Jiwani and Young describe the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver as a “degenerate [zone] that can be frequented with impunity by men . . . designed to demarcate degenerate bodies—those that society deems as being unwanted, unmissed, and ultimately disposable.”[1] This week, as readings focus on oppression and violence, I find myself unwilling to slip into the position of a detached, supposedly objective student. Unwanted, unmissed, disposable. Vancouver is my home city. I picture Princess and East Hastings, the street corner where Sarah de Vries disappeared more than ten years ago. Three years ago, when I moved out of my mother’s house, I lived one street away from that spot, the corner where Sarah was last seen alive.
The violence that has happened, the atrocities committed against the 67 female victims, cannot be separated from the underlying cause of gendered violence and societal oppression. I am overwhelmed, faced with these 67 disappearances and murders, because, in the outcome of these women’s lives, the full weight of systemic injustice and Canada’s long history of colonization and racism is revealed. They are killed because they exist in the “degenerate zone” of the Downtown Eastside, and are therefore perceived to be disposable. Who will miss them? They are sex workers, they are Aboriginal, they are poor. They are women.
Jiwani and Young reveal that, although news coverage did humanize the missing women by associating them with “respectability” (emphasizing that they were sisters, mothers, and daughters), it fails to interrogate the societal reasons for their disappearance. It does not address the “racialized and sexualized economy of representations that privileges some women over others.”[2] The media represent the women as having gone missing because of their non-normative, “high risk” lifestyles and not as the result of a poorly constructed social system, which victimizes the poor by offering inadequate detox programs and shelters, and refuses to legally protect sex workers.[3]
Not all of the missing and murdered women were poor, or lived on the street. Many had families and support networks. Sarah de Vries left the affluent West Side home of her adoptive parents for the world of the Downtown Eastside.
I don’t know why Sarah de Vries left her adoptive parents’ home. I can’t recreate the path her life traced, but I can picture her, standing at the crossroad of Main and Hastings, a face lost in many faces. Maybe, for the first time in her life as a mixed race woman, she felt that she belonged.
All of my conjecture leads me to wonder whether there a difference between a middle-class john buying sex in the “bad part of town” and me, a middle-class university student, writing this response, speculating on the fates of women whose lives have never touched mine. We are both engaging with the bodies of women that we do not know.
And yet these women do not feel like the “other.” They are not unwanted, unmissed, and disposable. Their lives, their histories, are central to understanding the relationship between the urban space and the gendered, racialized, sexualized body.
As the 2010 Olympics draw closer, Vancouver is becoming increasingly desperate to present an attractive face to the international community. What will happen when the Downtown Eastside’s population is forced out through gentrification? Will Vancouver’s poverty, systemic racism, gendered violence and drug abuse be forced into the light, and generate fruitful public debate? Or will it retreat to another corner, to another community, allowing the general public to sleep soundly in the knowledge that they are safe in their respectability?[4]
1. Yasmin Jiwani and Mary Lynn Young, “Missing and Murdered Women: Reproducing Marginality in News Discourse,” Canadian Journal of Communication 31 (2006): 900.
3. Yasmin Jiwani and Mary Lynn Young, “Missing and Murdered Women: Reproducing Marginality in News Discourse,” Canadian Journal of Communication 31 (2006): 902.
