GRSJ224Bobby

When comparing spaces in the works of David Goldberg’s Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of meaning and Robertson’s, Taming space: Drug use, HIV and homemaking in downtown eastside Vancouver; ‘spaces’ as a place opens to critical insight with how race, gender, identity are created and represented within these spaces. Goldberg begins by outlining how colonial settlement began creating these spaces within society leaving groups marginalized. One important feature of this is the ‘Group Areas Act of 1950’ which allowed for the proposal of race zones for different racial groups (Goldberg 1993). These ‘spaces’ that were marginalized from rest of society create this area of discourse where the ‘west’ as Goldberg mentions, creates the difference of these spaces to rest of society. He quotes that ‘distance is not primarily to be interpreted spatially or geographically but in terms of difference – and in the reinvented articulation of racist concepts; he says that these are the ‘modernistic morals’ (Goldberg 1993). Goldberg allows us to see spaces as this manifestation of racial ideologies. In Robertson’s article we see space as this place where home is made. In her narration of the 14 women who are drug users living in Vancouver’s downtown, Robertson shines light into how many of these women who are alienated from society share many similar histories which brings them to these ‘spaces’. Robertson points to that these spaces are ‘marked’ by exclusion. The sense of space here is one that is shared amongst many of the women who consider the DTES (downtown east side) as this constructed space of home. This space that the women share is not a permanent home but one in which they can create forms of order and dynamics in order to survive.