FEMINIST THEORY

feminist architecture

Feminist theory in 20th-century architecture encompasses identification of gendered power relations in architectural and urban form and discourse, critique of masculine dominance in the design professions, and creation of “feminist” and “feminine” architectural practices. Influenced by feminism in philosophy, literature, cultural studies, and the social sciences, feminist architectural theory has embraced histories of women in architecture, new types of architectural practice, and the reconceptualization of the “feminine” itself. In architecture, feminist theory has three main tendencies, all of which address gendered power relations and the injustice of masculine domination in architecture. Some theorists celebrate the differences between men and women and take an overtly feminist approach to the critique and reconstruction of architectural practice and history. Others emphasize the struggle for equal access to training and jobs in architecture and for recognition of women’s competence in the profession. Another group focuses on theories of gender difference and representation in the built environment, architectural discourse, and cultural value systems.

Feminist architectural theory has its sources in 19th-century feminist thought and the revival of feminism in the 1960s. Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique (1963) marked the emergence of a second wave feminism in the United States and, later, around the world. This feminism emerged from the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements of the 1950s and 1960s, just as 19th-century feminism developed from abolitionism. “Women’s liberation” focused on the pursuit of civil rights and equality. During the 1960s and 1970s, this strategy evolved into the analysis and challenge of gendered power relations. Feminists recognized that while the struggle for equality is ongoing, it left intact the epistemological and representational sources of inequality. They turned their critique to language, social relations, spatial hierarchies, education, history, art, and other means for preserving gender-based relations of power.

In light of the new emphasis on representation and language among feminists, the work of Simone de Beauvoir became central to feminist theory; her book The Second Sex is considered one of the greatest works of 20th-century feminist theory (published in France in 1949, translated into English in 1952). Its importance lies in the clarity with which Beauvoir summarized women’s condition; in The Second Sex, she traced the history of women’s reduction to objects for men, their status as man’s Other without control over their actions or subjectivity. Beauvoir demonstrated that this assumption dominates social, political, and cultural life. Further, she noted that women internalize this objectified vision as normal and enact their prescribed roles within patriarchy.

Feminist theorists and architects have created alternative practices and histories of architecture. In liberal feminism, there has been a conscious continuity between feminist history, theory, and practice, on the premise that changes to representation of the past contribute to the struggles of living producers. Doris Cole, Dolores Hayden, and Susanna Torre, for example, produced explicitly feminist histories of women in architecture and design. Others, such as Doreen Massey and Leslie Kanes Weisman, authored critiques of the sexism and discrimination against women embedded in and enforced by the built environment. Prominent women practitioners, such as Denise Scott Brown and Patricia Conway, have been advocates for women in professional institutions and critics of masculinism in architecture culture. 

Gender theories have been produced by specialists in many disciplines as well as architecture, such as philosophy, anthropology, geography, film studies, and cultural studies, the result of increased interest in theory among architects and in architecture among theorists of other discourses. French philosophy and psychoanalytic theorists, including Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Lacan, have had a particularly strong impact on feminist theory in architecture. The range of gender theory in architecture encompasses textual analysis and philosophical inquiry (Bergren, Grosz, and Ingraham); architectural history read through feminist, postcolonial, psychoanalytic, and poststructural theory (Çelik, Colomina, and Friedman); critical interpretations of gender and identity in architecture culture and the built environment (McLeod and Sanders); and complex work that interrogates gender construction and blurs the boundaries between theory and practice (Bloomer and Diller). This work can be created by men and women since women’s equality is not the central, political aim of gender theory; it analyzes and ultimately rejects the dichotomy between masculinity and femininity.

According to early feminist theorists, the sexual binary male/ female constructs a series of negative values that define the female as passivity, powerlessness, death, the natural, irrationality, and the Other, whereas the male connotes activity, power, life, the cultural, rationality, and the Self. This hierarchical value system is imbedded with oppositions relating to sexual difference. It generates meaning by placing terms such as “nature” and “culture” in opposition; meaning is acquired only by acknowledging the other term. A crude model for understanding sex and architecture might define the masculine as the alienating, technological outsides of buildings and the feminine as their nurturing, comfortable insides. In this formula, the phallus/exterior stands alone, projects, occupies space as an object, and is coupled with technology and logic. The womb/interior, in this account, protects, creates space, shelters humans, and is affiliated with sensuality and materialism. The problem with such a theory is that it reduces architecture to a series of biologically-based metaphors without interrogating the social and cultural constitution of the linked terms. That is, it attributes fundamentally “feminine” or “masculine,” universal essences to female and male biology (their sex), which are represented in cultural and social phenomena such as buildings.

In the 1970s, feminists made a crucial distinction between biological sex (their sexual organs and their biological functions as women) and gender (their social identity and the cultural associations of the feminine). The term “sex” seemed, to many feminists, to consign men and women to fixed roles, and they seized on “gender” as a more fluid, socially constituted category. Beauvoir’s famous assertion “One is not born a woman, but, rather, becomes one” summarizes the split between sex and gender. Sex implied that being a woman was an innate, biological state, whereas gender connoted the process by which female humans became “women.” Beauvoir noted that “the individuals that compose society are never abandoned to the dictates of their nature; they are subject rather to that second nature which is custom.… It is not merely as a body, but rather as a body subject to taboos, to laws, that the subject is conscious of him-self.” Gender is, therefore, a culturally and socially constructed category of difference, not fixed or stable; according to feminist theorists, it has no “natural” basis. 

The idea that there is an “essential” women’s nature or experience was further challenged during the 1980s; feminist theorists rejected “essentialism” because it reduced women to a homogeneous image based on their bodies (their biology) and a universal “woman’s experience” that was the same for all women regardless of their age, race, or class. Women of color criticized white feminists for creating an exclusively white, middle-class image of women. Informed by critiques of essentialism, feminists have scrutinized dominant, stereotypical images of women and assumptions about gender roles, often through a parody of the pervasive mechanisms of the media. Writers and critics such as bell hooks and Adrian Piper have investigated the ways racial difference is interconnected with sexual difference in dominant regimes of power.

Recent feminist theory has challenged the sex/gender dichotomy itself as an ideological construct. Judith Butler has defined gender as more than the imposition of meaning on “sex”; gender is the very cultural and discursive processes by which the sexes are established, according to Butler. Lesbian critics, such as Monique Wittig, have challenged the heterosexual bias of straight feminism and the inadequacy of the male/female binary, positing a transgressive character of lesbian identity, neither stereotypically “feminine” nor “masculine.” The essays collected by Joel Sanders in Stud explore such reconceptualizations of gender, sexuality, and identity in architectural discourse and design.

Feminist theorists in architecture have turned to a critique of the masculinist underpinnings of architectural discourse, both written and formal. A central concern of feminist theory has been the definition of the architect as a masterful, socially isolated individual whose genius and vision are imprinted on his designs. The conflation of the male body, illustrated by Vitruvius’s famous diagram of a male circumscribed by a circle and a square, exemplifies the dominance of a masculine norm in architecture. It is precisely this model that feminist theorists reject, seeking new models of identity and practice. The interrogation of the architect’s position in society informs feminist practices such as Matrix and Liquid Incorporated founded on collaboration rather than individual, competitive action. Diana Agrest has critiqued the history the Vitruvian model and provided an alternative based on the theory of écriture feminine (feminine writing). According to Agrest, women can place themselves outside the system of architecture by reconfiguring their marginal position and creating an architecture of the repressed, denied, excluded, and hidden.

More recently, feminist theory in architecture has returned to the themes of the body and the everyday experience of women. Feminists have used fashion, the home, and domesticity as a central theme in their work and have produced commentaries, parodies, historical critiques, performances, and alternative practices to critique architecture culture. Jennifer Bloomer’s work, for example, plays with language to create new forms of thought and expression in both writing and design. Her essay and project “Abodes of Theory and Flesh: Tabbles of Bower” reads the foundational texts of architecture, from the Renaissance to the present in order to analyze the relationships between the feminine and ornamentation, the masculine and structure. In a series of important essays (see the works by Agrest, Coleman, and Fausch), Mary McLeod has dissected gender, fashion, modernity, “otherness,” and the everyday in relation to the feminine in architecture culture. 

The simultaneous appearance in 1996 of three major anthologies of feminist writing on architecture signaled the significance of feminist architectural theory. These collections joined a growing body of work (see, for instance the works by Bergren, Colomina, and Fausch) that interrogates the social construction of sexual difference in architectural history, theory, and practice. In their introduction to The Sex of Architecture, Diana Agrest, Patricia Conway, and Leslie Kanes Weisman claim that “women writing on architecture today are exploring history, the uses of public space, consumerism, and the role of domesticity in search of ‘ways into’ architecture, often through alternative forms of practice and education.” Francesca Hughes, in The Architect: Reconstructing Her Practice, contends that “the absence of women from the profession of architecture remains, despite the various theories, very difficult to explain and very slow to change…. One simple and obvious reason for [the lack of feminist criticism in architecture] is the very small number of architects who might choose to apply feminist criticism to architecture: a constituency most easily identifiable as women architects.” By contrast, Debra Coleman, Elizabeth Danze, and Carol Henderson, editors of Architecture and Feminism, propose a strategic relationship between architecture and feminism that would be forged “out of the desire to produce intertextual work that contests an unjust social order.”

FURTHER READING

Agrest, Diana, Architecture from Without: Theoretical Framings for a Critical Practice, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1991

Agrest, Diana, Patricia Conway, and Leslie Kanes Weisman (editors), The Sex of Architecture, New York: Abrams, 1996

Beauvoir, Simone de, Le deuxième sexe, 2 vols., Paris: Gallimard, 1949; as The Second Sex, translated by H.M.Parshley, New York: Knopf, 1952; London: JonathanCape, 1953

Bergren, Ann, “Architecture, Gender, Philosophy,” in Strategies in Architectural Thinking, edited by John Whiteman, Jeffrey Kipnis, and Richard Burdett, Chicago: Institute for Architecture and Urbanism, 1992

Berkeley, Ellen Perry, and Matilda McQuaid (editors), Architecture: A Place for Women, London and Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989

Bloomer, Jennifer, “Abodes of Theory and Flesh: Tabbles of Bower,” Assemblage 17 (April 1992)

Brown, Denise Scott, “Room at the Top? Sexism and the Star System in Architecture,” in Architecture: A Place for Women, edited by Ellen Perry Berkeley and Matilda McQuaid, London and Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989

Butler, Judith P., Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge, 1990

Çelik, Zeynep, “Le Corbusier, Orientalism, Colonialism,” Assemblage 17 (1992)

Cole, Doris, From Tipi to Skyscraper: A History of Women in Architecture, Boston: i press, 1973

Coleman, Debra, Elizabeth Danze, and Carol Henderson (editors), Architecture and Feminism, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996 

Colomina, Beatriz (editor), Sexuality and Space, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992

Fausch, Deborah, et al. (editors), Architecture: In Fashion, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994

Friedan, Betty, The Feminine Mystique, New York: Norton, and London: Gollancz, 1963

Friedman, Alice T., Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Architectural History, New York: Abrams, 1998

Grosz, Elizabeth A., Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies, New York and London: Routledge, 1995

Hayden, Dolores, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1981

Hughes, Francesca (editor), The Architect: Reconstructing Her Practice, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1996

Ingraham, Catherine, Architecture and the Burdens of Linearity, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1998

Massey, Doreen, Space, Place, and Gender, Cambridge: Polity, and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994

Matrix, Making Space: Women and the Man-Made Environment, London: Pluto Press, 1984

Millett, Kate, Sexual Politics, Garden City, New York: Doubleday, and London: Virago, 1970

Moi, Toril, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, London and New York: Methuen, 1985

Morton, Patricia, “The Social and the Poetic: Feminist Practices in Architecture, 1970–1999,” Magasin for aodern arkitektur 26 (2000)

Pollock, Griselda, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism, and Histories of Art, London and New York: Routledge, 1988

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

Sanders, Joel (editor), Stud: Architectures of Masculinity, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996

Torre, Susana (editor), Women in American Architecture: A Historic and Contemporary Perspective, New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1977

Weisman, Leslie Kanes, Discrimination by Design: A Feminist Critique of the Man-Made Environment, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992

(source: PATRICIA MORTON, http://www.bookrags.com)