...probably won't be ready until the weekend. Both groups did an excellent job and the contest is very close. I want to scan some of the visuals before I make a final decision so that I can announce it on the blog.
The projects raised a lot of interesting questions about feminism and space. The most obvious is what it means to intend to create a feminist space and how we can know the outcomes. Both groups, in various parts of the project, adopted the position that gender neutrality was a way of achieving equality. That is, if spaces are designed without producing barriers that preclude certain people from inhabiting them, this is an optical outcome. We'll learn more about this idea in a few weeks when we talk about the relationship between disability access and other kinds of access.
Another question that both groups grappled with was how to best incorporate choice without producing trade-offs or confrontations between the interests of different groups. The best example of this is strategies for making residential hall spaces safer and more friendly towards trans students. One group approached the issue by designating spaces in which gender does not determine whether students can share a bedroom or bathroom. The other group indicated that trans students would be mentioned on the dorm application, indicating to potential residents that their participation in a "feminist themed dorm" necessitates their willingness to share even intimate bathroom spaces with others (but that they would be asked consent before being assigned a roommate).
These approaches reveal something about ideology and how spaces work to protect it. Maximizing choice is a way of protecting the inclusion of trans students (and others, I'm just using this as an example here) who might otherwise be forced to live in a hostile environment. Students choosing not to live in the spaces designated as open to gender diversity need not apply. Feminists have long debated the issue of ideological gate-keeping, or the idea that we can designate a metaphorical space for ideology and protect it from intrusion. Gate-keeping can be problematic in some instances because it attempts to establish authenticity, but it can also be useful when it is necessary to delineate one way of thinking from another for the purpose of critiquing dominant structures.
The approaches the students took to their projects showed how complicated the issue of boundary-drawing is in relation to exclusion. In some way, drawing boundaries is inevitable; it then becomes a question of what the boundaries protect and what they exclude. Even more complicated is the idea that design processes can be political and, in this case, feminist.
Is it possible to create a space of openness to difference without closing it off from an outside world that potentially challenges or poses a threat to it? Perhaps this is an issue of scale--drawing boundaries in a localized context could create the conditions necessary to remove barriers on a societal level. Within both groups' building designs, hallways, stairs, and other circulation paths were set up to create flows between the private living areas and the shared semi-public spaces, such as laundry and study rooms. The intention of these layouts is to encourage people, within the confined space of the residential hall, to cross spatial and metaphorical boundaries and inhabit different spaces. Does this strategy scale up to the level of the campus, the city, the region, and the world? Will the development of feminist consciousness in a single space prepare students for taking on more serious change on these other scales?
These are difficult questions to answer, but the fact that the projects raised them reveals a lot about their complexity, as well as the level of detail that went into both of them.
Stay tuned for some visuals, more detailed project descriptions, and the final competition winner!
No comments:
Post a Comment