In architecture, feminist discourse has long hovered on the margins of a male-dominated discipline that has often seemed unwilling to interrogate the assumptions underlying its universalist ideas (the ungendered user, the human-scale space, the context-free structure). But architecture has stakes in feminist discourse from the organization of a house to the design of a city. 

Early feminism was born in strictly ordered spaces that coded and confined ideas of the feminine. Feminist spatialities are also about the body, politic, and the body, public. They are about definitions and expressions of femaleness and femininity as states of being. What does it mean to be feminine, and does it mean something different in public than it does in private? How does public space enable or guard against visibility and vulnerability? Feminism, like the city, is not a monolith, it is constructed of a plurality of experiences and agendas. From post to radical, at the contested intersections of race, class and an ever widening conception of the possibilities of gendered experience.

In architecture, feminist discourse has long hovered on the margins of a male-dominated discipline that has often seemed unwilling to interrogate the assumptions underlying its universalist ideas (the ungendered user, the human-scale space, the context-free structure). But architecture has stakes in feminist discourse from the organization of a house to the design of a city.

Early feminism was born in strictly ordered spaces that coded and confined ideas of the feminine. Feminist spatialities are also about the body, politic, and the body, public. They are about definitions and expressions of femaleness and femininity as states of being. What does it mean to be feminine, and does it mean something different in public than it does in private? How does public space enable or guard against visibility and vulnerability? Feminism, like the city, is not a monolith, it is constructed of a plurality of experiences and agendas. From post to radical, at the contested intersections of race, class and an ever widening conception of the possibilities of gendered experience.