TRANSGRESSION, AFFECT AND PERFORMANCE Choreographing a Politics of Urban Space

Cultural criminological scholarship has impressively theorized and explored the cultural complexities, negotiated meanings and experiential immediacy of urban crime and its spatializing effects. Nonetheless, this important work tends to gloss over the political dynamics of spatial contestation, and assumes an urban politics which is relatively fixed and static and is locked into a dichotomy of control and resistance. This paper opens up to scrutiny the heterogeneity of political relationalities at the interstices of crime and 'the urban'. Core cultural criminological concepts of resistance, transgression, affect and performance are critically reappraised and put to work in a critical case study that centres on an offence of 'outraging public decency' at the Blackpool Cenotaph, UK. This provides the empirical ground for delineating some of the myriad ways in which crime continually reconfigures the political coordinates of 'the urban'.