Accessibility statement

Period Band B or C

Architecture, Gender and Sexuality

Tutor: Helen Hills

This module is designed to interrogate the relationships between architecture and gender and sexuality. It has a diachronic focus on modern/contemporary and early modern architecture, architectural theory, and gender and sexuality studies. That figurative art is significant in evoking, producing, re-articulating sexual difference has been intensely explored over several decades by scholars from a range of disciplines, including art history. The relationships between architecture, architectural theory and gender and sexuality have, by contrast remained until recently little analysed. Yet arguably, the consequences of the gendered and other social divisions which architecture helps to define are particularly significant, partly because they are omnipresent (we can never avoid architecture entirely) and partly because of the very subtlety in which distinctions wrought architecturally can be naturalized. This module seeks to make visible the gender of architecture, the ways in which architecture and gendered identities may be said to be  mutually constitutive, and the limits to these claims.

We shall consider, too, the ways in which sexualities have been both repressed and explored architecturally. Does architecture necessarily simply reproduce dominant sexual conventions? Or is it able to challenge and rearticulate them? Case studies will be taken predominantly from the early modern period (c.1600-c.1750), but will include some modern, postmodern, and contemporary architecture. Most of the theoretical literature we will be using was conceived in relation to modern and contemporary architecture. Part of the aim of the course therefore is to alert students to the potential, promise, and problems of paradigmatic cultural shifts. The tutor will take care to avoid metanarratives and strawmen.

St Sebastian, Andrea Mantegna 1457-59