Anneli Xie
Prof. Alice Friedman
ARTH 321: Gender, Sexuality, and the Design of Houses
2019/02/26
Prof. Alice Friedman
ARTH 321: Gender, Sexuality, and the Design of Houses
2019/02/26
Reading response:
Embodied and Other Spaces: Gender,
Intersectionality, Sexuality, Trans*
If bodies are like houses and houses like bodies, what does it mean to disentangle them?
In his essay, “Unbuilding Gender,” this is a question that Jack Halberstam attempts to answer, pointing the question specifically at the transgender body and the building/unbuilding of the gender-coded body. Explaining first the gendered bodies of houses, such as that “the female body has become so entangled with ideas of nature, and of domestic architecture as well, that we perhaps cannot imagine femininity otherwise,” (3) and discussing the escape of women from domestic space under second-wave feminism (and concurrently, the moving-back-in that was occurring amongst men,) Halberstam paints a historically binary language for understanding architecture. Going against that, he states that gender norms that once had “intuitive connections – between the home and the maternal body, or the skyscraper or the gun and the male body, or the city or the ship and femaleness,” are now becoming discomposed. (4) Further, Halberstam states that “if patriarchal systems of domination are understood as architectural, then queer/trans*/feminist activist responses can be received as anarchitectural.” Combining anarchy and architecture, anarchitectural processes are very critical of attitudes resistant to change and are instead related to the unbuilding, deconstructing, dismantling of the house – insisting on “what is not there, what has been removed, what is lacking,” – in order to unmake certain binary logics of the body.
In Halberstam’s discussion, Gordon Matta-Clark’s Splitting (1974) remains in the spotlight. Cutting the house – and thus dismantling its foundation – became evocative of reassembling the body; opening it up, deconstructing the relationship between external/internal, and removing an “essential” part (or a part that inevitably changes the core/essence/inherent structure) in order to emphasize change; you are no longer looking at the house, you are looking at the cut, the void, the removed. (6) Halberstam relates Splitting (1974) to the trans body, “capable of transcending its morphology, tilts back on its axis and stands in the space of its own unbuilt femininity.” (7)
Similar connections between bodies and houses can be found in Jessica Ellen Sewell’s essay “Power, Sex, and Furniture: Masculinity and the Bachelor Pad in 1950s-60s America,” in which Sewell discusses the Playboy bachelor pads as existing and inherent to what she calls the “crisis of masculinity” in the late 1950s. (1) Her essay entangles the idea of bachelor pads as the macho masculine with the idea of it “danc[ing] with the specter of queerness” (1) through lenses of narcissism and self-indulgence. With the idea of men moving back into domestic spaces as Halberstam also wrote about, Sewell emphasize that “outward reflection of […] inner self,” an escape of the conformity of corporate America and women. (2) Sewell also brings up the dilemma – the crisis of man – that in order to reach full maturity within masculinity, one had to marry and be the breadwinner of the family. Choosing bachelorhood thus might have served as a strong indicator of queerness during the time. (4) However, Sewell discusses the adaption of the bachelor pads to this notion, by comparing the bachelor pad to a machine for heterosexual seduction. (8) Straight masculinity is discussed in domestic design, and traces of traditional modes of masculine design, such as the men’s club and the hunting lodge, are seen only in traces: leather, dark colors, and rich textures. (5) Interestingly enough, however, Sewell brings into notion that “straight masculinity is also performed through absences,” (such as the absence of patterned fabrics, pleats, ruffles) (6) very much relating back to Halberstam and Matta-Clark's notion of anarchitecture – focusing on the void, the deconstructed, the nothing. Similarly, the absence of women is seen through the embracement of technology and liquor. Sewell explains that bachelor’s often employ gadgets to do stuff for him, such as cooking (7) and seducing (8), and thus becoming a fantasy of total control (as women might, for heterosexual men, too often be seen). This motif of heterosexual seduction masks the bachelor pad from its queerness, but as a space of consumption and narcissism, it is also sort of a queer space. However, as Sewell puts it: “its queerness consists not necessarily in its homosexual potential, […] but rather in its challenge to dominant narratives of reproductive breadwinner masculinity.”
References
Sanders, J et al. Stalled. https://www.stalled.online/
Sewell, J. “Power, Sex and Furniture: Masculinity and the Bachelor Pad in 1950s-60s America.” Unpublished. December 2011.