Subject: Re: Architecture and Feminism

From: [email-masked] (r kamins)
Date: 23 Mar 1995 00:03:10 -0800

daphne spain is the author of the book "gendered spaces".

also i think there was something by catherine ingrahm on this as well.

"architecture" magazine had a practice oriented "women's issue" a 
couple of years ago.

but there is a surprising amount of stuff on this topic around.
stanley tigerman, for one, found fertile ground, so to speak, on the topic
of the "lack" and the "irreparable wound", among other things in an
architectural context.

the criticism that has to be made of this topic, like most graduate school
indulgences, is that it has very little to do with architecture and even
less to do with getting anything built than with self-congratulatory
posturing.  the most adept minds of the profession learn how to do anything
but conceive and create space, and in the end the whole profession gets
marginalized.  

have fun!

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From: [email-masked] (SCRINIA)
Date: 6 Apr 1995 07:49:04 -0400

Your deadline was April 6 - I know this is a bit late, but you might
try...
  Jacqueline Rose's article "Sexuality & Vision: Some Questions" in Vision
and      Visuality (Bay Press)
  Briony Fer's article "What's in a Line?  Gender & Modernity" in The
Oxford      Art Journal (13 no. 1 (1990))
  Elizabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the
aesthetic      (New York, Routledge), 1992.
  Janet Beitzer, Ventriloquized Bodies; Narratives of Hysteria in
Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, Cornell University Press) 1994.

Most of this stuff is admittedly a bit tangential to the question of
architecture.  That is probably as it should be.  Architecture as a formal
discourse is always repressing something intresting. We wouldn't want it
spoon fed after all...
You might also try Lacan's "Feminine Sexuality" for a linguistic angle. 
Quite a bit of linguistic theory in architectural circles lately.
   -Fritz Johnsn