach even if they are located closer to the roadway than the waterfront. The park becomes a frank display of heteronormative sexuality, which I didn’t consider to be abnormal, until I had a conversation with a new acquaintance about his recent trip to Columbia and the prevalent homosexual representation in the parks and on the beaches there. My ideas of what is a normal representation of homosexual culture are based in my impressions from other encounters in Canadian space, which also explains my slow exposure to queer culture. The social occupation of public space defines how the next generation forms their ideas of what public space is and if our downtowns have a large heterosexual dominance, homosexual representation will have trouble becoming seen as natural.