Marriage matters for same-sex couples
Abstract
The limits of existing language. This phrase suggests an urgent need to not just recalibrate, but to reconstitute, dominant orderings and vocabularies into new substantive juxtapositions and temporalities of varying degrees of permanence and ephemerality. Such an undertaking not only collides with the limits of the ability to do the work of unlearning what urban scholars trained in the dominant traditions have long been taught, but also, perhaps even more so, ultimately runs aground on something even more immoveable and immalleable: the rootedness, positionality, and contextual subjective perspective of the theorist. Echoing vociferous debates across disciplines dating back to (and beyond) Geertzian arguments about when—if ever—an outside ethnographer can transition to insider status to conversations about language, power, and coloniality inspired by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, the problem(s) posed by language and translation of both words and experiences pose significant theoretical barriers that go beyond rhetorical stylings, the meanings of words, and the rhythms of language. Contemporary urban scholarship ought to acknowledge not only that urban theory must create conceptual space for the urban “South”, but also that theory on the South must be driven by scholars from these diverse geographic localities.