"Bawdies" in the City:
The Sexual Regulation
of Urban Space

by Janne Cleveland

Bodies, like cities, are not easily contained. The boundaries that are socially constructed for the purpose of establishing order continually shift, reflecting a transitional process that produces both pleasure and anxiety, often simultaneously. This paper will examine the ways in which the tensions between such pleasure and anxiety are navigated among citizens in urban spaces. The case of the Toronto dominatrix, Terri-Jean Bedford, demonstrates the social response to disorderly bodies -- particularly female bodies -- that resist de-sexualization and normalization according to normative constructions of subjectivity within the dominant discourses of bodies and cities. As a review of the case and personal interviews with Bedford make clear, the resistance to illusions of order within the psychosocial dynamic that locates the corporeality of subjects in a particular spatial and temporal setting challenges notions of the implementation of bounded spaces and the unruly bodies that inhabit them.

The marked increase in urban Western populations most notable in the nineteenth century resulting from the rapid growth of industrialization has resulted in a continually evolving set of regulations with respect to the ways in which individuals inhabit city spaces. According to Elizabeth Grosz, bodies and cities are mutually defining entities whose relations are regulated and mediated by the state (107 - 108). The physical boundaries constructed in social urban spaces that serve to order the movements of the people who live and work in such built environments reflect the psychic boundaries that are constructed to maintain the distance between the corporeal and the conceptual. This dualism between mind and body, and the demands of negotiating between physical and psychological terrains produces enormous anxiety with respect to issues of sex and sexuality -- especially within the realm of female sexuality. The recent ruling by the Ontario Court of Appeal in the case of Terri-Jean Bedford to uphold her conviction for keeping a common bawdy house exemplifies the determination of the legal system and municipal legislators to contain female sexuality within the domain of private, domestic space. The implications of this case reflect a moral panic predicated upon issues of public health and safety, the fear of women's sexual power, and the preservation of the heterosexual social contract surrounding sexuality as it comes to be enacted in an urban landscape.

In order to make clear the linkage between the fears generated around female sexual behaviour and the organization of city space, it is necessary to examine the history of the Bedford case. In the Fall of 1994, after a nine-week under-cover investigation, Terri-Jean Bedford was arrested at her rented home, in an up-scale, residentially-zoned suburban neighbourhood in Thornhill, just north of Toronto, where she had been operating her business for 18 months as a dominatrix under the name Madame de Sade's House of Erotica. While she had no license to operate a business in a residentially-zoned neighbourhood, Bedford contends that she was scrupulous about maintaining the financial accounts for the business and submitting the required taxes (Cleveland, taped interview). The business catered primarily to white heterosexual professional men interested in crossdressing, fetish costumes and masochism (Bedford, unpublished) . What came to be known in sensationalist newspaper accounts as the "Bondage Bungalow" is a modest nine-room bungalow, kitty-corner to a Christian church, and surrounded by newer and more ostentatious "monster homes" that mark the social status and wealth of Bedford's former neighbours (Now Magazine 23 July, 1998). The house, situated on what was at the time the largest lot in that residential community, with a large manicured lawn, remnants of an apple orchard, a small stream at the back of the property, and landscaped with a variety of trees and shrubs, afforded privacy and comfort. Various rooms in the house were appointed in themes intended to please the taste of the clients, including the nursery, the throne room and the dungeon. As the business grew, Bedford hired other women to work as dominatrices. At the time of the raid on the house, Bedford, along with her four employees, was arrested and charged, although the charges against the employees were subsequently dropped. The raid conducted by 15 officers with the York Regional Police Department that included plainclothes detectives, uniformed constables, and an Emergency Response Team, culminated in the seizure of over 700 items from the house, including all of Bedford's clothing, household furniture, a chandelier, and even library books -- none of which have ever been returned. The morning after the raid Bedford was granted bail on the condition that she not return to her home.

When the case first came to trial in 1995, just over a year after Bedford lost her home and her livelihood, the ruling judge agreed that there were no grounds to proceed, given the lack of specificity of the charges. The judge agreed that there had been no evidence to support a charge of either prostitution or the performing of indecent acts, and that the wording of the original charge had been too vague to proceed with a trial. The Crown responded by appealing the decision, and in 1996 was subsequently granted its request to have the case tried. In October of 1998, Bedford was convicted on the charge of keeping a common bawdy house, despite evidence that there was no genital contact between Bedford or her employees and the clients (Bedford, unpublished). Her lawyers appealed the decision and finally in March, 2000 Bedford returned to the Ontario Court of Appeal where her conviction was upheld. After nearly six years in the Court system, and thousands of tax-payer dollars spent in obtaining a conviction, a fine of $3,000 was imposed on Bedford, a punishment more in keeping with breaking zoning laws that prevent commercial enterprises from operating in residential areas, a "crime" of which she readily admits she was guilty. At this point Bedford is deciding whether or not to appeal her conviction to the Supreme Court of Canada (Cleveland, taped interview).

The day after the announcement in March, 2000 that the conviction had been upheld, I visited Bedford in the home she now maintains in downtown Toronto. The house, a slightly down-at-heel Victorian townhouse, is situated in the heart of the city on the fringes of the "Gay Ghetto", sandwiched between the Morgentaler Abortion Clinic and Take a Walk on the Wild Side, a boutique that caters to crossdressers and drag queens. Across the street from Bedford's house is Allan Gardens, a public horticultural conservatory and park that provides a daytime respite to area residents and the concentration of homeless people who inhabit the vicinity. The house is located in a heavily trafficked area that borders quiet residential homes to the south, a vibrant gay/lesbian community to the north, and surrounded by a diverse mixture of businesses and residences that reflect a broad spectrum of races, ethnicities, and socioeconomic backgrounds. In this setting Bedford has resumed her vocation as a dominatrix, this time with a license to operate the Millicent Farnsworth Sissy Maid Academy and Charm School for Crossdressers. Bedford no longer employs staff, but continues to offer her clients escapist fantasy scenarios in designated rooms within the house decorated to reflect particular themes, much in the fashion of the Thornhill bungalow.

Bedford's case exemplifies not only the anxiety and titillation generated by notions of female sexual behaviour, tied as they are to issues of power, but also demonstrates the ways in which urban space is organized to contain and control the sexual practices of its citizens, most particularly those practices and practitioners that exist outside the margins of normative expressions of sexuality. There is a dual engagement between members of the hegemonic order and those who are socially cast as "Other". This practice of "othering" serves to negatively construct subjectivity -- we know what we are and where we belong by comparisons of what we are not and where we do not belong¹. Cities reflect this practice of "othering" in the constitution of neighbourhoods where individuals who reflect characteristics in common with one another congregate along lines of similarity, and are separated from others whose characteristics have no such common ground. Hence we see the institutionalization of ethnic districts, racialized communities, middle-class, working-class and under-class neighbourhoods, as well as those based upon sexuality and sexual commerce, the boundaries of which are never stable but in a continuous state of flux. It is this very quality of instability that produces tension and suspicion between communities that are marked and coded as aesthetically different. As Gayle Rubin has pointed out, the emergence of urban sexual communities in Western Europe and North America resulting from the migration in the nineteenth century of workers seeking employment coincided with the criminalization of sex industries (17 - 19).

Sexual "outlaws", like members of other communities, are concentrated in particular urban areas where they are both more easily identifiable for purposes of commerce as well as more easily controlled and demonized (Knopp 149). Although Bedford vehemently denies she was selling sex from her home, based on a limited definition of sex as genital contact, the murky legal definitions of what constitutes sex have conspired to place her within the subculture of other sexual "deviants". As a black woman with origins of poverty, a past association with criminality (ie - prostitution charges), and working in an milieu of suspect sexuality, Terri-Jean Bedford lacks the cultural capital² required to maintain a presence in the Thornhill community where she originally chose to situate her practice as a dominatrix. Previous to the lengthy investigation that led to her arrest, Bedford insists that she was on very good terms with her neighbours, none of whom knew of the business she conducted in her home (Cleveland, taped interview). Since she was not allowed to return to the community after her arrest, it is impossible to say what her reception in the neighbourhood might have been once her identity, her livelihood, and her past associations with prostitution were made known. However, given that her daughter, a highschool student at the time who did not live with her, was "practically driven out of her school" (Toronto Star 25 March, 2000), it can be surmised that Bedford's neighbours would not have acknowledged her return warmly. The judge's decision to grant bail after her initial arrest upon the condition that she not return to the community, can be seen as reflective of the moral imperatives, driven by fears regarding issues of safety, health and sexual purity, that seek to segregate sexual outlaws from mainstream residential neighbourhoods.

Issues of the erosion of public health and safety, whether real or imagined, have long been cited as concerns when it comes to the regulation of sexual communities and their attendant practices. As Priscilla Alexander points out, the public demand for the closure of bathhouses in the 1980s in the wake of fears around the contagion of AIDS, and the enactment of the Contagious Diseases Act in Britain in 1864 that aimed to contain the spread of syphilis both reflected fears around issues of public health, although neither proved to be successful in their aims to control the escalation of either disease (222 - 230). Both instances stemmed from demands to protect "innocent" citizens from those whose practices are socially demonized as predatory and evil. Nowhere in the public discourses that encourage such a panic is there any notion of protection for the health of sex workers and other sexual radicals who are most at risk for contracting disease. The social construction of shame has worked to deny sexual "others" the voice with which to demand better policies for the protection of their own health and safety. John Lindell, in his discussion of the architectural layouts and gloomy atmospheres of New York sex clubs frequented by gay men in that city notes that these environments confirm the vestiges of shame in gay sex culture that deny the sex-positive attitude necessary for promoting safe sex (73 - 80). Taking Lindell's argument further, the configurations of sexual spaces in the city not only reflect the attitudes of the dominant social order, but work to inform these attitudes, most often negatively. Not only is there a health risk in many venues of sex-related commerce, but equally disturbing is the disregard for the safety of workers and clients within the industry who are bound to the legal structures that maintain the power to decide where and how these transactions may be conducted.

The 1995 zoning ordinance in New York city proposed by the municipal government there is reflective of this disregard for the safety of commercial sex operators and clients, who, it must be remembered, are also members of the public that such ordinances proclaim to protect. The ordinance made it illegal for any commercial sex establishment (clubs, bookstores selling explicit materials, adult video outlets, and bars and entertainment houses) to operate within 500 feet of residential districts, schools, or houses of worship. Of the 177 business affected, only 28 were allowed to remain at the sites from which they were operating, while the other 149 were forced to either alter their venues entirely, close down, or relocate to an approved zoning area. The area in which they could re-establish their businesses was zoned as industrial/manufacturing near the New York City waterfront (Serlin 45). As Michael Warner and Lauren Berlant point out, this relocation policy meant that businesses catering to clients from either heterosexual or homosexual populations, between whom there is a history of animosity that has been known to result in violence, were to be sharing the same city space. Given a diminished police presence in that area, with its attendant and well established reputation for danger, Warner and Berlant contend that the potential for increased violence against gay men that was implicit in this zoning strategy was clearly not a concern of public officials more interested in promoting the censorship of sexual space, or as they put it, the "sexual purification of the city" (551 - 552). Similar motives can be seen to be at work in the case of Terri-Jean Bedford, where the safety and security of her clients, as well as herself was devalued in favour of protecting the surrounding Thornhill neighbourhood from the perceived danger and taint of "deviant" behaviour. For Bedford's clients, the location of the Thornhill establishment in an affluent neighbourhood provided them with a feeling of safety that they did not experience when visiting establishments in downtown Toronto (Bedford, unpublished).

David Serlin's assertion that the New York sex industry re-zoning reflects strategies that target minority populations for erasure while concentrating on the social and economic values of elite property owners (51) draws some parallels with the Bedford case. As a tenant, but not owner, of the Thornhill residence, Bedford had fewer legal rights which subsequently facilitated her removal and censure from the community, possibly to the relief of area residents once her identity as a dominatrix became known. As Bedford states in an unpublished account of her experiences, "by attracting such attention after [the police] raid, they caused extreme embarrassment to the neighbourhood". Even several years after the raid curiosity seekers continued to be seen stopping to take pictures of the site. As Lawrence Knopp suggests, the interests of social power construct an ideology of danger with respect to spaces that are not conforming to the hegemonic order (155). Certainly the presence of a practising dominatrix in a suburban middle-class neighbourhood would incite fears of the breakdown of boundaries instituted to demarcate safe and unsafe spaces in the mainstream public mind. Without the power and social status attributed to the affluent property owners of the Thornhill community, Bedford would have had little means with which to claim a right to share the space enjoyed by other residents.

Immediately after the raid on the Thornhill premises, police stated that they had found a log book and would be contacting Bedford's clients, although they subsequently recanted this threat. Many of the clients were affluent area residents who, undoubtedly, would not have appreciated such negative publicity (Bedford, unpublished). Had knowledge of Bedford's client list been made public, not only would it have been an "embarrassment" to local residents who had made use of her services, but it would also have incited a moral panic predicated upon the fear that the breaching of social and spatial boundaries is threatened not only from without, but from within the community. Bedford has speculated that the nine weeks of surveillance that preceded the raid on her premises came about as the result of surveillance being conducted on one of her well-placed clients who was participating in an up-coming municipal election (Bedford, unpublished). It is one thing to have "community standads" -- whatever they might be -- disregarded by outsiders, but quite another to confront the possibility that such standards are at risk of being eradicated by community members themselves.

Given the excessive force used in Bedford's arrest -- remember the 15 officers that included an Emergency Response Team -- and the judge's stipulation that she not return to her home, one must question the source of the anxiety surrounding Bedford's presence in that community. Elizabeth Wilson suggests that the control of disorder in the city reflects a desire to control female sexuality that is socially equated with city spaces (cited in Knopp 152). In mainstream Western culture intimacy is constructed to reflect a heterosexual bourgeois social contract tied to notions of romantic love, wherein it is female sexuality and its linkage to the reproduction of workers and consumers that provides a foundation for the dominant social order. Such intimacy is directly related to notions of domestic space, kinship, property and nation, and institutionalized by marriage and family law, domestic architecture and zoning laws (Warner and Berlant 558 - 562). What could be more intimate than vulnerable, exposed bodies, or more dangerous to the perpetuation of the social contract than these same bodies being manipulated and controlled by a woman whose aim is not reproduction, but pleasure? The response by the legal system to the discovery of Bedford's activities in the Thornhill neighbourhood reflects the level of threat perceived against the social contract that the law seeks to uphold. One must ask what was ultimately achieved, given that Bedford's eventual conviction resulted only in a minimal fine of $3,000, with no incarceration other than the few days spent in detention while bail was being arranged? The answer to that is clearly the removal of Bedford and her influence from an elite suburban neighbourhood where the normalization of practices whose purpose is specifically the maintenance of bourgeois values inherent to the social contract could remain intact and unchallenged.

The interface between bodies and cities of which Elizabeth Grosz writes results in the regulation of bodies by the state as well as the regulation of the relations between those bodies and the cities in which they reside and conduct commerce (107 - 108). What behaviours will be socially condoned, and the sites upon which they are allowed to occur, reflect this corporeal engagement between citizens and city space. While laws aimed at eliminating sites of sexual transgression have never succeeded (Alexander 223), they have resulted in the containment of such bodies and behaviours within designated areas where surveillance and control are more effective. Normative views of female sexuality that pervade the dominant discourse work to restrict women's sexual energies to reproductive capacities safely contained within socially constructed domestic spaces. For those who transgress both the physical and social boundaries erected to protect the status quo, punishment is usually swift. As the case of Terri-Jean Bedford demonstrates, there is no place in Western affluent, suburban neighbourhoods founded upon an aesthetic of de-sexualized middle-class "family values", for women who refuse to conform. Deprived of the right to inhabit communities that reflect an aesthetically privileged "natural" environment of flower gardens and manicured lawns, these non-conforming women are relegated to the less desirable "concrete jungles" of the inner-city to interact among a diverse and fluid population of other social outcasts.

Subjectivity, like urban landscapes, is in a continuous state of change -- both act and react in a mutual exchange. Cities are constructed to house citizens who navigate the often contested terrains upon which they continue to develop more complex networks within physical and psychic spaces, gradually shifting the margins to reflect their desires. As social and spatial boundaries continue to shift and flux in the future, it will be interesting to witness the ways in which the resistance of "others" to hegemonic discourses of power works to shape and re-shape urban spaces as the places where the corporeal and the conceptual meet.

2. Cultural capital can be generally understood as the resources attributed to members of the social order with access to material and educational privilege. Such capital is distinguished by codes that signify most notably along elitist lines of race, gender and class position. (back)

References

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Bedford, Terri-Jean. Bondage Bungalow Dominatrix. Unpublished.

Berlant, Lauren and Michael Warner. "Sex in Public". Critical Inquiry. Vol. 24 (Winter 1998).

Binnie, Jon. "Trading Places: Consumption, Sexuality and the Production of Queer Space". Mapping Desire. Eds. David Bell and Gill Valentine. New York, London: Routledge, 1995.

Cleveland, Janne. Interview with Terri-Jean Bedford. Audio taped, Toronto, March 24, 2000.

Dunphy, Catherine. "Dominatrix still vowing to strike blow for justice". The Toronto Star. 25 March 2000, B5.

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Serlin, David. "The Twilight (Zone) of Commercial Sex". Policing Public Sex: Queer Politics and the Future of Aids Activism. Eds. Ephen Glenn Coulter, et al. Boston: South End Press, 1996.