Description

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.

Objectives

By the end of the module, students should have acquired:

• a critical knowledge and awareness of  inter-relationships between the built environment, urbanism, architecture, and sexuality and gender 
• a critical knowledge of the most important theoretical debates about this relationship
• a critical knowledge of several diverse case studies

Preliminary Reading

Students:

Please note I have not yet planned the course in detail, and some of these texts may not appear in the final reading lists, but pondering on the issues they raise will certainly stand you in good stead for the course.

 M. Wigley, ‘Untitled: The Housing of Gender’ in ed B Colomina, Sexuality and Space, Princeton University School of Architecture: Princeton, 1992, 327-389.

 Jane Rendell, Barbara Penner, & Iain Borden (eds), Gender Space Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Introduction, London & New York: Routledge, 2000.

 Amy Bingaman, Lisa Sanders & Rebecca Zorach (eds), Embodied Utopias. Gender, social change and the modern metropolis, London & New York: Routledge, 2002.

 Catherine Ingraham, Architecture, Animal, Human. The Assymetrical Condition, London & New York: Routledge, 2006.

 William Braham & Jonathan Hale (eds), Rethinking Technology. A Reader in Architectural Theory, London & New York: Roiutledge, 2007.

 Lori A Brown, Feminist Practices.  Interdisciplinary approaches to women in architecture, Ashgate: 2011

 B Colomina (ed), Sexuality and Space, Princeton University School of Architecture: Princeton, 1992.

 A Friedman, Women & the Making of the Modern House, New York: Abrams, 1998. 

 P Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge UP: Cambridge, 1977, esp. chs. 2, 3, and 4.

 H Lefebvre, The Production of Space (La production de l’espace, Paris: Editions Anthropos, 1974), trans. D Nicholson-Smith, Blackwell: Cambridge, 1991.

 P Bourdieu, ‘The Berber House’ in M Douglas, Rules and Meanings, Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1973.

 S Kent, Domestic Architecture and the Use of Space: An Interdisciplinary Study, Cambridge UP: Cambridge, 1990, esp. 1-16, 42-67.

 E Grosz, ‘Woman, Chora, Dwelling’, in eds. J Rendell, B Penner & I Borden, Gender Space Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Introduction, Routledge, London & New York, 2000, 210-222.

 Massey, D., ‘Space, Place, Gender’, in Rendell J Barbara Penner & Iain Borden, eds., Gender Space Architecture: An interdisciplinary Introduction, Routledge: London, 2000, 128-133.

 Roberta Gilchrist, Gender and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Religious Women, ch. 1, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, 1-21.

  *Helen Hills, Invisible City: The Architecture of Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Neapolitan Convents, Oxford University Press: Oxford & New York, 2004, ch. 2, ‘Virginity & Enclosure’, 45-61; ch. 6, ‘Conventual optics of Power’, 139-160.

 *Jutta Gisela Sperling, Convents and the Body politic in Late Renaissance Venice, Chicago & London: Chicago UP, 1999, ch. 3, ‘The Theology and Politics of Clausura’, 115-169.

*Marilyn Dunn, ‘Spaces Shaped for Spiritual Perfection: Convent architecture and Nuns in Early Modern Rome’, in Helen Hills (ed), Architecture and the Politics of Gender in Early Modern Europe, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003, 151-176.

 Sherry Lindquist, ‘Women in the Charterhouse: the Liminality of Cloistered Spaces at the Chartreuse de Champmol in Dijon’, in Helen Hills (ed), Architecture and the Politics of Gender in Early Modern Europe, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003, 177-191.

 *Francesca Medioli, ‘The Dimensions of the Cloister. Enclosure, Constraint and Protection in seventeenth-century Italy’, in eds. Anne Jacobsen Schutte et al., Time, Space and Women’s Lives in Early Modern Europe, Kirksville, Missouri: Truman State University Press, 2001, 165-180.

  Cordula van Wyhe (ed.), Female Monasticism in Early Modern Europe, Ashgate, 2008.

  Marilyn Dunn, ‘Spiritual Philanthropists: Women as Convent Patrons in Seicento Rome’, in ed. C Lawrence, Women and Art in Early Modern Europe, Penn State UP, 1997, 154-189.

 Donal Cooper, ‘Franciscan Choir Enclosures and the Function of the Double-sided altarpieces in Pre-Tridentine Umbria’, JWCI, Vol. LXIV, 2001, 1-54.

 P Renée Baernstein, A Convent Tale. A Century of sisterhood in Spanish Milan, New York-London: Routledge, ch. 3, ‘Borromeo’s Revolution, 1565-1584’, 79-112.

 N Pohl, Women, Space & Utopia 1600-1800, Ashgate: Aldershot, 2006, ch. 4, ‘In this Sacred Space: Convents and Academies’, 95-123.

 Marilyn Dunn, ‘Piety and Patronage in Seicento Rome: Two Noblewomen and their Convents’, Art Bull., Dec 1994, LXXVI, 644-663.

 R Gilchrist, Gender and Material Culture. The Archaeology of Medieval Religious Women, Routledge: London, 1994.

 C Bruzelius, ‘Queen Sancia of Mallorca and the Convent Church of Sta Chiara in Naples, Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, 50 (1995), 69-100.

 C Bruzelius & C Berman eds., Monastic Architecture for Women: special edition of Gesta, 31, n.2, 1992.

 Kate Lowe, Nuns’ Chronicles and Convent Culture in Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Italy, Cambridge UP: Cambridge, ch. 3, ‘The convents and Physical Space’, 97-148, esp. 117-148.

 Helen Hills (ed), Architecture and the Politics of Gender in Early Modern Europe, Ashgate: Aldershot, 2003.

 Helen Hills, Invisible City. The Architecture and Politics of Gender in Early Modern Europe, Ashgate: Aldershot 2003

 N Leach, ed. Rethinking Architecture Routledge, c.1990.

 Diana Fuss, ‘Interior Chambers: The Emily Dickinson Homestead’, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 1998.

 Iain Borden & Jane Rendell (eds), Intersections. Architectural Histories & Critical Theories, London & New York: Routledge 2000.

 D. Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: a history of feminist design for American homes, neighborhoods and cities, MIT Press: Cambridge, Mass., 1981, ch. 1, ‘The Grand Domestic Revolution’, 3-29, and ch. 11, ‘Homes without kitchens and towns without housework’, 229-265.

 J Attfield, ‘Inside Pram Town: a case study of Harlow town interiors 1951-61’ in eds J Attfield & P Kirkham, A View from the Interior: Feminism, Women and Design, London: Women’s Press, 1989, 215-238.

 Marion Roberts, Living in a Man-made world. Gender assumptions in modern housing design, London: Routledge, 1991, ch. 1 ‘Women as homemakers I’, 16-43; ch. 6, ‘ “We saw it as a dream”’, 105-114; ch. 7, 'A Respectable Life’, 115-139.

 R Madigan & M Munro, ‘The More We are Together: Domestic space, gender and privacy’ in eds. T Chapman & J Hockey, Ideal Homes? Social change and Domestic Life, Routledge: London, 1999, 61-72.

 Lauren Rosewarne, ‘The men’s gallery. Outdoor advertising and public space: Gender, fear, and feminism’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 28 (2005) 67-78. 

 D. Bell & J Binnie, ‘Theatre of Cruelty: the erotics of the street’, in ed. N Fyfe, Image of the Street, Planning Identity & control in public space, 129-140.