Gendered Space

Definition

Gendered space names the claim that space and gender are linked ordering systems: "If space is an ordering principle, so, of course, is gender. These principles are often also linked, though not always in the same way." Shirley Ardener's chapter demonstrates the linkage at three scales. (1) Direction: for the Irish, south is associated with women (and is black — "the sphere of music, slaves, witches and the dead"); "the Chinese see the south as male and the north as female"; among the Atoni, cardinal directions are coloured and ranked (south red with rulers, east white with warriors, west black with the village headman). (2) Position: hierarchies are realized by the placement of bodies — the ordering monks ← lay-men ← nuns ← lay-women redistributes when the space is primarily religious rather than gendered. (3) Mobility: "The environment imposes certain restraints on our mobility, and, in turn, our perceptions of space are shaped by our own capacity to move about" — the restraint on movement is how gendered ordering is felt. Gender may be the dominant determinant in some spaces and "irrelevant, or insignificant" in others; age, class and other features "add further complexities in situations of multiple dimensions." Linda McDowell's review of the gender division of urban space is cited as the key survey of the urban register.

This page holds the general anthropological concept; the interior-design-specific development is gender-and-the-interior.

Soulillou adds the concept's ornamental register: gendered space is also adorned space. His "ground plan" of order gives the linkage a fourth mechanism — Adornment: "In traditional societies ornament is revealed according to this plan: from left to right, without hierarchy, ornaments for men, ornaments for women; from upper to lower, with hierarchy, ornaments for the prince, the nobles, free men in general, and the slaves" (p. 316) — direction and hierarchy encoded in who wears what, with "sexuality and power… the forces which sustain the ground plan" (p. 315). The mechanism's modern survival is asymmetrical: the class-dress axis dissolved with the aristocracy, but "the man-woman opposition did not experience fundamental changes (the sartorial image of nineteenth-century man seems, on the contrary, to go one better in the abandonment of showy ornamentation)" (p. 319) — the gendered ordering outlasting the order it served. See ornamental-ground-plan.

Key Thinkers

• Shirley Ardener — space and gender as mutually reinforcing ordering principles, cross-culturally demonstrated (Women and Space, 1993).
• Robert Hertz — "The Pre-eminence of the Right Hand" (1909): the right/left opposition as the body-level template (right = male, sacred, inside, life; left = female, profane, outside, death); not yet paged (see log).
• Pierre Bourdieu — the classification schemes dividing the world by male/female, east/west, top/bottom, right/left (quoted p. 19).
• Linda McDowell — "Towards an Understanding of the Gender Division of Urban Space" (1983), the cited review of the urban material; not yet paged (see log).
• Renée Hirschon — interior/exterior space in an urban Greek locality as a lived gendered opposition; not yet paged (see log).
• Lee Edelman — the queer-theoretical register: sex-segregated space as the apparatus that produces, not merely reflects, gender — the men's room as "a social technology" that designs heterosexual masculinity, policing "the circuitry of visual relations" among men (2006). See mens-room.

Related Concepts

• Gender and the Interior — the interior-discipline development: the identification of women with the domestic and the decorative as discourse of power.
• Separate Spheres — the nineteenth-century institutional form: domestic interior feminine, public interior masculine.
• Mutedness — the positional mechanism by which gendered space distributes voice and dominance.
• Partition of Space — the general ordering system of which gendering is one instance.
• Dual Symbolic Classification — the symbolic apparatus (right/left, inside/outside) that codes space as gendered.
• Domestic Feminism — the historical strategy that claimed gendered space's domestic pole as a jurisdiction: governance through the gendered ordering.
• Time-Geography — capability and authority constraints on movement: the formal study of the mobility restraints Ardener describes.
• The Men's Room — gendered space's everyday public apparatus: the sex-segregated washroom as the built mechanism through which gender order is enforced on (and by) men.
• Masculinity — the gendered order from the other side: the unmarked term's own spaces, codes and policing.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The Partition of Space (Ardener 2006) — the ordering-principle thesis and coloured/gendered directions (p. 18); Hertz's right/left (p. 19); mobility restraints (p. 16); McDowell and Hirschon references (pp. 19, 20–21).
• A Christian House (Beecher & Stowe 1869/2006) — the gendered space's historical self-design: the domestic interior as the woman's governed jurisdiction ("female-led domestic government, rather than domestic slavery," editors, p. 43), with labor deliberately distributed across gendered lines — "outdoor labor for all," "women and children labor out of doors as well as within" in the free-labor South (p. 44), each family member's exercise in "the pure air" (p. 44). The Beecher house shows gendered ordering being designed rather than merely observed: the plan as the instrument of a gender's claim to govern its assigned space. See domestic-feminism, separate-spheres.
• The waiting room (Hedges 2018) — the institutional-transit register: the ladies' waiting room of the Auckland Railway Station as gendered space in the public building — "Dark paneled walls, ornate windows, and a clock reveal a transitory space in a transitory building for women who wait. The name of the room memorializes movement, speed, and stillness." The gendered ordering is produced and preserved by rules rather than walls: "Social roles and conventions have regulated, determined, and produced the interior; etiquettes and excluding boundaries construct and save the waiting interior, a constructed possibility of privacy." Gendered space here is simultaneously mobility's restraint and mobility's waiting — the room for women in a building "for the day of business or pleasure" (the traveler addressed in the masculine), where waiting itself is the assigned condition. See waiting-room, separate-spheres, boundaries.
• Men's Room (Edelman 1996/2006) — the gendered order built for men: the men's room as "a social technology in itself to necessitate a certain relation between the male subject and his body" (pp. 103–104) — gendered space that does not order women out of an already-gendered room but produces the gender (heterosexual masculinity) of those inside it; the room "set aside for men" as the warrant of "a privileged place in the structure of social meaning" (p. 106); and Lacan's "urinary segregation" (via note 1) as the anatomical-difference reading of sex-segregated plumbing that Edelman counters with the stall's "older eroticism… anterior to the genital tyranny" (pp. 108–109). The register completes Ardener's: gendered space governs its dominant occupants too. See mens-room, masculinity.
• 'Decorators May be Compared to Doctors' (Ferry 2003/2006) — the gendered order worked on by its excluded (1876): "the two most obviously gendered rooms in the house, the masculine Dining Room and the feminine Drawing Room" (Ferry, p. 112, citing Kinchin) — the Garretts' room-by-room critique names the coding from inside the discipline: the dining room's "dignified seclusion" as "the especially masculine department of the house-hold" under the castle-boast (quoted p. 112), its innovations "more grudgingly permitted" than anywhere else (quoted p. 112), and the resistant Paterfamilias as the gendered order's domestic enforcer. The women professionals then redecorate both gendered rooms — mobility across the interior's gender boundaries exercised as professional practice — while the text itself keeps the room-assignments ("women's work and women's sphere," quoted p. 113). Gendered space here is not only constraint and production but contestation: the order's coded rooms become the site where its excluded professionals demonstrate competence. See dining-room, drawing-room, separate-spheres, house-decorator.
• Towards a Feminist Poetics: Infection in the Sentence (Gilbert & Gubar 1979/2006) — gendered space's identification-thesis: the ordering is not only of space around women but of women as space — "Women themselves have often, of course, been described or imagined as houses" (Erikson's female "inner space," the opening Madonna statues, the womb as "a child's first and most satisfying house… a mythic paradise imaged over and over again in sacred caves, secret shrines, consecrated huts," pp. 121–122). The ordering's felt form is enclosure anxiety rather than mobility restraint alone: "these ancient associations of house and self seem mainly to have strengthened the anxiety about enclosure which she projected into her art" (p. 122) — and its reproduction cycle is named precisely: "the confinement of pregnancy replicates the confinement of society" (p. 122). Ardener's spatial ordering given its most interior body: the bounded territory is the woman herself. See house-body-equation, enclosure, gender-and-the-interior.
• Woman's Domestic Body (Gordon 1996/2006) — the identification-thesis's dated, caused, evidence-based form: gendered space as a dated cultural system (mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, strongest c. 1875–1925), built not by symbolic direction-coding (Ardener's coloured space) but by industrial capitalism's division of adornment — the man's body and the public world of production conscribed, the woman's body and the home paired as the household's "front" (Goffman), "adorned to testify to his success" and bearing "the name, literally and legally, of the man who 'owned' them" (pp. 129–131). The ordering's medium is metaphor made structural (Lakoff & Johnson): "a simile – women and interiors were like one another – was transformed into a synonym" (p. 127). And its reproduction apparatus is taught, not inherited: the school project's "boys built an actual house, while the girls designed its interior" (p. 128). Gordon also supplies the ordering's vestige-test: the wives' initials on jointly owned silver, the "overwhelmingly female" interior design profession (p. 127) — gendered space persisting after its discourse's peak. See separate-spheres, woman-as-decoration, fashion.
• Ornament and Order (Soulillou 2002/2006) — the ordering's ornamental register: the ground plan realizing gender and hierarchy in adornment — "from left to right, without hierarchy, ornaments for men, ornaments for women; from upper to lower, with hierarchy, ornaments for the prince, the nobles, free men in general, and the slaves" (p. 316); "sexuality and power are the forces which sustain the ground plan" (p. 315); and the modern survival's asymmetry — the man-woman opposition in ornament outlasting the free/not-free opposition's dissolution (p. 319). Where Ardener shows gendered space as perceived order (direction, position, mobility) and Gordon as economic order (the adornment system), Soulillou shows it as ornamental order — the body's place on the plan assigned by what adorns it, the ornament "appropriat[ing] the individual" rather than the reverse (p. 316). See ornamental-ground-plan, dual-symbolic-classification, woman-as-decoration.

Open Questions

• Ardener's gendered directions are symbolic (coloured space, south as female); McDowell's are sociological (the gender division of urban space). What converts symbolic coding into material restraint — and can design interrupt the conversion?
• If gender is "irrelevant, or insignificant" in some spaces, what makes a space gender-neutral — the absence of coding, or its suspension? Can a neutral space exist once the coding apparatus is known?
• The Chinese case reverses the Irish (south male/north female vs south female) — does the arbitrariness of direction-gender pairing strengthen or weaken the claim that gendered space is a cultural universal?
• Ardener's and Hedges's gendered space constrains its subordinate occupants (women's muting, women's waiting); Edelman's constrains its dominant ones (the "vigilant nonchalance" of men watching men). Is gendered space one ordering system applied differently to dominant and subordinate — and does the dominant case (policed masculinity) prove the ordering is never in the dominant's interest either?
• The Garretts work professionally across both gendered poles of the house — the masculine dining room and the feminine drawing room — while their book re-affirms "women's sphere." Can gendered space be occupied professionally without being re-inscribed — and does professional mobility across gendered rooms (the first interior decorators) mark the ordering's erosion or its professionalization? See separate-spheres, house-decorator.
• Soulillou's ground plan orders bodies through adornment ("the ornament that appropriates the individual," p. 316) rather than through walls or mobility restraints — a mechanism none of the page's other sources names. Is the designed interior's gendering therefore primarily an ornamenting system (dress, decoration, finishes) whose spatial assignments follow, and would a gender-neutral interior require redesigning the ornaments before the rooms? See ornamental-ground-plan, the-decorative.