#feminist spatial theory

[omegaphilosophia]

The Philosophy of the Eyes

The philosophy of the eyes explores the significance of vision as a primary means of perceiving and interacting with the world. It examines the relationship between sight, knowledge, beauty, and perception, and how the eye symbolizes awareness, truth, and consciousness in philosophical and cultural contexts. Vision has often been privileged in both epistemology (theory of knowledge) and aesthetics due to its ability to capture detail, distance, and spatial relationships, but the philosophy of the eyes also delves into its limitations and subjective nature.

Key Themes in the Philosophy of the Eyes:

Vision and Knowledge:

Sight is often seen as the primary sense through which humans gain knowledge about the external world. In many philosophical traditions, vision is closely linked with truth and clarity. The empirical tradition, especially in philosophy of science, relies heavily on what can be observed and measured visually.

However, philosophers such as Plato and Descartes have also questioned whether sight alone can lead to true knowledge, highlighting how the senses can deceive. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave suggests that what we see is often just shadows of the truth, while the real understanding comes from intellectual insight rather than sensory perception alone.

Eyes and the Mind:

The connection between the eye and the mind is central to many philosophical discussions, particularly in epistemology and phenomenology. The eye is not just a passive receptor but interacts with the mind to interpret and make sense of the visual stimuli it receives.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a key figure in phenomenology, emphasized how vision is embodied, meaning that seeing is not merely a function of the eyes but involves the whole body and consciousness. Our perception is shaped by our experiences, biases, and embodiment.

The Eye as a Symbol of Consciousness:

In various philosophical traditions, the eye symbolizes awareness and the mind’s ability to see beyond the physical world. The "third eye" in Eastern philosophy represents spiritual insight and higher consciousness. The eye of Horus in Egyptian mythology symbolizes protection and divine perception.

The eye is often used as a metaphor for the intellect, reason, or the soul. Descartes' "Cogito" (I think, therefore I am) exemplifies how self-awareness, akin to the eye seeing itself, is central to human consciousness.

Vision and Ethics:

The eye is central in discussions about ethical perception, or moral seeing. Seeing others, particularly in a Levinasian sense, involves recognizing the ethical demands they place on us. The act of looking at another can signify recognition, respect, or objectification.

The concept of "the gaze" has been discussed in existentialism and feminist theory. Jean-Paul Sartre argued that the gaze of others can objectify us, reducing our freedom. Laura Mulvey, in feminist film theory, discusses the "male gaze," where the act of looking is tied to power dynamics and objectification.

Eyes and Aesthetics:

The eyes are key in aesthetic philosophy, as vision is a primary way we engage with art, beauty, and nature. Visual beauty, both natural and created, is often one of the first experiences that lead to reflection on aesthetics.

The role of sight in aesthetic experience can raise questions about how we distinguish between superficial beauty and deeper, more significant forms of artistic or natural beauty.

Illusion and Reality:

The eyes are often associated with the concept of illusion, prompting philosophical reflections on the difference between what is seen and what is real. Philosophers from Plato to Kant have explored how vision can deceive, raising doubts about its reliability as a source of knowledge.

Optical illusions serve as practical examples of how the mind interprets visual information in ways that may not correspond to reality, challenging the assumption that “seeing is believing.”

Vision and the Sublime:

The eye’s capacity to perceive vastness and grandeur is tied to the concept of the sublime in philosophy. Experiencing vast landscapes, the night sky, or immense natural phenomena through vision often invokes feelings of awe and transcendence.

Philosophers like Kant have explored how the sublime reveals the limits of human perception, as what we see can overwhelm the senses and exceed comprehension, leading to both fascination and terror.

Vision, Time, and Memory:

Sight is also closely linked with time and memory. Our eyes capture moments that we store in memory, giving us access to the past. Philosophical inquiries into how memory works often involve visual recollections.

Henri Bergson discussed the relationship between perception, memory, and time, proposing that vision is one way we navigate the tension between the present moment and our past experiences.

Power and Surveillance:

In modern philosophy, particularly with thinkers like Michel Foucault, the eye is linked to power, especially in the context of surveillance. Foucault’s concept of the panopticon highlights how being under constant watch shapes behavior and exerts control over individuals, leading to philosophical discussions about the ethical implications of being seen.

The "eye of authority" also raises questions about who has the power to look, who is watched, and how vision is used to enforce social norms and hierarchies.

Eyes and Empathy:

Eyes are windows to emotional understanding and empathy. The ability to make eye contact and read emotions through facial expressions plays a key role in interpersonal relationships. Seeing another’s pain or joy can evoke empathy, leading to discussions in ethics about the moral obligations we have to others when we recognize their emotional states.

The philosophy of the eyes is rich and multifaceted, spanning discussions on perception, knowledge, aesthetics, ethics, and power. The eye symbolizes both the potential and the limitations of human understanding, as it is a primary means through which we engage with the world, yet it is also capable of deception and subjective interpretation. The eye's importance in human experience is reflected in its central role in philosophy, whether in understanding reality, contemplating beauty, or navigating social and ethical relationships.

[naomiroe1]

Blog post 10/3

How does Donna Haraway’s concept of the cyborg challenge traditional feminist ideas about technology and identity?

Haraway’s cyborg challenges traditional feminist ideas by rejecting binary divisions such as nature vs. technology or male vs. female. Instead of seeing technology as something inherently oppressive or liberating, she advocates for a hybrid approach that navigates shifting boundaries. Her concept of the cyborg emphasizes partial connections and interconnectedness, arguing against universal theories or "perfect communication." By doing so, Haraway moves beyond essentialist notions of identity, offering a more flexible and inclusive framework that acknowledges how gender, race, and class intersect in relation to technology.

Why does Haraway distance herself from the term "cyberfeminism," and how does she critique its popular interpretation?

Haraway distances herself from "cyberfeminism" because the term, as popularly interpreted, often simplifies her complex ideas about the relationship between technology and feminism. While cyberfeminism focuses on how technology can offer women freedom in areas like identity and sexuality, Haraway is critical of how these narratives can overlook issues of race, colonialism, and class. She argues that many mainstream feminist movements and technological discourses marginalize women of color, failing to address how these groups are affected by the same systems of power. Haraway’s critique is that cyberfeminism, in its popular form, risks celebrating the empowerment of a privileged few while ignoring the structural inequalities that affect others

3. How did Pokémon GO expose racial and economic inequalities in the U.S., and why was this significant?

Pokémon GO revealed the entrenched racial and economic disparities in the U.S. by making players navigate both virtual and real-world spaces, often forcing minority players into uncomfortable or dangerous situations. For example, Black and Asian American players faced suspicion or violence in predominantly white neighborhoods. These incidents highlighted the persistence of de facto segregation and racial inequality, showing that even seemingly innocent games could be influenced by real-world social dynamics. The game's requirement for boundary-crossing, whether geographical or social, underscored how race remains a deeply ingrained factor in how people experience public spaces, challenging the notion that games are merely escapist or free from societal issues

4.What is "ludo-Orientalism," and how does it apply to the experience of Asian Americans in Pokémon GO?

"Ludo-Orientalism" refers to how games, through their design, marketing, and cultural rhetoric, reinforce racial hierarchies and perceptions of foreignness, particularly in relation to Asians and Asian Americans. In Pokémon GO, this dynamic is evident in how Asian Americans were perceived as outsiders, with the game reifying racial boundaries and spatial dislocation. Even though the game itself is Japanese in origin, the Asian American experience of being treated as perpetual foreigners—despite citizenship or birthplace—became a model for how all minority players were made to feel "othered" within the game's framework. This experience of otherness reflects the broader societal stereotypes and misperceptions of Asians in America, where they are both seen as model minorities and potential threats, depending on the context.

Kolko, B. E. (2000). Race in cyberspace.

[architectuul]

From Care to Cure and Back

Under the umbrella of the LINA platform a program From Care to Cure and Back was initiated by Ana Dana Beroš in collaboration with the Association of Architects of Istria (DAI-SAI). "Treat, cure and give care again", is the idea behind this program, says Ana Dana and stress how important is to deal with experimental publishing practices in architecture.

Ana Dana Beroš at the Publishing Acts: The Publishing School Pedagogies of Care in Rijeka (2020). | Photo © Matija Kralj Štefanić

She is referring how care was and is missing in the formal education of architecture, in the form of a humanistic way of thinking and asking background questions, which primarily concern the users of buildings. With the construction of the state, public projects fell into the background. It became clear that we must learn from our own history, repair, preserve and take care together, and not build unnecessarily.

How will architecture change in the future?

ADB: It will change drastically. I ask myself all the time is it ethical to build anymore? Or should we be focusing on “the great repair” of the broken world? Or is it broken architecture, or mankind, or more than human environment? This question are arising because we were witnessing for more than half of century the capitalist modernity, with its emphasis on innovation, growth, and progress, its economic system based on consumerism and wasteful use, and profligacy, has led to a ruthless exploitation of humans and nature. 

Architecture has played a huge small part in this, as the statistics on greenhouse gas emissions and construction and demolition waste prove. As a counter-strategy to capitalism’s creative destruction, we should focus on the repair, in which nurturing and maintenance that should become the key strategies for the action. 

Publishing Acts I-II-III (2017-2020) | Photo © Matija Kralj Štefanić, collage Ana Dana Beroš

This is not just mine thinking, the notions of care in architecture have been part of many international exhibitions starting from the Critical Care at the Architektur Zentrum in Viena curated by Elke Krasny and Angelika Fitz, the term The Great Repair was used by Milica Topalović and her team at ETH, then are here Pedagogies of the Broken Planet. This is how I see the future.

What does your critical spatial practice include? 

ADB: My critical spatial practice has components of artistic research, documentary filmmaking, curating, publishing/broadcasting, exhibition design, activism and post-disciplinary de-schooling. This is work that overlaps, diverges, converges, runs in parallel, in circles, and in many cases came before and goes beyond.

A whole multitude of practitioners and theorists have been developing work in an expanded field such as this, quite different perhaps from the one Rosalind Krauss identified in 1979. Critical spatial practice was coined by the theorist Jane Rendell in 2000s as a helpful way of describe projects located between art and architecture, that both critiqued the sites into which they intervened as well as the disciplinary procedures through which they operated.

LINA - DAI-SAI programme From Cure to Care and Back. | Photo © Ana Dana Beroš

Taking into account the wide spectrum of intellectual fields close to architecture and space - from urban anthropology to human geography - I consider connecting architecture with feminist theory crucial for the development of critical spatial practices. Gender-based analysis of architecture, its multiple forms of representation, where subjects and spaces are viewed as performatives and constructs, is aimed primarily at questioning the world around us.

Moreover, critical spatial practices are necessarily self-critical and tend to change society, in contrast to orthodox architectural practices that seek to maintain and strengthen the existing social and spatial order of inequality.

How is the LINA platform important for your development on architecture of care?

ADB: I have started Architecture of Care actually developing through the concept of Pedagogies of Care within the predecessor platform to LINA, the former Future Architecture. The Publishing School: Pedagogies of Care is an exploration on how we learn and produce knowledge collectively through emancipatory practices of care. The program builds upon the three Publishing Acts and their collective efforts in shaping unordinary publications, unlikely publics and unorthodox spatial imaginaries.

Publishing Acts, The Publishing School -Pedagogies of Care (Rijeka, 2020). | Design © Marin Nižić

Can radio become again a media for architecture (like in the time of Wright) and in which way you work with it?

ADB: Regarding the radio, as a powerful architectural tool, or to the media that architecture uses, I can agree with many who say that architecture has nowadays become transmedial. We don’t create only in the offline dimension, in concrete and brick, but in the online sphere as well. All media are allowed, or rather necessary, to attain goals of architecture. I have been involved in radio forever as been working for Croatian radio HR3, I have been developing the Radio Schools with artists during the Pedagogies of Care. As our colleagues from dpr-barcelona we claim to this cover that radio is louder than bombs that relates to their motto.

Beside radio you work is also dedicated on documentary film?

ADB: My documentary work is dedicated both to architecture and migration topics. Within the Croatian Architects’ Association I have been leading, then co-leading a documentary project Man and Space and working as a scriptwriter on long feature documentaries dedicated to the life achievement laureates.

Geotrauma - Ana Dana Beros and Matija Kralj Štefanić at the V Magazine. | Foto © Marija Gašparović

In pluriannual research on the relational reading of migrant bodies and migrant territories, conducted together with the artistic partner and cinematographer Matija Kralj Štefanić, we have been departing from nonrepresentational theories, the practices of witnessing that produce knowledge without contemplation. The experimental documentary trajectory builds on previous investigations in the Mediterranean: in reception camps (Contrada Imbriacola, Lampedusa), hotspots (Moria, Lesbos), makeshift camps (Idomeni, Greece), urbanized camps (Dheisheh, Palestine), city refugees (Mardin, Turkey), and, recently, in the Balkans, where we live.

Transmigrancy - Life of Art Magazine, 101-2017 edited by Ana Dana Beroš: Geotrauma. Photo © Matija Kralj Štefanić (design bilic mueller studio)

We refined methods of producing critical, nonrepresentational images, and of gathering and documenting evidence found in borderscapes, in order to make a transmedial and migratory archive, a border documentarism, that is in constant articulation. After the pandemic, from mute images of migrants’ residuals that speak for themselves, we have started creating a polyphony of protagonists of migrant origin and those involved in the No Border movement in a documentary series Three-Voiced: Stories on the Move, broadcast in Croatia. As a contemporary response to the rise of fascist phenomena in Europe, In the era of fetishizing borders and territorialization of bodies, it was crucial to start resonating in a new voiced register for topics that are not heard, or rather systematically not listened to in our societies.

It is just one of many attempts at confronting structures of silencing, asking: Can we, through collective vibration, transform silence into a path of newfound hope and solidarity?

How Intermundia opened an important topic of transmigration in Europe?

ADB: Back in 2014, Intermundia research project questioned alternating border-scapes of trans-European and intra-European migration. The focus was put on the Italian island of Lampedusa, metonymy for contemporary Western conditions of confinement. For me, back then it was clear that the dominant discourses on illegal migration obscure the role of international migration as a regulatory labour market tool. It was important to stress that migrants must be conceived primarily as workers, not only as immigrants. It seemed that, in the pre-pandemic times of constant mobility, involuntary territorial shifts of the precarious workers was parallel to the detention of undesired migrants.

Intermundia at the Venice Biennial in 2014. | Foto © Ana Opalić

Instead of observing Lampedusa as a consolidated institution of the waiting room, as a jailed zone in the middle of conflict, Intermundia attempted a post-human perspective in order to investigate the ambivalent state of in-betweenness. I was aware of the impossibility of cultural translation of such a condition, the understanding of the Other, so the project Intermundia, exhibited and awarded at the Architecture Biennial in Venice 2014, challenged visitors to immerse themselves into a coffin-like light and sound installation. Inducing Verfremdungseffekt, the project asked for solemnity and re-action, and not simply empathy.

I am not sure Intermundia opened the important topic of migration in Europe, but for sure it was a predecessor to the summer of migration in 2015, with the great influx of migrants, refugees and the formation of the so-called Balkan Route.

What does architecture mean to you?

ADB: I dare to say that the fundamental task architecture has is to articulate spatial thinking, thinking capable of asking questions about burning issues of our society in a different way, hence of also creating a different reality. Architecture must offer a space for understanding of the existential condition of an individual and of society, and must also construct a foundation for a life with dignity. We know who we are, and where we belong, precisely through human constructions, both material and intellectual. 

Intermundia "Io sono Africanicano". | Photo © Ana Dana Beroš

Ana Dana Beroš (b. 1979) is an architect based in Zagreb, but often explores contested borderscapes of Europe and beyond. Co-founder of ARCHIsquad - Division for Architecture with Conscience and its educational program UrgentArchitecture in Croatia. Her interest is architectural theory, experimental design and publishing as spatializing practice led her to co-found Think Space (2010-2015) and Future Architecture (2016-2021) international platforms, and currently LINA (2022-2025). The LINA member DAI-SAI ongoing project From care to cure and back, under her curation, explores critical architectural heritage on the case of The Children’s Maritime Health Resort of Military Insured Persons in Krvavica, and encourages transformation of both material and immaterial environments from spaces of a common disease into places of common healing. Her project Intermundia on trans- and intra-European migration was a finalist for the Wheelwright Prize at GSD Harvard, and received a Special Mention at the XIV Venice Architecture Biennale curated by Rem Koolhaas (2014). In her pluriannual research and relational reading of migrant bodies and migrant territories, she departs from non-representational theories, the practices of “witnessing” that produce knowledge without contemplation. The fragments of the migratory archive, a border documentarism formed together with the filmmaker and cinematographer Matija Kralj Štefanić, have been made public in different forms and formats, exhibitions and publications (2016-2022) – and lately within a documentary series Three-voiced: Stories on the move (2022-).

Here You can listen to the WELTRAUM interview

[sam-atwood]

Trans-Spaces:

Reviewing the Application of Queer Theory and Gender Studies in the Design of Transitional Spaces.

This literature review will examine and analyse the existing contemporary literature relevant to applications of queer theory and gender studies in the architectural discipline, whilst identifying a further need to focus on transitional spaces. The aim in applying queer theory and gender studies as a theoretical approach in the design of transitional spaces is to create public accessibility and inclusivity. The discussion will summarise and critique queer and gender-diverse approaches to architecture, and the design of public-facing transitional spaces, before justifying the need for further research.

Debates, Controversies and Foundations:

Early applications of feminist and queer theory in the late 20th Century focused on cis-women, lesbians and gay men - such as in the 1999 text Gender Space Architecture, Betsky’s Queer Space, and Sander’s Stud - inadvertently excluding gender-diversity (Betsky, 1997; Borden et al., 1999; Sanders, 1996). There was a shift in seminal formulations of a distinctly trans-theory by Halberstam and Nagoshi & Brzuzy, theorising broader representations of transgender lives (Halberstam, 2005; Nagoshi et al., 2014). Crawford attempted to remedy “architectural theory’s marginal treatment of transgender” lives, with hesitancy amidst debate regarding the theorisations of lived-experiences subject to “erasure, murder, violence and ridicule in public space” (Crawford, 2016; Moore & Castricum, 2020). Furman and Mardell’s archival examination of criminal records further highlights the erasure of queer spatial history and need for safety (Furman & Mardell, 2022). Queer theory and gender studies is inherently politically charged, foregrounded in the debate of public bathrooms as an intersection of architecture and gender-diversity; with practice-based interventions such as ‘Stalled!’ attempting to find gender-neutral solutions (Jess Berry et al., 2020; Sanders, 2017). Literature further debates the risk of elevating the fluidity of queer people to unrealistic levels of ability to challenge structural institutions, underpinned by the paradoxical nature of a queer methodology (Crawford, 2016; Jobst & Stead, 2023). The literature presents a post-modern understanding of a queer methodology, encompassing non-normative sexualities, trans-, gender-diverse and gender-non-conforming identities, with ‘queer’ shifting from a noun, into a verb; ‘to queer’ or ‘queering’ meaning “to unsettle established relations and norms” of society and the architectural discipline (Jobst & Stead, 2023). It is commonly argued queering involves challenging and rethinking conventional disciplinary methods and approaches; seen in the use of experimental writing, case-studies, archival and practice-based research.

Queering Architecture: Gender Performativity

Judith Butler - considered a founder of gender studies - first introduced the theory of gender as a continual social performance in 1990, resulting in a paradigm shift (Butler, 2006). Butler rejected gender as a fixed natural reality; finding gender is constructed by repetitive acts which create reality; upheld by institutions of patriarchy and biological essentialism (Butler, 2006). Laqueur further supported Butler, finding ‘biological sex’ lacked empirical evidence and perpetuated the oppression of women as less than, or opposite to men (Laqueur, 1992). Ahmed’s later dissertation on queer phenomenology found lived experiences to be performed by the orientation of bodies in space, “shaped by histories,” the repetition of interactions, and the spatial production of “straight tendencies,” or cis-heteronormativity, foregrounding discussions of gender performativity within architecture (Ahmed, 2006).

Within literature there is acknowledgment of architecture as an upholder of normative gender and sexuality, with debate regarding architecture’s repetitive performance of “longstanding essentialism,” and the further need for queering to subvert social constructions (Angelopoulou, 2017). The much-cited thesis Behind Straight Curtains first explored the performance of gender in architecture through a theatrical interpretation of case-studies (Bonnevier, 2007). Caldwell and Smitheram find that if gender is performed; then a space free from institutions, and experienced as queer is also performed through a “collaboration between bodies, materials and forces” (Caldwell & Smitheram, 2023). Canl1 further envisions space as “constantly being reperformed,” with the ability to subvert “gender-charged” power structures by instead performing queer modes of being in a “dissident form of world-making” (Canl1, 2023). It is generally agreed that architecture is subject to and maintains the continual social performance of gender, with queering aiming to dismantle cis-heteronormativity and patriarchy associated with constructions of binary gender.

Resistance to Binary Oppositions and Cis-Heteronormativity

Eve Sedgwick, regarded as a pioneer of queer theory, supports Butler’s theory of gender performativity finding the performance of normalised binary categorisations of sexuality and gender underpin Western society, highlighting socio-political fragmentation due to regulation within institutions such as architecture, leading to marginalisation’s of queerness and gender-diversity (Butler, 2006; Sedgwick, 1990). A queering of architecture aims to resist authoritative binary definitions of sexuality and gender, and associated cis-heteronormativity, leading to the deconstruction of various binaries - from Halberstam’s theorising of queer time as moving “beyond the binary division of flexibility or rigidity” and resisting “institutions of family, heterosexuality and reproduction,” to Herring’s challenging of the urban and rural binary, or “metronormativity,” present within discussions of queering cities (Halberstam, 2005; Herring, 2010).

Ahmed suggests the bodily occupation of space reproduces and affects the performance of social binaries, with spaces historically orientated around a standardised straight cis-body; proposing queering can radically “reorder” these standards to form new modes of inhabitation (Ahmed, 2006). Vallerand further explores the performance of social binaries in domesticity, using case-studies to reveal a coinciding spatial binary of private and public; proposing a “blurring” can resist binary gender roles within the home; supported by Queering the Interior (Gorman-Murray & Cook, 2020; Vallerand, 2020). Gough further explores gay clubs as case-studies, proposing a “transing of gender” and architecture can deconstruct essentialist binary definitions of gender and sexuality, and subsequent constructed architectural boundaries (Gough, 2017). Further literature supports this queer deconstruction of architectural boundaries alongside social binaries in considering the wall as a spatial binary. Canl1 makes the comparison between the division of space with walls, to the barriers faced by queer identities, supported by Crawford arguing “the demarcation of spatial boundaries plays out disproportionately on transgender people and others” (Canl1, 2023; Crawford, 2016). Caldwell and Smitheram, in their practise-based research, theorise the wall as a political force used to “control and orientate our bodies” and “divide people up;” denoting ideas of access and belonging, whilst speculating a blurring of “social and spatial binaries,” within a “nesting of scales” using alternatives, such as the curtain (Caldwell & Smitheram, 2023).

Embodiment of Queer and Gender-Diverse Lived Experiences

Gender performativity and resistance to binary oppositions and cis-heteronormativity in a queering of architecture is commonly underpinned by the embodiment of queer and gender-diverse lived and bodily experiences. Early theorisations of trans-theory, such as that of Halberstam and Nagoshi & Brzuzy, emphasised “the significance of the transgender body” as fluidly embodying resistance to normalised social binaries; foregrounding the self-construction of identity as core to challenging social constructions (Halberstam, 2005; Nagoshi et al., 2014). Canl1 and Ahmed consider the spatial embodiment of socially-constructed binaries to be through the “lived experience of inhabiting a body” in space; with interactions between objects, such as skin and surface, contributing to the normalised exclusion of ‘othered’ bodies (Ahmed, 2006; Canl1, 2023). Canl1 further finds this co-creation of normative identity and space can become “penetrable, diffusive and processual” in a reimagination of architecture as the embodiment of queerness, therefore in a constant state of becoming and transformation (Canl1, 2023). Crawford supports this discussion considering archival narratives of queer “agency, experiences and resistances to human actors” embodied within modernist architecture, examining the “fluidity of the trans body” as a “model” for the transformation of architectural conventions (Crawford, 2016). This concept is reinforced in Angelopoulou’s interdisciplinary case-study research, speculating the queering of architecture is through destabilising acts of “dis/continuity” in the design process, found in the medical transformation of transgender bodies, or “trans-modification,” relating surgical cuts, to cuts in architectural drawings, software and structures (Angelopoulou, 2017). It is widely debated that it is the embodiment of queer and gender-diverse narratives of lived experience within the transgender body and its uses of space that challenges conventions of architecture, gender, and sexuality leading to both bodily and architectural transformations.

Transitional Spaces:

Existing literary discussions of transitional spaces are foregrounded by movement and negotiation of behaviours through and beyond the public and private binary, heralding the queer deconstruction of social binaries. Kimmel’s case-study research employs a critical lens to analyse the social and spatial “requirements and impacts of” of transitional spaces, namely the threshold (Kimmel, 2021). It is accepted that the threshold links “public space with publicly accessible buildings,” acting as a spatial boundary creating “material enclosures” navigating tensions within society enacted between the interior and exterior, whilst aiming to resist the “homogenisation of space” (Kimmel, 2021; Lathouri, 2019). Lathouri’s archival research further finds - using a political lens to propose contemporary applications - that transitional spaces deal with “the space-in-between,” interacting with boundary thresholds and generating liminal experiences of “interiority and proximity” that negotiate individual and collective modes of being and usage (Lathouri, 2019). Similarly, Kimmel finds as “enhancers of social interactions” demarcating “broader socio-political contexts in public and private space” - transitional spaces have the ability to “orchestrate different behaviours” related to status, power and control; delineating experiences of segregation and marginalisation, whilst contributing to the “publicness” of adjacent spaces as reflections of social conditions (Kimmel, 2021). Lathouri further argues transitional spaces are “a condensed expression of human life itself” as they reconsider the relationship between human agency and social structures and construct social reality (Lathouri, 2019). There is agreement that the “recalibration of boundaries” within transitional spaces becomes a socio-political site of resistance, constructing “alternative social…patterns” related to public “access and visibility,” finding a greater impact upon marginalised “communities that are usually invisible” with encounter and connection encouraging sociability, diversity, and “public life” (Kimmel, 2021; Lathouri, 2019).

Queering Transitional Spaces: Liminality: Subverting Binaries

Literature regarding transitional spaces find them to be “small theatres of social life,” performing social constructs of gender and sexuality within liminal movement between binaries such as the public and private (Kimmel, 2021). It is further theorised that transitional spaces negotiate the individual and collective, with queer spatial embodiments establishing self-constructed experiences as integral to the subversion of socially-constructed norms (Lathouri, 2019; Nagoshi et al., 2014). Therefore, the queering of transitional spaces can be justified in the connection between transitional spaces’ theorised liminality and queer approaches to subverting spatial and social binaries. Moore and Castricum further suggest queering architecture requires “looking inside the liminal spaces between the repressive binaries we are forced into by hetero and cisnormativity” proposing a need for further practise-based speculation of transitional spaces as a microcosm of social institutions such as gender and sexuality (Moore & Castricum, 2020).

Transformative Potential

The ability of transitional spaces to modify behaviours; found by Kimmel, can be linked with the transformative potential of body and architecture in mutual co-creation; found in the consideration of lived experiences and bodily occupations in queering architecture (Kimmel, 2021). Canl1 considers the “transformative potential of queerness” in its fluidity; akin to Kimmel and Lathouri’s consideration of transitional spaces as sites of change, with the ability to encourage alternative modes of usage and sociability, such as a queer experience (Canl1, 2023; Kimmel, 2021; Lathouri, 2019). Canl1 further contemplates the domestic corridor as a transitional or “liminal space between worlds” where transformation takes place, arguing the “in-betweenness” creates possibilities heralding Lathouri and Kimmel’s findings that transitional spaces are “sites of intimacy, socialisation and interaction” (Canl1, 2023; Kimmel, 2021; Lathouri, 2019). The justification for the application of queer and gender-diverse approaches in transitional spaces can be found in Canl1’s finding that marginalised people reside in transitional spaces as they are in a “constant state of displacement,” finding comfort in decentralised and destabilised public places where boundaries and identities are blurred, such as transitional spaces (Canl1, 2023). However, contemporary literature is yet to take the consideration of the transitional space out of the domestic and into the public scale, with a queering lending itself to the blurring of scales as seen in Caldwell and Smitheram (2023). Crawford’s proposal of “transing” justifies the further speculation of a queer transformation in the public realm, considering the collaboration and movement that can happen “across bodies, buildings and milieus” in an act similar to that theorised by Lathouri as experiences of movement transform relationships and boundaries within transitional spaces (Crawford, 2016; Lathouri, 2019) There is a present lack of explicit consideration of queer lived experiences and gender-diverse bodies in transitional spaces, therefore, research is required regarding the processes involved in designing transitional spaces as the site of queering and transformative potential.

Inclusivity and Accessibility

A need to focus on the design of transitional spaces with a queer and gender-diverse approach persists; with an aim to foster “inclusive, participatory, safe and accessible” public spaces, as suggested by Contentious Cities, consistent with debates regarding the embodied transformative potential of queer lived experiences, and the advent of liminality within transitional spaces to subvert spatial and social binaries (Jess Berry et al., 2020). Kimmel’s consideration of status, power and control within transitional spaces and the focus on “publicness” indicates an awareness of accessibility and inclusivity issues and need for further application of queer and “gender-sensitive participatory design” processes; such as that used by Kalm and Bawden as “an equalising force used to create spaces…of inclusion” and address power dynamics (Kalms & Bawden, 2020; Kimmel, 2021). Jobst and Stead establishes a connection between queering and concepts introduced by Kimmel, in the advocacy of queering the interior and exterior binary as a “container of private and public voids” which provides visibility and access to spaces where sexuality and gender “resides and enacts itself” without delving further or explicitly exploring transitional space design (Jobst & Stead, 2023; Kimmel, 2021).

There is a clear need to apply queer and gender-diverse approaches to the design of transitional spaces in processes and practices beyond the bathroom and domestic applications; to foster inclusivity and accessibility foregrounded by safety, visibility and participation that starts with queer and gender-diverse lived experiences and extends to all marginalised communities in their transformative potential and subversion of binaries.

References: Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke University Press. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/4/monograph/book/70074 Angelopoulou, A. (2017). A Surgery Issue: Cutting through the Architectural Fabric. FOOTPRINT, Trans-Bodies / Queering Spaces(21), 25–50. https://doi.org/10.7480/footprint.11.2.1899 Betsky, A. (1997). Queer space: Architecture and same-sex desire (First edition). William Morrow and Company, Inc. http://www.gbv.de/dms/weimar/toc/198223609_toc.pdf Bonnevier, K. (2007). Behind Straight Curtains: Towards a queer feminist theory of architecture [KTH]. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-4295 Borden, I., Penner, B., & Rendell, J. (1999). Gender Space Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Introduction. Taylor & Francis Group. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unisa/detail.action?docID=169967 Butler, J. (2006). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203824979

Caldwell, A., & Smitheram, J. (2023). Blurring Binaries: A Queer Approach to Architecture through Embodied Connection. The International Journal of Architectonic, Spatial, and Environmental Design, 17(2), 151–167. https://doi.org/10.18848/2325-1662/CGP/v17i02/151-167 Canl1, E. (2023). Notes from transient spaces, anachronic times: An architextural exercise. In Queering Architecture: Methods, Practices, Spaces, Pedagogies. Bloomsbury Visual Arts. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350267077 Crawford, L. (2016). Transgender Architectonics: The Shape of Change in Modernist Space. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315550039 Furman, A. N., & Mardell, J. (Eds.). (2022). Queer Spaces: An Atlas of LGBTQ+ Places and Stories. RIBA Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003297499 Gorman-Murray, A., & Cook, M. (Eds.). (2020). Queering the Interior. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003086475 Gough, T. (2017). Trans-architecture. FOOTPRINT, Trans-Bodies / Queering Spaces(21), 51–66. https://doi.org/10.7480/footprint.11.2.1900 Halberstam, J. (2005). In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York University Press. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unisa/detail.action?docID=2081650 Herring, S. (2010). Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism. New York University Press. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unisa/detail.action?docID=866116

Jess Berry, Timothy Moore, Nicole Kalms, & Gene Bawden (Eds.). (2020). Contentious Cities | Design and the Gendered Production of Space | Jes (1st ed.). https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781003056065/contentious-cities-jess-berry-timothy-moore-nicole-kalms-gene-bawden Jobst, M., & Stead, N. (Eds.). (2023). Queering Architecture: Methods, Practices, Spaces, Pedagogies. Bloomsbury Visual Arts. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350267077 Kalms, N., & Bawden, G. (2020). Lived experience: Participatory practices for gender-sensitive spaces and places. In Contentious Cities. Routledge. Kimmel, L. (2021). Architecture of Threshold Spaces: A Critique of the Ideologies of Hyperconnectivity and Segregation in the Socio-Political Context. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003133889 Laqueur, T. (1992). Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Harvard University Press.

Lathouri, M. (2019). IMAGINING THE SPACE-IN-BETWEEN: The Elaboration of a Method. Arhitektura, Raziskave, 2019, 173-191,268. Moore, T., & Castricum, S. (2020). Queering architecture: Simona Castricum and Timothy Moore in conversation. In Contentious Cities. Routledge. Nagoshi, J. L., Nagoshi, C. T., & Brzuzy, S. (2014). Gender and Sexual Identity: Transcending Feminist and Queer Theory. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8966-5 Sanders, J. (Ed.). (1996). Stud: Architectures of Masculinity. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003014720 Sedgwick, E. K. (1990). Epistemology of the closet (Updated ed. / preface by the author.). University of California Press. Vallerand, O. (2020). Unplanned Visitors: Queering the Ethics and Aesthetics of Domestic Space. McGill-Queen’s University Press. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unisa/detail.action?docID=6944697

[reposted-yura15cbx]

Patrick Gray, John D. Cox - Shakespeare and Renaissance Ethics-Cambridge University Press (2014).pdf Paul Cefalu - Revisionist Shakespeare_ Transitional Ideologies in Texts and Contexts (2004).pdf Paul Raffield, Gary Watt - Shakespeare and the Law (2008).pdf Paul Yachnin, Jessica Slights - Shakespeare and Character_ Theory, History, Performance and Theatrical Persons (2009).pdf Penny Gay - The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare's Comedies (Cambridge Introductions to Literature)- (2008).pdf Peter G. Platt - Shakespeare and the Culture of Paradox (Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama) (2009).pdf Peter Holbrook - Shakespeare's Individualism (2010).pdf Profiling Shakespeare-Routledge.pdf Rebecca Ann Bach - Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature before Heterosexuality (2007).pdf Richard Dutton, Jean E. Howard - A Companion to Shakespeare's Works, The Poems, Problem Comedies, Late Plays -Wiley-Blackwell (2003).pdf Richard Dutton, Jean E. Howard - A Companion to Shakespeare's Works_ The Comedies -Wiley-Blackwell (2003).pdf Richard Dutton, Jean E. Howard - A Companion to Shakespeare's Works_ The Tragedies -Wiley-Blackwell (2005).pdf Robert H. Bell (auth.) - Shakespeare’s Great Stage of Fools-Palgrave Macmillan US (2011).pdf Robert Weimann - Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice_ Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre-Cambridge University Press (2000).pdf Robertson - Montaigne and Shakespeare.epub Robin Bates - Shakespeare and the Cultural Colonization of Ireland (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory) (2007).pdf Roslyn Lander Knutson - Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare's Time (2001).pdf Russell Jackson - The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, 2nd Edition (Cambridge Companions to Literature) (2007).pdf Russell West - Spatial Representations and the Jacobean Stage_ From Shakespeare to Webster (2002).pdf Saddleback Educational Publishing - Shakespeare Made Easy, Julius Caesar-Saddleback Educational Publishing (2006).pdf Sarah Werner - Shakespeare and Feminist Performance_ Ideology on Stage -Routledge (2001).pdf Stanley Stewart - Shakespeare and Philosophy (Routledge Studies in Shakespeare)-Routledge (2009).pdf Steven Adler - Rough Magic_ Making Theatre at the Royal Shakespeare Company (2001).pdf Steven Adler - Rough Magic_ Making Theatre at the Royal Shakespeare Company-Southern Illinois University Press (2001).pdf Taylor G., Jowett J., Bourus T., Egan G. (General Editors) - The New Oxford Shakespeare. The Complete Works. Modern Critical Edition - 2016.pdf Tetsuo Kishi, Graham Bradshaw - Shakespeare In Japan (2005).pdf Tiffany Stern - Making Shakespeare_ From Stage to Page (Accents on Shakespeare) (2004).pdf Tom MacFaul - Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England_ Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne and Jonson-Cambridge University Press (2010).pdf Tom McAlindon - Shakespeare Minus ’Theory’-Routledge (2016).pdf

[piscessheepdog]

Aledis the Blue Yorkie

Meet Aledis, a Littlest Pet Shop OC (original character) that I created on October 2019. Before I could tell information about this character, I like to say what I have done on February 2, 2024 in the morning. Initially, I was going to archive more files that I considered necessary and that were only found in a desktop computer that used to run Windows 7. Unfortunately, when I started up said desktop computer, I found out that it has been broken down sometime after the end of support of the Professional and Enterprise volume licensed versions, making most of them lost media. What a pity that I couldn't archive them before that software rot!

In compensation of what happened to the older computer, I had to write the following information of this original character from memory:

Name: Aledis

Age: More or less the same as Brown Yorkie

Species: Dog (Yorkshire Terrier)

Gender: Cisgender female

Personal gender pronoun: She/Her

Alignment: Social good

Likes: Literature (especially fiction books and poems), rationalism, science (especially physics) and art

Dislikes: Pseudoscience, fringe theories, blockchain and similar concepts, negative evaluation

Description: Aledis is a blue-furred Yorkshire Terrier that is commonly seen wearing a wreath of flower in her left ear and a green bandana in one of her forelegs. She also has a white star-shaped birthmark that is slightly hidden in her neck's fur. Namewise, Aledis' attitude is described as being intelligent, innovative, progressive, adventurous, and slightly rebellious. As a result, Aledis herself is feminist and will fight for animal rights. Despite being a ratter, Aledis can spare the lives of rodents, including mice and rats. However, she has fear of negative evaluation and a slight spatial anxiety. In some occasions, she is able to take one for the team when necessary. She is depicted as the cousin of Brown Yorkie and is rational enought to be skeptical about magic and paranormal events.

Biography: Aledis was born in Pets Plaza (a place that is found exclusively on the 2008 video game adaptation of Littlest Pet Shop) along with her two siblings. One day, Aledis was suddenly become displaced from her original dimension. To make matters worse, she discovers that the planet she is sent to, the Glade of Dreams, contains hostile beings that are more dangerous compare to that of her native parallel world. In order to deal with it, Aledis uses the survival skills her mother taught earlier. During the journey, she meets a like-minded dweller of the Glade of Dreams that she befriends. Eventually, both of them are sent to a more peaceful world and, over time, she befriends two more female nonhuman characters from different parallel universes.

If anyone asks when Aledis appeared for the first time, the earliest drawings featuring her were first posted on Rayman Pirate Community, as I have a currently inactive account and Aledis used to be the co-mascot of this account along with a Rayman OFC (original female character). As drawn in an approximately five-year-old paper, she originally looked like this in an old artstyle:

Yes, the older picture is a model sheet in the form of traditional art, and it is written in Spanish. By January 2023, I have improved this art style to the current one (such as the digital art I have made for Aledis) so that I removed these drawing quirks found on her head for consistency. Therefore, it's time to give her a chance to make a comeback.

Aledis the Blue Yorkie © Me (@piscessheepdog) Littlest Pet Shop © Hasbro (previously owned by Kenner)

[skibasyndrome]

Helloww, as a fellow literature student... what's a favourite theory/critic/movement of yours?

Oh hi, what a fun question, thank you so much!!!! 🥰

I'd say I'm generally not very set on any school or theory which is most likely due to the fact that my uni isn't very keen on teaching different theories, sadly.

But I looooove anything coming out of cultural studies! So obviously feminist and gender and queer theory, but what I reeeeeaaaally love as well is spatial theory, idk if that even counts as a distinct theory tbh, but.... spaces. My beloved <3

Oh and I love theories that go a bit into sociology, like field theory, my beloved <3

As for critics, can't say I have a favorite. I mean there are the "classics" that inform lots of my views on literature, but no one I know a lot from.

As for movements!!! Honestly, anything from the 19th century on is very much my jam. I love naturalism and I love expressionism, but also lots of the smaller (sub)movements like Wiener Moderne or Dada. All in all I'm a big fan of Modernism and some of the stuff that happened like... on the brink of Modernism (depending on the definition of Modernism you wanna go by)!

[emily-tozer]

_thinkMake Week 3 Reading

This week's reading was 'Only Resist - a feminist approach to critical spatial practice' by Jane Rendell. I found this text quite hard to decipher.

This key parts I picked out from this text were:

Architecture as a profession was historically ‘masculine’ and male dominated in the early 1900s and before, due to the lack of women’s right to work.

Identity is an important aspect of the human condition and so should have the space to exist.

Representation is important when making spaces.

From the text, I picked out the 5 main qualities that characterise the feminist approach to critical space practice:

Collectivity - the importance of collaboration in the creation of something. Women's voices must be heard during the design process of anything, as women are often ignored and not considered, or designed for without being consulted.

Subjectivity - life is often thought about in binary opposites, whereas most things in life are subjective and rely on contextual clues. Historically, architecture has been a men's profession and interior design was a woman's. However, this is not the case.

Alterity - the state of being 'other' or different. Intersectionality is the combination of race, class and gender and how they overlap to create further discrimination and disadvantage. It is important to consider everyone when designing something so that no one is disadvantaged.

Performativity - the interdependent relationship between certain words and actions. Using text as a platform to create performance and action allows a deeper understanding of the text, and has been developed through feminist practices.

Materiality - an object being composed of a material and its qualities. It is important to think about where materials are sourced from, and the processes that take place for that material to be where it is today. It is also important to think about what using a particular material in a design means for the human and non-human actants of the space.

The 7 words I picked out were:

Radical

Marginalisation

Historical - to archive

Critique - to critique

Intersectionality

Theory

Contribution - to provide

The drawing that I created represents the 'normal' way of doing something, and how this conflicts with a 'new' way of doing something. This relates to the idea of being radical and having new theories.

[joannalannister]

The Dead Ladies Club

“Ladies die in childbed. No one sings songs about them.”

The Dead Ladies Club is a term I invented** circa 2012 to describe the pantheon of undeveloped female characters in ASOIAF from the generation or so before the story began. 

It is a term that carries with it inherent criticisms of ASOIAF, which this post will address, in an essay in nine parts. The first, second, and third parts of this essay define the term in detail. Subsequent sections examine how these women were written and why this aspect of ASOIAF merits criticism, exploring the pervasiveness of the dead mothers trope in fiction, the excessive use of sexual violence in writing these women, and the differences in GRRM’s portrayals of male sacrifice versus female sacrifice in the narrative. 

To conclude, I assert that the manner in which these women were written undermines GRRM’s thesis, and ASOIAF -- a series I consider to be one of the greatest works of modern fantasy -- is poorer because of it. 

*~*~*~*~

PART I: WHAT IS THE DEAD LADIES CLUB?

Below is a list of women I personally include in the Dead Ladies Club. This list is flexible, but this is generally who people are talking about when they’re talking about the DLC:

Lyanna Stark

Elia Martell

Ashara Dayne

Rhaella Targaryen

Joanna Lannister

Cassana Estermont

Tysha

Lyarra Stark

the Unnamed Princess of Dorne (mother to Doran, Elia, and Oberyn)

Brienne’s Unnamed Mother

Minisa Whent-Tully

Bethany Ryswell-Bolton

EDIT - The Miller’s Wife - GRRM never named her, but she was raped by Roose Bolton and she gave birth to Ramsay

I might be forgetting someone

Most of the DLC are mothers, dead before the series began. I deliberately use the word “pantheon” when describing the DLC because, like the gods of ancient mythology, these women typically loom large over the lives of our current POVs, and it is their deification that is largely the problem. The women of the Dead Ladies Club tend to be either heavily romanticized or heavily villainized by the text, either up on a pedestal or down on their knees, to paraphrase Margaret Attwood. The DLC are written by GRRM as little more than male fantasies and tired tropes, defined almost exclusively by their beauty and desirability (or lack thereof). They have no voices of their own. Too often they are nameless. They are frequently the victims of sexual violence. They are presented with few or no choices in their stories, something I consider to be a particularly egregious oversight when GRRM says it is our choices which define us. 

The space in the narrative given over to their humanity and their interiority (their inner lives, their thoughts and feelings, their existence as individuals) is minimal or nonexistent, which is quite a shame in a series that is meant to celebrate our common humanity. How can I have faith in the thesis of ASOIAF, that people’s “lives have meaning, not their deaths,” when GRRM created a coterie of women whose main if not sole purpose was to die? 

I restrict the Dead Ladies Club to women one or two generations back because the Lady in question must have some immediate connection to a POV character or a second-tier character. These women tend to be of immediate importance to a POV character (mothers, grandmothers, etc), or at most they’re one character removed from a POV character in the main story (AGOT - ADWD+). 

Example #1: Dany (POV) --> Rhaella Targaryen

Example #2: Davos (POV) --> Stannis --> Cassana Estermont

*~*~*~*~

PART II: "NOW SAY HER NAME.”

Lyanna Stark, “beautiful, willful, and dead before her time.” We know little about Lyanna other than how much men desired her. A Helen of Troy type figure, an entire continent of men fought and died because “Rhaegar loved his Lady Lyanna”. He loved her enough to lock her in a tower, where she gave birth and died. But who was she? How did she feel about any of these events? What did she want? What were her hopes, her dreams? On these, GRRM remains silent. 

Elia Martell, “kind and clever, with a gentle heart and a sweet wit.” Presented in the narrative as a dead mother, a dead sister, a deficient wife who could bare no more children, she is defined solely by her relationships with various men, with no story of her own outside of her rape and murder. 

Ashara Dayne, the maiden in the tower, the mother of a stillborn daughter, the beautiful suicide, we get no details of her personality, only that she was desired by Barristan the Bold and either (or perhaps both) Brandon or Ned Stark. 

Rhaella Targaryen, a Queen of the Seven Kingdoms for more than 20 years. We know that Aerys abused and raped her to conceive Daenerys. We know that she suffered many miscarriages. But what do we know about her? What did she think of Aerys’s desire to make the Dornish deserts bloom? What did she spend 20 years doing when she wasn’t being abused? How did she feel when Aerys moved the court to Casterly Rock for almost a year? We don’t have answers to any of these questions. Yandel wrote a whole history book for ASOIAF giving us lots and lots of information on the personalities and quirks and fears and desires of men like Aerys and Tywin and Rhaegar, so I know who these men are in a way that I don’t know the women in canon. I don’t think it’s reasonable that GRRM left Rhaella’s humanity virtually blank when he had all of TWOIAF to elaborate on pre-series characters, and he could have easily made a little sidebar on Queen Rhaella. We have a lot of dairies and letters and stuff about the thoughts and feelings of real medieval queens, so why didn’t Yandel (and GRRM) give us a little more about the last Targaryen queen in the Seven Kingdoms? Why didn’t we even get a picture of Rhaella in TWOIAF? 

Joanna Lannister, desired by both a King and a King’s Hand and made to suffer for it, she died giving birth to Tyrion. We know there was “love between” Tywin and Joanna, but details about her are few and far between. With many of these women, the scant lines in the text about them often leave the reader asking, “well, what does that mean exactly?” What does it mean exactly that Lyanna was willful? What does it mean exactly that Rhaella was mindful of her duty? Joanna is no exception, with GRRM’s teasing yet frustratingly vague remark that Joanna “ruled” Tywin at home. Joanna is merely the roughest sketch in the text, seen through a glass darkly. 

Cassana Estermont. Honestly I tried to recall a quote about Cassana and I realized that there wasn’t one. She is the drowned lover, the dead wife, the dead mother, and we know nothing else. 

Tysha, a teenage girl who was saved from rapers, only to be gang-raped on Tywin Lannister’s orders. Her whereabouts become something of a talisman for Tyrion in ADWD, as if finding her will free him from his dead father’s long, black shadow, but aside from the sexual violence she suffered, we know nothing else about this lowborn girl except that she loved a boy deemed by Westerosi society to be unloveable. 

For Lyarra, Minisa, Bethany, and the rest, we know little more than their names, their pregnancies, and their deaths, and for some we don’t even have names. 

I often include Lynesse Hightower and Alannys Greyjoy as honorary members, even though they’re obviously not dead. 

I said above that the DLC are either up on a pedestal or down on their knees. Lynesse Hightower is both, introduced to us by Jorah as a love story out of the songs, and villainized as the woman who left Jorah to be a concubine in Lys. In Jorah’s words, he hates Lynesse, almost as much as he loves her. Lynesse’s story is defined by a lot of tired tropes; she is the “Stunningly Beautiful” “Uptown Girl” / “Rich Bitch” “Distracted by the Luxury” until she realizes Jorah is “Unable to support a wife”. (All of these are explained on tv tropes if you would like to read more.) Lynesse is basically an embodiment of the gold digger trope without any depth, without any subversion, without really delving into Lynesse as a person. Even though she’s still alive, even though lots of people still alive know her and would be able to tell us about her as a person, they don’t. 

Alannys Greyjoy I personally include in the Dead Ladies Club because her character boils down to a “Mother’s Madness” with little else to her, even tho, again, she’s not dead. 

When I include Lynesse and Alannys, every region in GRRM’s Seven Kingdoms has at least one of the DLC. That was something that stood out to me when I was first reading - how widespread GRRM’s dead mothers and cast off women are. It’s not just one mother, it’s not just one House, it’s everywhere in GRRM’s writing.

And when I say “everywhere in GRRM’s writing,” I mean everywhere. Mothers killed off-screen (typically in childbirth) before the story begins is a trope GRRM uses throughout his career, in Fevre Dream and Dreamsongs and Armageddon Rag and in his tv scripts. It’s unimaginative and lazy, to say the least. 

*~*~*~*~

PART III: WHO ARE THEY NOT? 

Long dead, historical women like Visenya Targaryen are not included in the Dead Ladies Club. Why, you ask? 

If you go up to the average American on the street, they’ll probably be able to tell you something about their mother, or their grandmother, or their aunt, or some other woman in their lives who is important to them, and you can get an idea about who these women were/are as people. But the average American probably won’t be able to tell you a whole lot about Martha Washington, who lived centuries ago. (If you’re not American, substitute “Martha Washington” with the name of the mother of an important political figure who lived 300 years ago. I’m American, so this is the example I’m using. Also, I can already hear the history nerds piping up - sit down, you’re distinctly above average.)  

In this same fashion, the average Westerosi should (misogyny aside) usually be able to tell you something about the important women in their lives. In real life history, kings and lords and other noblemen shared or preserved information about their wives or mothers or sisters or w/e, in spite of the extremely misogynistic medieval societies they lived in. 

So this isn’t “OMG a woman died, be outraged!!1!” kind of thing. This isn’t that. 

I generally limit the DLC to women who have died relatively recently in Westerosi history and who are denied their humanity in a way that their male contemporaries are not. 

*~*~*~*~

PART IV: WHY DOES IT MATTER?

The Dead Ladies Club are the women of the previous one or two generations that we should know more about, but we don’t. We know little more about them than that they had children and they died. I don’t know these women, except through transformative fandom. I know a lot about the pre-series male characters in the text, but canon gives me almost nothing about these women. 

To copy from another post of mine on this issue, it’s like the Dead Ladies exist in GRRM’s narrative solely to be abused, raped, give birth, and die, later to have their immutable likenesses cast in stone and put up on pedestals to be idealized. The women of the Dead Ladies Club aren’t afforded the same characterization and growth as pre-series male characters. 

Think about Jaime, who, while not a pre-series character, is a great example of how GRRM can use characterization to play with his readers. We start off seeing Jaime as an asshole who pushes kids out of windows, and don’t get me wrong, he’s still an asshole who pushes kids out of windows, but he’s also so much more than that. Our perception as readers shifts and we understand that Jaime is so complex and multi-layered and grey. 

With dead pre-series male characters, GRRM still manages to do interesting things with their stories, and to convey their desires, and to play with reader perceptions. Rhaegar is a prime example. Readers go from Robert’s version of the story that Rhaegar was a sadistic supervillain, to the idea that whatever happened between Rhaegar and Lyanna wasn’t as simple as Robert believed, and some fans even progress further to this idea that Rhaegar was highly motivated by prophecy. 

But we don’t get that kind of character development with the Dead Ladies. For example, Elia exists in the narrative to be raped and to die, and to motivate Doran’s desires for justice and revenge, a symbol of the Dornish cause, a reminder by the narrative that it is the innocents who suffer most in the game of thrones. But we don’t know who she is as a person. We don’t know what she wanted in life, how she felt, what she dreamed of. 

We don’t get characterization of the DLC, we don’t get shifts in perception, we barely get anything at all when it comes to these women. GRRM does not write pre-series female characters the same way he writes pre-series male characters. These women are not given space in the narrative the same way their male contemporaries are. 

Consider the Unnamed Princess of Dorne, mother to Doran, Elia, and Oberyn. She was the only female ruler of a kingdom while the Robert’s Rebellion generation was coming up, and she is also the only leader of a Great House during that time period that we don’t have a name for. 

The North? Ruled by Rickard Stark. The Riverlands? Ruled by Hoster Tully. The Iron Islands? Ruled by Quellon Greyjoy. The Vale? Ruled by Jon Arryn. The Westerlands? Ruled by Tywin Lannister. The Stormlands? Steffon, and then Robert Baratheon. The Reach? Mace Tyrell. But Dorne? Just some woman with no name, oops, who the hell cares, who even cares, why bother with a name, who needs one, it’s not like names matter in ASOIAF, amirite? //sarcasm//

We didn’t even get her name in TWOIAF, even though the Unnamed Princess was mentioned there. And this lack of a name is so very limiting - it is so hard to discuss a ruler’s policy and evaluate her decisions when the ruler doesn’t even have a name. 

To speak more on the namelessness of women... Tysha didn’t get a name until ACOK. Although they were named in the appendices in book 1, neither Joanna nor Rhaella were named within the story until ASOS. Ned Stark’s mother wasn’t named until the family tree in the appendix of TWOIAF. And when will the Unnamed Princess of Dorne get a name? When? 

As I think about this, I cannot help but think of this quote: “She hated the namelessness of women in stories, as if they lived and died so that men could have metaphysical insights.” Too often these women exist to further the male characters, in a way that doesn’t apply to men like Rhaegar or Aerys. 

I don’t think that GRRM is leaving out or delaying these names on purpose. I don’t think GRRM is doing any of this deliberately. The Dead Ladies Club, imo, is the result of indifference, not malevolence. 

But these kinds of oversights like the Princess of Dorne not having a name are, in my opinion, indicative of a much larger trend -- GRRM refuses these dead women space in the narrative while affording significant space to the dead/pre-series male characters. This issue, imo, is relevant to feminist spatial theory, or the ways in which women inhabit or occupy space (or are prevented from doing so). Some feminist scholars argue that even conceptual “places” or “spaces” (like a narrative or a story) have an influence on people’s political power, culture, and social experience. Such a discussion is probably beyond the scope of this post, but basically it’s argued that women/girls are socialized to take up less space than men in their surroundings. So when GRRM refuses narrative space to pre-series women in a way that he does not do to pre-series men, I feel like he is playing into misogynistic tropes and tendencies rather than subverting them.  

*~*~*~*~

PART V: THE DEATH OF THE MOTHER

Given that many of the DLC (although not all) were mothers, and that many died in childbirth, I want to examine this phenomenon in more detail, and discuss what it means for the Dead Ladies Club. 

Popular culture has a tendency to prioritize fatherhood by marginalizing motherhood. (Look at Disney’s long history of dead or absent mothers, storytelling which is merely a continuation a much older fairytale tradition of the “symbolic annihilation” of the mother figure.) Audiences are socialized to view mothers as “expendable,” while fathers are “irreplaceable”:

This is achieved by not only removing the mother from the narrative and undermining her motherwork, but also by obsessively showing her death, again and again. […] The death of the mother is instead invoked repeatedly as a romantic necessity […] there appears to be a reflex in mainstream popular visual culture to kill off the mother. [x]

For me, the existence of the Dead Ladies Club is perpetuating the tendency to devalue motherhood, and unlike so much else about ASOIAF, it’s not original, it’s not subversive, and it’s not great writing.  

Consider Lyarra Stark. In GRRM’s own words, when asked who Ned Stark’s mother was and how she died, he tells us laconically, “Lady Stark. She died.” We know nothing of Lyarra Stark, other than that she married her cousin Rickard, gave birth to four children, and died during or after Benjen’s birth. It’s another example of GRRM’s casual indifference toward and disregard for these women, and it’s very disappointing coming from an author who is otherwise so amazing. If GRRM can imagine a world as rich and varied as Westeros, why is it so often the case that when it comes to the female relatives of his characters, all GRRM can imagine is that they suffer and die? 

Now, you might be saying, “dying in childbirth is just something that happens to women, so what’s the big deal?” Sure, women died in childbirth in the Middle Ages at an alarming rate. Let’s assume that Westerosi medicine closely approximates medieval medicine - even if we make that assumption, the rate at which these women are dying in childbirth in Westeros is inordinately high compared to the real Middle Ages, statistically speaking. But here’s the kicker: Westerosi medicine is not medieval. Westerosi medicine is better than medieval medicine. To paraphrase my friend @alamutjones, Westeros has better than medieval medicine, but worse than medieval outcomes when it comes to women. GRRM is putting his finger down on the scales here. And it’s lazy. 

Childbirth, by definition, is a very gendered death. And it’s how GRRM defines these women - they gave birth, and they died, and nothing else about them matters to him. (“Lady Stark. She died.”) Sure, there’s some bits of minutia we can gather about these women if we squint. Lyanna was said to be willful, and she had some sort of relationship with Rhaegar Targaryen that the jury is still out on, but her consent was dubious at best. Joanna was happily married, and she was desired by Aerys Targaryen, and she may or may not have been raped. Rhaella was definitely raped to conceive Daenerys, who she died giving birth to. 

Why are these women treated in such a gendered manner? Why did so many mothers die in childbirth in ASOIAF? Fathers don’t tend to die gendered deaths in Westeros, so why isn’t the cause of death more varied for women? 

And why are so many women in ASOIAF defined by their absence, as black holes, as negative space in the narrative? 

The same cannot be said of so many fathers in ASOIAF. Consider Cersei, Jaime, and Tyrion, but whose father is a godlike-figure in their lives, both before and after his death. Even dead, Tywin still rules his children’s lives. 

It’s the relationship between child and father (Randyll Tarly, Selwyn Tarth, Rickard Stark, Hoster Tully, etc) that GRRM gives so much weight to relative to the mother’s relationship, with notable exceptions found in Catelyn Stark and Cersei Lannister. (Though with Cersei, I think it could be argued that GRRM isn’t subverting anything -- he’s playing into the dark side of motherhood, and the idea that mothers damage their children with their presence -- which is basically the flip side of the dead mother trope -- but this post is already a ridiculous length and I’m not gonna get into this here.) 

*~*~*~*~

PART VI: THE DLC AND SEXUAL VIOLENCE

Despite his claims to historical verisimilitude, GRRM made Westeros more misogynistic than the real Middle Ages. Considering that the details of their sexual violence is the primary information we have about the DLC, why is so much sexual violence necessary?

I discuss this issue in depth in my tag for #rape culture in Westeros, but I think it deserves to be touched on here, at least briefly. 

Girls like Tysha are defined by the sexual violence they experienced. We know about Tysha’s gang rape in book 1, but we don’t even learn her name until book 2.  So many of the DLC are victims of sexual violence, with little or no attention given to how this violence affected them personally. More attention is given to how the sexual violence affected the men in their lives. With each new sexual harassment Joanna suffered because of Aerys, we know per TWOIAF that Tywin cracked a little more, but how did Joanna feel? We know that Rhaella had been abused to the point that it appeared that a beast had savaged her, and we know that Jaime felt extremely conflicted about this because of his Kingsguard oaths, but how did Rhaella feel, when her abuser was her brother-husband? We know more about the abuse these women suffered than we do about the women themselves. The narrative objectifies rather than humanizes the DLC. 

Why did GRRM’s messianic characters have to be conceived through rape? The mother figure being raped and sacrificed for the messiah/hero is an old and tired fantasy trope, and GRRM does it not once, but two (or possibly even three) times. Really, GRRM? Really? GRRM doesn’t need to rely on raped dead mothers as part of his store-bought tragic backstory. GRRM can do better than that, and he should do better. (Further discussion in my tag for #gender in ASOIAF.) 

*~*~*~*~

PART VII: MALE SACRIFICE, FEMALE SACRIFICE, AND CHOICE

Now, you might be asking, “It’s normal for male characters to sacrifice themselves, so why can’t women sacrifice themselves for the messiah? Isn’t female sacrifice subversive?” 

Male sacrifice and female sacrifice are often not the same in popular culture. To boil it down - men sacrifice, while women are sacrificed. 

Women dying in childbirth to give birth to the messiah isn’t the same thing as male characters making some grand last stand with guns blazing to give the Messianic Hero the chance to Do The Thing. The male characters who get to go out guns blazing choose that fate; it’s the end result of their characterization to do so. Think of Syrio Forel. He chooses to sacrifice himself to save one of our protagonists. 

But women like Lyanna and Rhaella and Joanna they didn’t get a choice, were afforded no grand moment of existential victory that was the culmination of their characters; they just died. They bled out, they got sick, they were murdered -- they-just-died. There was no grand choice to sacrifice themselves in favor of saving the world, there was no option to refuse the sacrifice, there wasn’t any choice at all. 

And that’s key. That’s what lies at the heart of all of GRRM’s stories: choice. As I said here,

“Choice […]. That’s the difference between good and evil, you said. Now it looks like I’m the one got to make a choice” (Fevre Dream). In GRRM’s own words, “That’s something that’s very much in my books: I believe in great characters. We’re all capable of doing great things, and of doing bad things. We have the angels and the demons inside of us, and our lives are a succession of choices.” It’s the the choices that hurt, the choices where good and evil hang in the balance – these are the choices in which “the human heart [is] in conflict with itself,” which GRRM considers to be “the only thing worth writing about”. 

Men like Aerys and Rhaegar and Tywin make choices in ASOIAF; women like Rhaella don’t have any choices at all in the narrative. 

Does GRRM not find the stories of the Dead Ladies Club worth writing about? Was there no moment in GRRM’s mind when Rhaella or Elia or Ashara felt conflicted in their hearts, no moment they felt their loyalties divided? How did Lynesse feel choosing concubinage? What of Tysha, who loved a Lannister boy, but was gang-raped at the hands of House Lannister? How did she feel? 

It would be very different if we were told about the choices that Lyanna and Rhaella and Elia made. (Fandom often speculates about whether, for example, Lyanna chose to go with Rhaegar, but the text remains silent on this issue as of ADWD. GRRM remains silent on these women’s choices.)  

It would be different if GRRM explored their hearts in conflict, but we’re not told anything about that. It would be subversive if these women actively chose to sacrifice themselves, but they didn’t. 

Dany is probably being set up as a woman who actively chooses to sacrifice herself to save the world, and I think that’s subversive, a valiant and commendable effort on GRRM’s part to tackle this dichotomy between male sacrifice and female sacrifice. But I don’t think it makes up for all of these dead women sacrificed in childbirth with no choice. 

*~*~*~*~

PART VIII: CONCLUSIONS

I hope this post serves as a working definition of the Dead Ladies Club, a term which, at least for me, carries a lot of criticism of the way GRRM handles these female characters. The term encompasses the voicelessness of these women, the excessive and highly gendered abuse they suffered, and their lack of characterization and agency. 

GRRM calls his characters his children. I feel like these dead women -- the mothers, the wives, the sisters -- I feel like these women were GRRM’s stillborn children, with nothing left of them but a name on a birth certificate, and a lot of lost potential, and a hole where the heart once was in someone else’s story. From my earliest days on tumblr, I wanted to give voice to these voiceless women. Too often they were forgotten, and I didn’t want them to be. 

Because if they were forgotten -- if all they were meant to do was die -- how could I believe in ASOIAF? 

How can I believe that “men’s lives have meaning, not their deaths” if GRRM created this group of women merely to be sacrificed? Sacrificed for prophecy, or for someone else’s pain, or simply for the tragedy of it all?

How can I believe in all the things ASOIAF stands for? I know that GRRM does a great job with Sansa and Arya and Dany and all the other female POVs, and I admire him for it. 

But when ASOIAF asks, “what is the life of one bastard boy against a kingdom?" What is one life worth, when measured against so much? And Davos answers, softly, “Everything” ... When ASOIAF says that ... when ASOIAF says that one life is worth everything, how can people tell me that these women don’t matter? 

How can I believe in ASOIAF as a celebration of humanity, when GRRM dehumanizes and objectifies these women? 

The treatment of these women undermines ASOIAF’s central thesis, and it didn’t need to be like this. GRRM is better than this. He can do better. 

I want to be wrong about all this. I want GRRM to tell us in TWOW all about Lyanna’s choices, and I want to learn the name of the Unnamed Princess, and I want to know that three women weren’t raped to fulfill GRRM’s prophecy. I want GRRM to breathe life into them, because I consider him to be the best fantasy writer alive. 

But I don’t know that he will do that. The best I can say is, I want to believe.

*~*~*~*~

“Ladies die in childbed. No one sings songs about them.” 

But I sing of them. I do. Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story...

*~*~*~*~

PART IX: FOOTNOTES AND MISCELLANEOUS

**I am 90% certain that I am the person who invented the term “Dead Ladies Club”, but I am not 100% certain. It sounds like a name I would make up, but a lot of my friends who I would talk to about this on their blogs in 2011 and 2012 have long since deleted, so I can’t find the first time I used the term, and I can’t remember anymore. Some things that should not have been forgotten were lost, history became legend, legend became myth, y'all know the drill.

To give you a little more about the origins of this term, I created my sideblog @pre-gameofthrones because I wanted a place for the history of ASOIAF, but mostly I wanted a place where these women could be brought to life. During my early days in fandom, so many people around here were writing great fanfiction featuring these women, fleshing out these women’s thoughts and feelings, bringing them to life and giving them the humanity that GRRM denied them. I wasn’t very interested in transformative works before ASOIAF, but suddenly I needed a place to preserve all of these fanfics about these women. Perhaps it sounds silly, but I didn’t want these women to suffer a second “death” and to be forgotten a second time with people deleting their blogs and posts getting lost in tumblr’s terrible organization system. 

Over the years, so many other people have talked about and celebrated the Dead Ladies Club: @poorshadowspaintedqueens, @cosmonauthill, @lyannas, @rhaellas, @ayllriadayne, @poorquentyn, @goodqueenaly, @arielno, @gulbaharsultan, @racefortheironthrone and so many others, but these were the people I remembered off the top of my head, and I wanted to list them here because they all have such great things to say about this, so check them out, go through their archives, ask them stuff, because they’re wonderful!

[gatheringbones]

[“… Jensen states in the imperative that one cannot liberate masculinity from itself; one instead must destroy it. In Jensen’s words: “One response to this toxic masculinity has been to attempt to redefine what it means to be a man, to craft a kinder-and-gentler masculinity that might pose less of a threat to women and children and be more livable for men. But such a step is inadequate; our goal should not be to reshape masculinity but to eliminate it.”

The allusion to “elimination” here is extremely noteworthy. Eliminate, comes from the Latin eliminatus, meaning “to be turned out of doors” or “through a threshold”—which also connotes to put an end to something; to kill, destroy, or make somebody or something ineffective; to defeat and put a player or team out of a competition; to remove something as irrelevant or unimportant; and interestingly, last but nowhere near least, to expel waste from the body. This is curious. Part of what Jensen suggests with this rhetoric of elimination is that, in addition to surrendering the desire to reconstruct masculinity—something he claims is an inadequate response—masculinity instead needs to be categorically destroyed, removed, killed off, and, expelled as waste.

Of course, the claim here is supported by both of the teleologies and tautologies in Jensen’s logic: “I get erections from pornography. I take that to be epistemologically significant.” Jensen concludes two points about the male body and its sexual responses: first, it is involuntary in its responsiveness; and second, that such responsiveness itself is a priori evidence of abject, irresolvable culpability and guilt. Masculinity writ noncomplicitous remains unthinkable.

Such corporeal self-evidence and abjection are precisely what Judith Butler has cautioned against in her work while, at the same time, acknowledging the vitality of the unthinkable in other ways and on different terms. Although Jensen, Dworkin, and Butler each write the impossible body as the effect of heteronormative hegemonies, Butler’s construction of embodiment differs from Jensen’s. Where he details a body constructed by its overdetermined biological need to occupy and destroy femaleness as a drive toward achieving normalized manhood, for Butler, the body is the effect of normative social processes and can, in turn, “occupy the norm in myriad ways, exceed the norm, rework the norm, and expose realities to which we thought we were confined as open to transformation.”

In other words, where matter for Jensen must inscribe no possibility of excess, Butler finds rearticulation as a fundamental part of why matter must be inhabited in excess of itself and incoherently for both theory and politics.

“Bodies are not,” Butler writes, “inhabited as spatial givens. They are, in their spatiality, also underway in time: aging, altering shape, altering signification—depending upon their interactions—and the web of visual, discursive, and tactile relations that become part of their historicity, their constitutive past, present, and future.”

What emerges vis-à-vis Jensen’s rearticulation of antipornography feminism and masculinity is precisely the opposite of what Butler seeks to map. Jensen’s is a flow of affect not only grounded in mimesis, or an assumption of realism without mediation. Instead it is affect produced relationally (as a mediation between text and audience), an affect that is also heavily invested in constituting masculinity through problematic and very limited subject positions: the only feminist affect available for masculinity is self-punishment, despair, and debilitating pathos. Jensen punctuates and performs such pathos throughout his text by lamenting, “I am sad. It feels like there are few ways out” for a masculinity trapped in the guilty male body and for whom elimination is the only remedy.”]

bobby noble, from Knowing Dick: Penetration and the Pleasures of Feminist Porn’s Trans Men, from the feminist porn book: the politics of producing pleasure, edited by tristan taormino, constance henley, and celine perreñas shimizu, 2013

[phroyd]

This brilliant researcher supports a theory that vindicates important Feminist Thought, but removes some hopeful biological validation of the pre-adolescent Transgender rationale!  And she is totally correct, there IS No Gendered Brain! - Phroyd

You receive an invitation, emblazoned with a question: “A bouncing little ‘he’ or a pretty little ‘she’?” The question is your teaser for the “gender reveal party” to which you are being invited by an expectant mother who, at more than 20 weeks into her pregnancy, knows what you don’t: the sex of her child. After you arrive, explains cognitive neuroscientist Gina Rippon in her riveting new book, The Gendered Brain, the big reveal will be hidden within some novelty item, such as a white iced cake, and will be colour-coded. Cut the cake and you’ll see either blue or pink filling. If it is blue, it is a…

Yes, you’ve guessed it. Whatever its sex, this baby’s future is predetermined by the entrenched belief that males and females do all kinds of things differently, better or worse, because they have different brains.

A neuroscientist explains: the need for ‘empathetic citizens’ - podcast

“Hang on a minute!” chuckles Rippon, who has been interested in the human brain since childhood, “the science has moved on. We’re in the 21st century now!” Her measured delivery is at odds with the image created by her detractors, who decry her as a “neuronazi” and a “grumpy old harridan” with an “equality fetish”. For my part, I was braced for an encounter with an egghead, who would talk at me and over me. Rippon is patient, though there is an urgency in her voice as she explains how vital it is, how life-changing, that we finally unpack – and discard – the sexist stereotypes and binary coding that limit and harm us.

For Rippon, a twin, the effects of stereotyping kicked in early. Her “under-achieving” brother was sent to a boys’ academic Catholic boarding school, aged 11. “It’s difficult to say this. I was clearly academically bright. I was top in the country for the 11+.” This gave her a scholarship to a grammar school. Her parents sent her to a girls’ non-academic Catholic convent instead. The school did not teach science. Pupils were brought up to be nuns or a diplomatic wife or mother. “Psychology,” she points out, “was the nearest I could get to studying the brain. I didn’t have the A levels to do medicine. I had wanted to be a doctor.”

A PhD in physiological psychology and a focus on brain processes and schizophrenia followed. Today, the Essex-born scientist is a professor emeritus of cognitive neuroimaging at Aston University, Birmingham. Her brother is an artist. When she is not in the lab using state-of-the-art brain imaging techniques to study developmental disorders such as autism, she is out in the world, debunking the “pernicious” sex differences myth: the idea that you can “sex” a brain or that there is such a thing as a male brain and a female brain. It is a scientific argument that has gathered momentum, unchallenged, since the 18th century “when people were happy to spout off about what men and women’s brains were like – before you could even look at them. They came up with these nice ideas and metaphors that fitted the status quo and society, and gave rise to different education for men and women.”

Rippon has analysed the data on sex differences in the brain. She admits that she, like many others, initially sought out these differences. But she couldn’t find any beyond the negligible, and other research was also starting to question the very existence of such differences. For example, once any differences in brain size were accounted for, “well-known” sex differences in key structures disappeared. Which is when the penny dropped: perhaps it was time to abandon the age-old search for the differences between brains from men and brains from women. Are there any significant differences based on sex alone? The answer, she says, is no. To suggest otherwise is “neurofoolishness”.

Plasticity is now a scientific given – the brain is moulded from birth onwards until old age

“The idea of the male brain and the female brain suggests that each is a characteristically homogenous thing and that whoever has got a male brain, say, will have the same kind of aptitudes, preferences and personalities as everyone else with that ‘type’ of brain. We now know that is not the case. We are at the point where we need to say, ‘Forget the male and female brain; it’s a distraction, it’s inaccurate.’ It’s possibly harmful, too, because it’s used as a hook to say, well, there’s no point girls doing science because they haven’t got a science brain, or boys shouldn’t be emotional or should want to lead.”

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The next question was, what then is driving the differences in behaviour between girls and boys, men and women? Our “gendered world”, she says, shapes everything, from educational policy and social hierarchies to relationships, self-identity, wellbeing and mental health. If that sounds like a familiar 20th-century social conditioning argument, it is – except that it is now coupled with knowledge of the brain’s plasticity, which we have only been aware of in the past 30 years.

“It is now a scientific given,” says Rippon, “that the brain is moulded from birth onwards and continues to be moulded through to the ‘cognitive cliff’ in old age when our grey cells start disappearing. So out goes the old ‘biology is destiny’ argument: effectively, that you get the brain you are born with – yes, it gets a bit bigger and better connected but you’ve got your developmental endpoint, determined by a biological blueprint unfolding along the way. With brain plasticity, the brain is much more a function of experiences. If you learn a skill your brain will change, and it will carry on changing.” This is shown to be the case in studies of black cab drivers learning the Knowledge, for example. “The brain is waxing and waning much more than we ever realised. So if you haven’t had particular experiences – if as a girl you weren’t given Lego, you don’t have the same spatial training that other people in the world have.

If, on the other hand, you were given those spatial tasks again and again, you would get better at them. “The neural paths change; they become automatic pathways. The task really does become easier.”

Neural plasticity throws the nature/nurture polarity out of the lab window. “Nature is entangled with nature,” says Rippon. Added to this, “being part of a social cooperative group is one of the prime drives of our brain.” The brain is also predictive and forward-thinking in a way we had never previously realised. Like a satnav, it follows rules, is hungry for them. “The brain is a rule scavenger,” explains Rippon, “and it picks up its rules from the outside world. The rules will change how the brain works and how someone behaves.” The upshot of gendered rules? “The ‘gender gap’ becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Rippon regularly talks in schools. She wants girls to have leading scientists as role models, and she wants all children to know that their identity, abilities, achievements and behaviour are not prescribed by their biological sex. “Gender bombardment” makes us think otherwise. Male babies dressed in blue romper suits, female ones in pink is a binary coding that belies a status quo that resists the scientific evidence. “Pinkification”, as Rippon calls it, has to go. Parents don’t always like what they hear.

The brain is a rule scavenger and it picks up its rules from the outside world

“They say, ‘I have a son and a daughter, and they are different.’ And I say, ‘I have two daughters, and they are very different.’ When you talk about male and female identity, people are very wedded to the idea that men and women are different. People like me are not sex-difference deniers,” continues Rippon. “Of course there are sex differences. Anatomically, men and women are different. The brain is a biological organ. Sex is a biological factor. But it is not the sole factor; it intersects with so many variables.”

I ask her for a comparable watershed moment in the history of scientific understanding, in order to gauge the significance of her own. “The idea of the Earth circling around the sun,” she bats back.

Letting go of age-old certainties is frightening, concedes Rippon, who is both optimistic about the future, and fearful for it. “I am concerned about what the 21st century is doing, the way it’s making gender more relevant. We need to look at what we are plunging our children’s brains into.”

Ours may be the age of the self-image, yet we aren’t ready to let the individual self emerge, unfettered by cultural expectations of one’s biological sex. That disconnect, says Rippon, is writ large, for example, in men. “It suggests there is something wrong in their self-image.” The social brain wants to fit in. The satnav recalibrates, according to expectations. “If they are being driven down a route that leads to self-harm or even suicide or violence, what is taking them there?”

On the plus side, our plastic brains are good learners. All we need to do is change the life lessons.

How gender stereotypes led brain science

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Research so far has failed to challenge deep prejudice, says Gina Rippon

Several things went wrong in the early days of sex differences and brain imaging research. With respect to sex differences, there was a frustrating backward focus on historical beliefs in stereotypes (termed “neurosexism” by psychologist Cordelia Fine). Studies were designed based on the go-to list of the “robust” differences between females and males, generated over the centuries, or the data were interpreted in terms of stereotypical female/male characteristics which may not have even been measured in the scanner. If a difference was found, it was much more likely to be published than a finding of no difference, and it would also breathlessly be hailed as an “at last the truth” moment by an enthusiastic media. Finally the evidence that women are hard-wired to be rubbish at map reading and that men can’t multi-task! So the advent of brain imaging at the end of the 20th century did not do much to advance our understanding of alleged links between sex and the brain. Here in the 21st century, are we doing any better?

One major breakthrough in recent years has been the realisation that, even in adulthood, our brains are continually being changed, not just by the education we receive, but also by the jobs we do, the hobbies we have, the sports we play. The brain of a working London taxi driver will be different from that of a trainee and from that of a retired taxi driver; we can track differences among people who play videogames or are learning origami or to play the violin. Supposing these brain-changing experiences are different for different people, or groups of people? If, for example, being male means that you have much greater experience of constructing things or manipulating complex 3D representations (such as playing with Lego), it is very likely that this will be shown in your brain. Brains reflect the lives they have lived, not just the sex of their owners.

Seeing the life-long impressions made on our plastic brains by the experiences and attitudes they encounter makes us realise that we need to take a really close look at what is going on outside our heads as well as inside. We can no longer cast the sex differences debate as nature versus nurture – we need to acknowledge that the relationship between a brain and its world is not a one-way street, but a constant two-way flow of traffic.

Once we acknowledge that our brains are plastic and mouldable, then the power of gender stereotypes becomes evident. If we could follow the brain journey of a baby girl or a baby boy, we could see that right from the moment of birth, or even before, these brains may be set on different roads. Toys, clothes, books, parents, families, teachers, schools, universities, employers, social and cultural norms – and, of course, gender stereotypes – all can signpost different directions for different brains.

Resolving arguments about differences in the brain really matters. Understanding where such differences come from is important for everyone who has a brain and everyone who has a sex or a gender of some kind. Beliefs about sex differences (even if ill-founded) inform stereotypes, which commonly provide just two labels – girl or boy, female or male – which, in turn, historically carry with them huge amounts of “contents assured” information and save us having to judge each individual on their own merits or idiosyncrasies.

With input from exciting breakthroughs in neuroscience, the neat, binary distinctiveness of these labels is being challenged – we are coming to realise that nature is inextricably entangled with nurture. What used to be thought fixed and inevitable is being shown to be plastic and flexible; the powerful biology-changing effects of our physical and our social worlds are being revealed.

The 21st century is not just challenging the old answers – it is challenging the question itself.

An extract from The Gendered Brain by Gina Rippon, published by Vintage on 28 February for £20. To buy a copy for £15 go to guardianbookshop.com

Phroyd

[anniekoh]

Feminist Housing (Her)Stories for the Future. BERLIN, BAUHAUS and BEYOND deals with feminist approaches, discussions and practices in architecture, as well as spatial and urban planning, in which gender relations become visible as diverse asymmetrical ideas of living, relationships and professional life. Starting from the pioneers of architecture in the 1920s (focus of the first part in autumn 2019), the second part will discuss the impacts of the second women’s movement on architecture, living, housing and activism to the present in a contradictory globalized economy, presenting feminist and inclusive alternatives for the future. www.galeriefutura.de

This looks super interesting! Hopefully the events later in the year will be able to go on, including the fem*MAP BERLIN Mapping- and Research Seminar and the main symposium (alas I do not speak German)

A feminist perspective for Berlin today! Symposium 5.9.2020 // 16:00-21:00

The symposium brings together practitioners and theorists who address emancipatory projects in architecture, urban planning, and urban sociology in different ways. An interdisciplinary and cross-generational exchange should demonstrate possible answers to questions regarding a feminist and non-sexist city.

Bettina Barthel (Sozialwissenschaftlerin, TU Berlin): “There is No Outside.” – Gender Relations in Communal Living

Dr. Katarina Bonnevier (Architect SAR, founding member of the Architecture, Design and Art Collective MYCKET, Sweden): Touching Architecture or, “hand in glove”

Roberta Burghardt (Architektin, coop-disco): Architecture as Partner

Prof. Dr. Kerstin Dörhöfer (Architektin und Stadtplanerin): “Social Housing“ – Feminist Critique and Demands of the 70s and 80s

Nanni Grau (Architektin, Hütten und Paläste): Urban Biotopes – Spaces of Emancipatory Negotiation

Dr. Meike Schalk (Architektin, Professorin in Städtebau und urbaner Theorie, KTH School of Architecture Stockholm): Feminist (Working)Environments in Architecture – Historic, Contemporary, and Future Forms of Organization

[thedgblog-blog1]

Reflective Piece

Using Gibbs 1988 reflective model, I will express my thoughts, progress and concerns that I experienced during this project. In order to accumulate this blog, I had to think of a clear issue that I could develop throughout the blog, which I found quite stressful. Out of the many gender inequality topics, my initial thought was to pick a topic that I could relate to, hence why I chose ‘exploring cultural gender inequalities between countries’.  The reason why I wanted to look at gender inequalities in different countries was because I went to a non-western country previously and saw some of the differences amongst females and males. Having seen this, I wanted to research further and explore the reasonings behind it. One aspect that I found quite challenging was thinking of topics for the three blog entries. Initially, I wanted to do my first blog on education, then on forced/child marriage and the last one on female genital mutilation. I came to the realisation that as these three topics were strong, this blogs ultimate focus would be unclear thus why I chose brand new topics. As I knew what my main focus was (lack of choices between countries), I began to research academic journal articles, newspaper articles and documentaries.

Before the creation of the blog, I was feeling quite overwhelmed and anxious due to the fact I’ve never written a blog before. I didn’t know in which way the blog was meant to be written, eg academic style or not as formal. As this became a huge worry for me, I met up with one of the tutors and expressed my concern and she explained to me what the blog must have in it. Whilst creating the blog, I had mixed feelings, from feeling satisfied as I found a topic, to very distressed during the research process and the time frame that was given. After writing the blogs, I am feeling relieved that it is done however at the same time worried to see whether I have met each criteria. One thing that I enjoyed whilst writing the blog was reading articles and seeing different viewpoints relating to my topic. As I am a female and woman of colour, it was eye opening to see the lack of choices females have in different countries.

However, the research process was frustrating as there was a lack of journal articles/sources that focussed on gender differences that females experience in non-western countries.   It was difficult to find specific journal articles and took a long amount of time to find it as I had to dig deeper. Aside from this, I found writing the structure of the blog quite confusing, however doing my research by looking at various other vlogs, I hope that I tackled this difficulty. I think planning my time and effectively sectioning how I would write/prepare for each section went well. I created a plan, for example I focussed on the outline for a couple of days and then the first entry and so on. This allowed me to manage my time but was far more relaxing as I was able to use my initiative effectively. The reason why the research process didn’t go well during the start was because due to the lack of perspectives on this situation, it was hard to search. As this process was difficult, I had to read a numerous of articles and use the bits that related to my blog the most hence why quite a few references were used. Overall, I enjoyed the experience of making a blog as it was something different to what I have done before and definitely made me more confident.

References: 

 Berry, B. (2011) ‘Beauty Standards, Cross-Cultural.’ Encyclopedia of Women in Today’s World The Multimedia Encyclopedia of Women in Today’s World,pp. 140-144

  Bylanes, K., (2017). ‘Of Feminism and African Culture’. Nigerian Tribune.

  Carby, H. V., (1982). ‘White Women Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood’. pp. 110-128.

  Chulu, J. (2015). ‘A Feminist Perspective that Poverty is Gendered: Do Women Have Lesser Access to Resources in Comparison with Men?’. SSRN Electronic Journal.

  Feroz, R. (2019). ‘Gender inequality in Pakistan’. [online] Daily Balochistan Express. Available at: https://www.bexpress.com.pk/2017/07/httpwp-mep5f0gk-8ry/ [Accessed 24 Oct. 2019].

 Gibbs, G. (1988). ‘Learning by Doing: A Guide to Teaching and Learning Methods’. Oxford: Oxford Further Education Unit

Huber, J., (2015).’ On the origins of gender inequality’. Routledge,pp. 1-117.

  Jayachandran, S. (2015). ‘The Roots of Gender Inequality in Developing Countries’. Annual Review of Economics, 7(1), pp.63-88.

  Kinias, Z. and Kim, H. (2011). ‘Culture and gender inequality’. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 15(1), pp.89-103.

 Li, PH, E., Min, H. J. & Belk, R. W., (2008). ‘Skin lightening and beauty in four Asian cultures’. ACR Nortg American Advances, pp. 444-449.

 Biography. (2018) Malala Yousafzai, Activist. [online] [Accessed on 30thOctober 2019] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6by9NEhT9GM

.Nadia, C., Dlova, N. & Diedrichs, P. C., (2018). ‘Colourism:a global adolescent health concern’. Current opinion in pediatrics, 30(4), pp. 472-477.

 Okin, S. M., (1994). ‘Gender Inequality and Cultural Differences’. Political Theory, Vol.22(1), pp. 5-24.

 Ostby, G., Urdal, H. & Rudolfsen, I., (2016). ‘What Is Driving Gender Equality in Secondary Education?Evidence from 57 Developing Countries, (1970-2010)’. Education Research International, pp. 1-18.

 Paddison, L. (2019). Educating girls: the key to tackling global poverty. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/opportunity-international-roundtables/2017/oct/04/global-poverty-child-marriage-education-girls [Accessed 28 Oct. 2019].

Ridgeway, C. L., (2011). ‘Framed by gender: How gender inequality persists in the modern world’.  Oxford University Press., Volume Vol.16, pp. 181-187.

Senadza, B. (2012). ‘Education inequality in Ghana: gender and spatial dimensions’. Journal of Economic Studies, 39(6), pp.724-739.

Stromquist, N.P., 1990. ‘Gender inequality in education: Accounting for women’s subordination’. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 11(2), pp.137-153.

[theconstructionofwoman-blog]

CHORA

Excerpts from Woman, Chora, Dwelling by Elizabeth Grosz (1991) (from Space, Time and Perversion, The Politics of the Body) 

I wish to make some indirect and tenuous connections between architecture, deconstruction, and feminist theory, forge some rudimentary links, and point out some of the rather awkward points of dis-ease between these various concerns. My goal here will be to present an initial exploration of the cultural origins of notions of spatiality in the writings of the Classical period, most notably in Plato’sTimaeus, which invokes a mythological bridge between the intelligible and the sensible, mind and body, which he calls chora. 

Chora has been the object of considerable philosophical reflection, especially in contemporary French philosophy, having taken on the status of a master term in the writings of Julia Kristeva, in her understanding of the stabilization and destabilization of the speaking subject and, more recently in the writings of Jacques Derrida, particularly in his various theoretical exchanges with architecture, in his commentaries on and contributions to the work of the architects and architectural theorists Bernard Tschumi and Peter Eisenman. Chora, which Derrida insists must be understood without any definite article, has an acknowledged role at the very foundations of the concept of spatiality, place and placing: it signifies, at its most literal level, notions of ‘place,’ ‘location,’ ‘site,’ ‘region,’ ‘locale,’ ‘country’; but it also contains an irreducible, yet often overlooked connection with the function of femininity, being associated with a series of sexually-coded terms—‘mother,’ ‘nurse,’ ‘receptacle,’ and ‘imprint-bearer.’ Derrida is interested in chora in keeping with the larger and more general features of ‘deconstructive reading,’ that always seek out terms that disturb the logic, thelogos, of the text under examination, in order to show that it exceeds and cannot be contained by the logic, explicit framework, and overt intentions of the text. Derrida continually seeks out these terms—impossible to assimilate into the text’s logic—which are nonetheless necessary for it to function. They are thus ineliminable from the text’s operations and exert a disruptive force, an aporetic effect, on the apparent claims and concerns of the text in question. Chora thus follows a long line of deconstructively privileged terms in Derrida’s texts, from ‘writing,’ ‘trace,’ ‘pharmakon,’ ‘dissemination,’ ‘supplement,’ ‘parergon,’ in his earlier writings, to ‘cinders,’ ‘ghost,’ ‘remainder,’ ‘residue’ (among others) in his more recent texts. Each term designates and locates a point of indeterminacy or undecidability, a point at which the text’s own writing exceeds its explicit goals and logic, where the text turns in on itself and ties itself into a strategically positioned knot.

It will be my argument here, reading Plato and Derrida on chora, that the notion of chora serves to produce a founding concept of femininity whose connections with women and female corporeality have been severed, producing a disembodied femininity as the ground for the production of a (conceptual and social) universe. In outlining the unacknowledged and unremitting debt that the very notion of space, and the built environment that relies on its formulation, owes to what Plato characterizes as the ‘femininity’ of the chora (a characterization he both utilizes and refuses to commit himself to), I will develop some of the insights of Luce Irigaray in her critical analysis of the phallocentric foundations of Western philosophy. Irigaray’s reading of the history of philosophy as the erasure or covering over of women’s specificity has served to demonstrate that even where women and femininity are not explicitly mentioned or evoked in philosophical and architectural texts, nonetheless they, and concepts associated with them, serve as the unconscious, repressed or unspoken foundations of and guarantee for philosophical value. This essay may be understood as the confrontation of one strand of contemporary architectural theory, represented by Derrida’s relatively small and admittedly oblique contributions to architecture, and Irigaray’s sweeping analysis of the investment that all modes of knowledge have in perpetuating the secondary and subordinate social positions accorded to women and femininity. Irigaray contra Derrida in the domain of the dwelling: where and how to live, as whom, and with whom?

DWELLING: BETWEEN THE INTELLIGIBLE AND THE SENSIBLE

Timaeus represents Plato’s attempt to produce a basic explanation of the universe as we know it—a modest attempt on the part of a philosopher who believed that only philosophers were fit to rule the well-ordered polis—an explanation of the divine creation of the cosmos and the earth. In an age when myth is not yet definitively separated from science or philosophy, Plato presents an account of the genesis of the universe from divine and rational metaphysical principles. He sets up a series of binary oppositions that will mark the character of Western thought: the distinctions between being and becoming, the intelligible and the sensible, the ideal and the material, the divine and the mortal, which may all be regarded as versions of the distinction between the (perfect) world of reason and the (imperfect) material world.

This opposition between what is intelligible and unchanging, being (the world of Forms or Ideas), and what is sensible (which Plato describes as visible) and subject to change, becoming, seems relatively straightforward; but, it is difficult to use as an explanatory model, a ground of ontology, unless there is the possibility of some mediation, some mode of transition or passage from one to the other. Plato complicates and indeed problematizes and undoes this opposition by devising a third or intermediate category, whose function is to explain the passage from the perfect to the imperfect, from the Form to the reality: chora. This category, it is claimed, shares little in common with either term in the opposition. Plato does suggest at some points that it shares in the properties of both the Forms and material reality; yet at other points, he claims that it has nothing in common with either. Rather enigmatically and impossibly, he suggests that it has both no attributes of its own, and that it shares some of the attributes of the Forms:’...we shall not be wrong if we describe it as invisible and formless, all-embracing, possessed in a most puzzling way of intelligibility, yet very hard to grasp (Plato, 1977:70).

Somehow, in a ‘puzzling way,’ it participates in intelligibility yet is distinct from the intelligible; it is also distinct from the material world insofar as it is ‘invisible and formless,’ beyond the realm of the senses. It dazzles the logic of non-contradiction, it insinuates itself between the oppositional terms, in the impossible no-man’s land of the excluded middle. This is already enough to indicate to Derrida, no less than to Irigaray, that there is something odd at stake here, something that exceeds what Plato is able to legitimately argue using his own criteria.

Plato cannot specify any particular properties or qualities for chora: if one could attribute it any specificity it would immediately cease to have its status as intermediary or receptacle and would instead become an object (or quality or property). It is thus by definition impossible to characterize. It is the mother of all qualities without itself having any—except its capacity to take on, to nurture, to bring into existence any other kind of being. Being a kind of pure permeability, infinitely transformable, inherently open to the specificities of whatever concrete it brings into existence, chora can have no attributes, no features of its own. Steeped in paradox, its quality is to be quality-less, its defining characteristic that it lacks any defining feature. It functions primarily as the receptacle, the storage point, the locus of nurturance in the transition necessary for the emergence of matter, a kind of womb of material existence, the nurse of becoming, an incubator to ensure the transmission or rather the copying of Forms to produce matter that resembles them. Matter bears a likeness to the Forms. This relation (like the paternal bond between father and son) depends on the minimalized contributions of the receptacle/space/ mother in the genesis of becoming. Moreover, it becomes less clear as the text proceeds whether something like chora is necessary for the very genesis of the Forms themselves, i.e. whether chora can be conceived as a product or copy of the Forms, or contrarily, whether the Forms are themselves conditioned on chora:

“It can always be called the same because it never alters its characteristics. For it continues to receive all things, and never itself takes a permanent impress from any of the things that enter it, making it appear different at different times. And the things which pass in and out of it are copies of the eternal realities, whose form they take in a wonderful way that is hard to describe.” (Plato, 1977:69)

Chora can only be designated by its, by her, function: to hold, nurture, bring into the world. Not clearly an it or a she, chora has neither existence nor becoming. Notto procreate or produce—this is the function of the father, the creator, god, the Forms—but to nurse, to support, surround, protect, incubate, to sort, or engender the worldly offspring of the Forms. Its function is a neutral, traceless production that leaves no trace of its contributions, and thus allows the product to speak indirectly of its creator without need for acknowledging its incubator. Plato explicitly compares the Forms to the role of the male, and chora to the role of the female according to Greek collective fantasies: in procreation, the father contributes all the specific characteristics to the nameless, formless incubation provided by the mother:

“We may indeed use the metaphor of birth and compare the receptacle to the mother, the model to the father, and what they produce between them to their offspring; and we may notice that, if an imprint is to present a very complex appearance, the material on which it is to be stamped will not have been properly prepared unless it is devoid of all the characters which it is to receive. For if it were like any of the things that enter it, it would badly distort any impression of a contrary or entirely different nature when it receives it, as its own features would shine through.” (Plato, 1977:69)

Neither something nor yet nothing, chora is the condition for the genesis of the material world, the screen onto which is projected the image of the changeless Forms, the space onto which the Form’s duplicate or copy is cast, providing the point of entry, as it were, into material existence. The material object is not simply produced by the Form(s), but also resembles the original, a copy whose powers of verisimilitude depend upon the neutrality, the blandness, the lack of specific attributes of its ‘nursemaid.’

This peculiar receptacle that is chora functions to receive, to take in, to possess without in turn leaving any correlative impression. She takes in without holding onto: she is unable to possess for she has no self-possession, no self- identity. She supports all material existence with nothing to support her own. Though she brings being into becoming she has neither being nor the possibilities of becoming; both the mother of all things and yet without ontological status, she designates less a positivity than an abyss, a crease, perhaps a pure difference, between being and becoming, the space which produces their separation and thus enables their co-existence and interchange.

Plato slips into a designation of chora as space itself, the condition for the very existence of material objects. (It is no accident that Descartes takes the ability to occupy space as the singular defining characteristic of material objects.) Space is a third kind of ‘entity’ that is neither apprehended by the senses nor by reason alone, being understood only with difficulty, in terms of a ‘spurious reason,’ ‘in a kind of a dream,’ in a modality that today, following Kant, may be described as apperception. Plato describes a space

“which is eternal and indestructible, which provides a position for everything that comes to be, and which is apprehended without the senses by a sort of spurious reasoning and so is hard to believe in—we look at it indeed in a kind of dream and say that everything that exists must be somewhere and occupy some space, and that what is nowhere in heaven or earth is nothing at all.(Plato, 1977:71–2)

Chora, then, is the space in which place is made possible, the chasm for the passage of spaceless Forms into a spatialized reality, a dimensionless tunnel opening itself to spatialization, obliterating itself to make others possible and actual. It is the space that engenders without possessing, that nurtures without requirements of its own, that receives without giving, and that gives without receiving, a space that evades all characterizations including the disconcerting logic of identity, of hierarchy, of being, the regulation of order. It is no wonder that chora resembles the characteristics the Greeks, and all those who follow them, have long attributed to femininity, or rather, have expelled from their own masculine self-representations and accounts of being and knowing (and have thus de facto attributed to the feminine). Moreover, this femininity is not itself merely an abstract representation of generic features (softness, nurturance, etc.), but is derived from the attributes culturally bestowed on women themselves, and in this case, particularly the biological function of gestation. While chora cannot be directly identified with the womb—to do so would be to naïvely pin it down to something specific, convert it into an object rather than as the condition of existence of objects—nonetheless, it does seem to borrow many of the paradoxical attributes of pregnancy and maternity.

Bild: Die Hure Babylon in der Ottheinrich-Bibel (um 1530–1532)

[brakerbreaker]

Honors Research Seminar- Blog Post #3

As I have started my research process and have delved into my reading material, I started to notice a pattern which has made me slightly alter my original topic. I plan on continuing to read the same short story authors. I just want to change my focus a bit. My original topic was focused on analyzing the differences between men and women authors’ work and philosophies on writing. I was hoping to prove that there was a difference which was in my mind caused by the sexism that women authors faced in the literary and publishing worlds. I found that that was an enormous topic. I also found that many authors have similarities and differences and it is impossible to pin them down to whether they experienced sexism or not. I noticed that many women authors pay homage to the places that they are from. Their short stories are influenced by the landscapes they wrote from. My new focus is going to be on the relationship between women short story authors and the space they wrote from, spatiality and the female author.

This past weekend I focused almost exclusively on Flannery O’Connor. I read her one of her most famous pieces “A Good Man is Hard to Find”. It was interesting because it was one of the stories that I knew what happened at the end, but it still sucked me in. The main character is “the grandmother”. I have been referred to this character a number of times because she is a character who does bad things, but the reader is still interested in and wants to continue to read a story focused on them. I then found a pdf version of some prose that O’Connor wrote about how to learn to write. I believe it was taken from a speech that she gave to a college because she addressed people and gave advice. I found it very amusing that the same biting sharpness that O’Connor addressed the students with was in her character of the grandmother.

I found it very difficult to find any feminist theory or literary criticism about O’Connor’s work on our library database. I went searching for some of the other authors that were suggested to me last week and couldn’t find several of them in our database too. I had much better results when I started looking up biographies of authors. I found a really good article about how the South influenced different short stories, “A Peculiarly Southern Form of Ugliness: Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O’Connor”. It turns out that characters like the grandmother were based off of Southern ideals for women and their behavior. This is really interesting to me and it was then that I realized that many different short stories that I have been reading by women have strong foundations in places where the author is from or is connected with. Another example is Annie Proulx whose has a collection of stories called Close Range which are all set in Wyoming. For this next week, I am planning on researching more theory about geography and spatiality along with continuing to read many short stories by women authors.

[intersectionedge-blog]

objectification and silence

Due to the acts of objectification I’ve resigned from many of my dreams. Ok, maybe not resigned, but I’ve hidden them, silenced which is a „step out” in the eyes of „social”,  and even not - stepping out in this case is nonperceptible, it’s just something which existed before (which existence becomes veiled, not-remembered) and now isn’t there. Many of these acts have never seemed gender-based, only the mechanism was confusingly similar. So, since I’ve discovered that I used to embrace sometimes the others’ objectification, reification of my own passions and interests, I’ve subsequently noticed that it was not the lack of my dedication or an internal „error” of what I’ve considered as such, but the act of object-making of some very intense and complex spheres of my life which were leading me to silence them and hide. Once I’ve taken the objectified perception of these from the others, a perception which is demeaning, they started to seem unattainable, cause that abstract notion of what I think and what I do had nothing to do with its complexity I’ve had felt so far. Anyway, the act of silencing in the face of objectification is one of the most spread aspects of gender inequality (or inequity), well studied within the feminist theory (but maybe not well analyzed). Right now I’m starting to think that if we really need to embrace elements of patriarchal common-sense, we should more trace not within this which is easily caught upon the gender-based structures of disapproval, depreciation, demeaningness and - inequality (or inequity). It wouldn’t be a real hegemony indeed if its particular focal points are so easy to notice. So, as many women along history have silenced their voices (as an act of presupposed agency in the face of depreciating social surrounding) or their voices have been silenced in the full variety of ways (just think about an example, or even an exemplum of suicider in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s „Can subaltern speak?” essay). I've done the same many times, still underlining the mistake of such action and trying not to get hypnotized by the poetics of the agency of silence or martyrology of being silenced. Penelope, weaving and weaving, and weaving until her husband Odysseus won’t come back - her life being transformed into constant passive present after his departure, the life which can’t come into an active being, cannot reach the past, so also the future, which are the basic formats of having a sense of one’s own identity. Her life can „cling to life” only in the presence of the man who has made her his. Or, for example, the act of hiding one’s nominal and possible to situate identity in the aim of reaching  and expressing one’s identity in the sphere where accompanied by this proper nominal one it was impossible to enter - I am thinking here about many women writers and painters who were publishing under the masculine name. Many, many more examples well exposed today, but let’s come back to fragments of my own story. When we broke up with my boyfriend, my life came upon the passivity and I felt the lack of some part of myself which I used to believe I have had before we’ve met. And it’s anything I’ve decided, what’s more - even I didn’t want it since the very beginning of our relationship - I’ve been visualizing ourselves as two individuals making something together, and panicky opposed any supposed act of his bad treatment of me. Even though, the social rule was making its job above us. And I knew that he won’t experience the same sense of lack I did, which was making me even more depressed and understating my yet low sense of self-esteem. What my brain was suggesting me to do - and still is - was to cease my possible physical presence within spatial spheres in our city and among our friends which have both became common, and I know it will be a hard struggle not to do so. Cause it’s a mistake. But there were a few people, amongst which - my mum, who had advised me to „step out” „for my own own peace of mind” and self-realization without obstacles. And for the same very reasons, I won’t do this.   The small things I am trying to unveil and analyze through my own experiences lately, start to work for my image as „tilting at windmills” and this is another process of silencing ongoing. But I’m not scared of it, it’s just not worthy of a thrill. Because, once I talk about it to some other people, sometimes I hear „I’ve had a sensation like you’ve been writing about me” or „thank you, have nothing more to add”. These are not the only responses I get - I talk about my experiences to men, too, since many of them are my close friends. We even don’t imagine how many „obvious” experiences have been isolated thanks to support-based common-experiences-exchange within many women’s (family, friends) and also feminist circles. So many of them don’t even acknowledge possible man’s presence within. And yet there are so many men who really want to hear and share their opinion even if they’re not feminists. They are simply people who „want to understand”, „want to know more”. Until we won’t start speaking without a filtrating view, men will think that these experiences are only exceptions linked to particular-kind-of-men and doing so, they will never consider themselves as possible bearers of this heritage. And we are, we all are. We talk a lot about a sexist hate-speech, I’d suppose that we are not of the same grade familiar with discussing the approval-like sexist speech. And we make a mistake by our temptations to ban some kind of expressions. This language set is rooted within deeper mental structures. Focusing on the outer layer is undoubtedly important, but each time we notice that we should shift on what’s below. And some sadly experienced women, won’t gain anything by hating man, by finding a mental shelter saying that men are just oppressive, that men think with balls etc. - that way we only enact the same discursive patriarchal structure inside which it is placed a notion that women are just more quiet, and think with their hearts. It’s awful. As a woman, I bear the capacity of feeling well by creating in silence, by closing my thoughts in exclusive circles, by feeling even great working „from below” or „close-enough-to” without the aim to be in the center. Please do notice that I’m not saying about „doing so”, but about „feeling good within”, the same as I’m not assuming that this feeling isn’t also a part of some men’s lives.  And since I am a performer and I feel more comfortable by performing in the center these two feelings were always fighting with each other in some focal points in my past life until today, and for sure they will. So, turning back to what I have marked out in the title of this reflection, my dedication to dance world (in many different forms) has been strongly objectified by reducing the whole dense complexity of my feelings for dancing to simply „an ambition” which made me get hooked. By reducing it into an ambition I was gaining sometimes a subliminal message - „chill girl, don’t be so ambitious, so zealous, it’s   o n l y   your passion, or maybe even - a hobby”, a domesticated activity. „Only” is an illusive and an excellent tool of the objectification act. What has happened - I made myself quit dancing, but dancing didn’t quit me. I started to dance in darkness, in empty spaces, when there was nobody or everybody was asleep, like I didn’t want to get caught on this denuding act, which appeared almost like a tightlipped romance. And what’s more, I even found a beauty of incredible poetics which seemed to flourish from within that conspiration-like silence, strange but not an exceptional mixture of grief and pride! But I did get caught once, on my own wish. We were at my friend's house, having rest during the middle of winter. My two close friends were lying down on the couch. I turned on some music, and, accidentally, started to dance. After all, when I was lying down on the pavement still stunned of what has just happened when the last pulsations of a past event were resonating through my body, a friend of mine looked at me and said: „like... I don’t understand. Really.” and this „not-understanding” referred to the hung above question why this isn’t a part of my today’s living. It is, indeed, but a hidden part. I am still trying to trace why is it so easy sometimes to lose control while the objectification act is ongoing. Losing control means - to embrace it, even partially, but a partial embrace of passiveness always tends to totalization. This way, you leave the part of yourself behind and maybe this is what Sartre meant - „... it is not that I perceive myself losing my freedom in order to become a thing, but my nature is - over there, outside my lived freedom - as a given attribute of this being which I am for the Other”, while writing on voyeur’s shame. Only by living within lived freedom we are able to put our pieces together. It is never possible in its totality. But by acknowledging the impact of the shameful objectification, we are able to keep a compensation, which is never not fully embraced by the other’s notion what-like we are. Your space of experiencing, once objectified, becomes limited, call it a box (like today’s coaching „priests”), the square (like Beatniks), or whatever else you like. But an objectification’s goal is to close you inside an object, on the outside of which - there is only silence.