The following is the text of a talk delivered on Gender night at Summer School 2012, which took place in August (of 2012, obviously) at the Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library in Berkeley, CA.
Trying to write a talk on the
feminist city, an idea that I seem perpetually to be thinking and talking about
even as I can’t fully tell you what it is, has pretty much made me insane. I
think this might have to do with the fact that if I really think about it, it’s
not really a talk, but rather a long book called something like “The Feminist
City and How to Get There,” which I’m at present highly unequipped to write.
What would be in that book? What would its table of contents look like? I know
there’d be something on the history of feminist designs for the built
environment of cities, which is a book that actually does exist, written by
Dolores Hayden under the title “The Grand Domestic Revolution.” There’d be a
catalog of feminist tactics for and in public space, which would include
something on collective responses to street harassment and sexual violence,
something about the Fifth Street Women’s building occupation in 1971 (which
lasted two weeks), something about the suggestion, which came from Golda Mier
of all people, that instead of instituting a curfew for women to prevent them
from being raped, that since men were the perpetrators of the rapes, perhaps
it’s men that needed to have a curfew. There’d be a lot of other sections in
there, but I suppose the “chapter” I want to write right now is the one on the
discourse on the public and private spheres, the gendering of those spheres,
and the importance and difficulty of breaking down that constructed divide. Everything
I’m saying feels tentative—and that’s exciting. It also freaks me out. But with
all that said I’m just going to mildly bold and embrace the book title “The
Feminist City and How to Get There” and pretend that this talk is part of it,
and proceed to write as much as I can on my chosen topic with knowledge so that
what I’m sure will be a woefully inadequate stand-in for that book will still go
someplace useful in the discussions we might have tonight. So with that in mind
I want to talk a little bit on what a feminist city might be like, but I want
also to devote more space to thinking about what kinds of changes in our
sociospatial practices would help us actual get there. In theory I’m also going
to talk about parenting, and while I’m not sure if I’m going to have the space
and time to explicitly broach that topic, I will say that my status as a
stepparent has everything to do with what I’m talking about tonight, for
reasons that’ll hopefully be clear.
Anyway,
by way of a little background, my question of what a feminist city might be
like comes directly, verbatim almost, from a 1980 essay, also by Dolores Hayden,
whose title asks the question “What Would a Non-Sexist City Be Like?” One can
debate the differences in the idea of the “non-sexist city” versus the
“feminist city,” but let’s not right now. In any case, Hayden’s essay is one
that that I wish would get the revised-and-expanded treatment every year or so,
and inevitably it reads a little dated in places, but still the proliferation
of writing that riffs off her title suggests that she laid some pretty
important groundwork that people are still working off of—I recently came
across “What Would a Non-Heterosexist City Be Like?”, for example. I don’t want
to take too much time recounting the details of Hayden’s argument here, but her
subtitle “Speculations on Housing, Urban Design, and Human Work” should provide
a pretty good clue for where she goes. Hayden, being a geographer and urban
planning historian, critiques the ways in which the built environment has been
constructed with a certain gender and economic order in mind. The ways she
points out will come as no surprise to most people in this room: she discusses
the lack of flexible housing options, the ways that the transportation system
disproportionately hinders female wage laborers, the expensive commercial
solutions that have arisen in the absence of widespread childcare, the ways in which
dwelling design hinders more egalitarian divisions of household and other
caregiving labor, the ways in which sprawl and zoning laws have been used to
shore up a regressive gender order. Running through this critique, and tying it
together, is the observation that there exists a dominant discourse on how
space is divided, both socially and in the built sense, into public and private
spheres and that, as this discourse would have it, public and private are
gendered male and female, respectively. A hard divide is placed between these
spheres, between who belongs in each realm and what activities and ways of
being are appropriate to either of them. Queer and trans folk, of course, are quite
absent from the view of that discourse.
That
we the people must constantly live with, butt up against, and grapple with this
discourse of the spheres isn’t a new concept; really, it’s fundamental to a
great deal of feminist analysis. And it’s no surprise that, given Hayden’s
place in the urban planning field, the focus of her suggestions of how to
effect change center around alterations of the built environment. These ideas,
which draw from history, are, I must say, really interesting, taking in
variations on co-housing and placement of services like prepared meals and childcare
in proximity to housing (as well as de-privatizing the providing of those
services). Hayden also ponders the kind of community organizing needed to make
these kinds of projects happen. All of this feels particularly trenchant with
Occupy sitting just under the surface of my mind at all times, and a big part
of me wishes that this talk was actually about interventions in the built
environment, because brainstorming with you all about practical designs for
feminist utopias, and then, I don’t know, working together to try to get make
them happen, and probably failing, but maybe doing something important in the
process either way—well, that would just be cool. Something for next year
maybe. Still, while this focus on the built environment is absolutely vital to
thinking about social change, the fact is that the organization of space is not
the sole, rigid determinant of how we live. There are, to make a bit of an
understatement, some social patterns that affect us as well. Built space and
social practice reshape each other in an ongoing process, which I suppose if we
want to be fancy about it we could call a sociospatial dialectic. Therefore, if
the goal, and I think it’s a good one, is to dissolve this divide between the
so-called private and public spheres, a strategy of simultaneously altering the
built environment and social practice seems in order. Now, picking apart the
dynamics of that dialectic is another one of those crazymaking processes
that’ll have to wait for that book I probably won’t be able to write, but I do
want to pause and think about the way our gendered social practices,
particularly those centered around speech but more generally as well, are
affected by the discourses on space we have to engage with from day to day. I
think also that it pertains to what we’re doing here tonight, and to the idea
of a feminist city as well.
At
risk of belaboring a point that might be obvious to everyone, I want to make
really clear what I mean when I'm talking about the relationship between
gender, space, and forms of speech. Bear with me on this. When I’m talking
about the gendering of space and speech, I'm obviously not saying that the
association between women and private space means that a woman's place is in
the home, etc., nor am I doing some "men are from Mars, women are from
Venus" type of shit where women inherently talk in certain ways and men
inherently talk in others and thus it shall forever be, so saith the lord God.
Rather, to expand on what I wrote earlier, I'm saying that there's a discourse
that associates women with certain spaces (the household, the private sphere) and,
to say something I haven’t said yet, associates women with certain kinds of
speech (the kind using more lateral thinking, based in dialogue, more tentative,
embracing complexity and ambiguity or what some misguided people would call being
wishy-washy). Men, in turn, are associated with different spaces (the public
sphere, the political sphere) and other kinds of speech (direct, declarative,
forceful, the kind of thing you see politicians do all the time). The word
“associates” is key here—in real life, anyone of any gender is capable of any
mode of speech. Now, to complete the triangle in both cases, certain spaces are
therefore associated with certain forms of speech--and from that you get
conceptions of the spaces where each gender “belongs,” what kinds of subject
matter are appropriate to each space, and in turn, the kind of speech that is
appropriate for use in each space. Thus, for example, there's the idea that
public space is the realm of men, where they talk about politics using direct,
logical argumentation free from the pulls of emotion blah blah blah.
Obviously,
this isn't the only discourse on space in play, and plenty of
counter-discourses, wielded by actual people, have chipped away at the rigid gendering
of various spaces. Thus we have in this era, for example, a more widespread
acceptance of the appropriateness of women speaking in the political sphere,
and certain subject matter previously considered the purview of the private
realm has been brought into public discussion. The classic example here is, I
think, intimate partner violence, which as we know was for a long time
considered entirely a private matter, something inappropriate for discussion in
the political realm. Now, there's still plenty of suppression of discussion of
intimate partner violence that goes on, but it is at least nominally on the
agenda for public discussion.
Still,
all that having been said, there are nonetheless a lot of topics out there,
and, in connection to that, a lot of kinds of speech out there, that are deemed
by this dominant discourse as inappropriate for the public, political sphere. What
kind of topics and speech am I talking about? Well, there’s kind of an endless
list, but picture addressing the US Congress or similar group on, like, the
body politics of motherhood or giving a speech on anything that doesn’t come to
an unambiguous, well-ordered conclusion and you’ll start to get at what I’m
talking about. What’s unnerving is that even as we may see ourselves as setting
up spheres of opposition to the dominant political public sphere (if such a
thing actually exists anymore), we’re not immune to placing value on kinds of
speech based on which sphere they’re associated with, nor are we immune to
ranking the importance of subject matter based on these same sphere-based
criteria. Like, instead of addressing the US Congress, now picture a GA, and
picture one person speaking in an inspiring, well-argued, militant fashion
about something or other, and then picture another person delivering a thoughtful
yet ambivalent and torn exposition on that same something or other. Who gets
the bigger cheer? The point is not that one kind of speech is better than
another, but rather that that second speech would feel like a breach to many
people’s sense of public sphere aesthetics, and the second speaker knowing that
might have the effect of dissuading them from speaking, and therefore of suppressing
an important topic or voice. And even if we ourselves are able to get past the
shame or embarrassment that might be involved in discussing these supposedly private
matters, or talking about anything in a way that uses modes of speech or
expresses emotions that are perceived as being best kept private, all
this still can run the risk of invalidating us in the eyes of the people
we're trying to converse with. There are, then, topics and ways of
communicating that are associated in this dominant discourse with the private
realm, the female-gendered realm, and thus when those things are brought into
the so-called public realm, they run great risk of being seen as lesser,
debased, secondary to what’s “important.” And it doesn’t take much to reproduce
this—just a historical norm and a few fervent, possibly unaware enforcers of it.
It
seems to me, then, that if we want to work towards the feminist city, work
towards dissolving some of this divide between public and private spheres, that
in addition to the kinds of modifications to the built environment that Hayden
and others suggest, alterations of this and other sociospatial practices need
to also enter the mix. Okay, so that’s what I’ve been getting at this whole
time, but the point is that where this kind of work starts, among other spaces,
is in giving a good hard look to settings such as the one we’re in now. What
are our norms of interaction? What kinds of speech feel acceptable here, and
what kinds don’t? What kind of political topics or opinions would you be afraid
of bringing up in this space, for fear of being shamed by those around you,
being taken less seriously, being seen as less cool? And, more to the point,
how can we work to alter the norms of these spaces so that that gendered
public/private divide applies less and less? Part of that seems to involve
trying to rethink this kind of summer school itself, to dissolve its identity
as something that belongs to the public realm, because just as there are topics
or ways of speech that the norms of this kind of space might preclude, the
space itself, by virtue of location, time of events, aura, etc., precludes the
participation of many people. And I suppose that that’s where I could start to
talk explicitly about parenting, among other things, but won’t given time
constraints. Now, this talk just kind of ends, but ultimately it seems like
these are the sorts of questions that need to be tackled when thinking about how
to model what a feminist city would be like and how to organize to make it at
least a tiny bit more of a reality.
