Digging into the Creative City: A Feminist Critique

Abstract: This paper contributes a critical and intersectional feminist analysis and methodological approach to debates about creative city policies and practices. Through a narrative description of community-engaged arts interventions based on action research with the Toronto Free Gallery, an artist-run centre and activist space, I demonstrate how feminist arts activism uncovers the multiple exclusions that creative city policies and practices entrench. In some ways, community-engaged arts interventions can be complicit in exclusionary gentrification dynamics, particularly the production of spaces of white privilege and heteronormativity. But neoliberal imperatives are not always over determining. Feminist artists and activists are also finding ways to performatively and playfully push back at this highly regulated, gendered, and raced regime