Lesbians in the Crowd: Gender, sexuality and visibility along Montréal's Boul. St-Laurent

Abstract

Boul. St-Laurent is a commercial artery in inner-city Montréal. Often characterised as the border zone of a multicultural and bilingual city, it is a place where a variety of populations and activities come together. It is also a central activity space for residents of the Plateau Mont-Royal District, an area of the city with a significant population of lesbian residents. Using qualitative interviews with lesbians who live in this district, the author examines how this neighbourhood shopping street facilitates lesbian patterns of social interaction, place making and expressions of desire. Most previous research on how lesbians establish a presence in urban space focuses either on the exclusion of lesbian subjectivity from heterosexual spaces or patterns of residential and institutional clustering in urban neighbourhoods. The objective of this article, however, is to focus on an area of the city that can be described as a 'space of difference' and examine how its heterogeneity accommodates lesbian visibility, especially among the lesbians themselves.