Apparently, I Can't Stand Anywhere

This week, I have been faced with all sorts of challenges to the space I choose to inhabit. As I stood with my family beside a stretcher in a hospital hallway, while one of our number was being wheeled off for surgery, we were approached by someone who seemed to be an administrator of some sort, telling us to clear out the hallway. The nurse pushing the stretcher was clearly offended, and we were just bemused. Who was supposed to be occupying that space, we wondered, if not patients and their families? It was baffling.
The entire place was defined by places one was allowed to enter and places one was barred from. Those who were not medical professionals could approach a line in the hallway, but not go past it. People having procedures done could enter a certain room, but others could not. Many restrictions upon people’s ability to be in various spaces within the facility were, of course, based on safety, but others seemed arbitrary and based on power dynamics. Surgeons, for instance, could freely enter the waiting room where families were gathered. There was no space entirely set aside for families alone.
Prohibitions on entering spaces for safety reasons were enforced within the building, but it was interesting to note that those same safety regulations did not always translate into preserving the safety of people in public spaces, as nurses left the building, and the hospital grounds, in scrubs. When one enters the hospital space as a patient or a family member, it becomes difficult to preserve autonomy. Every action is proscribed by the staff or administration, sometimes to avoid litigation, but most often for the convenience of those who work there. It seems to be in opposition to what one might expect to have happen in a hospital, a place that is sometimes considered public space, as the public funds it, but is, in truth, extremely private.
Being asked to leave the hospital hallway put me in mind of a gypsy punk group I learned about a couple of weeks ago, called Gogol Bordello, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sM1Ahn0Osjo who were evicted from CBGB’s, the ‘birthplace of punk’. Having watched their video, I don’t wonder that they were evicted, but I have some empathy for them. When we were shooed from the hospital corridor, I wanted to say to the administrator, “I have worked in this space! I belong here!” If you’re not wearing the uniform, though, your identity in that particular place is lost and you can be evicted. This is reminiscent too, of O’Brien and Szeman’s observations about the “ violent dispossession” of Native Americans. In truth, Native peoples did not “possess” the places they inhabited; they just lived in harmony with what was there, without concern about ownership. Many of them still do this, but their space is defined. Place and space, and who can inhabit them seem to be determined by power these days, and not by who is making logical use of them at the time.