Gendered Spaces, Spaces of Gender

With Benedetta Gennaro, researcher and visiting lecturer in Sociology and Gender Studies at Technische University in Darmstadt.

 

 

As part of the Gender Lecture Series, this talk asks what happens when we consider space as a crucial dimension to understanding how gender and sexuality are constructed in society and culture? Feminist theory has, for example, reflected prolifically on the classic dichotomy oikos/polis (domestic/public space) as an important axis upon which patriarchy exercises its domination and gender is stratified. It follows that when someone decides to cross the line of “space” propriety, the balance of power at the basis of the social contract is put at risk. Space is not, however, solely a material dimension but must also be understood as a metaphorical element whose influence determines the balance of power in society.

 

During the nineteenth century wars and civil uprisings in Italy, France, and Germany, women who decided to take up arms and fight found themselves in a space that was not theirs: indeed, women were traditionally relegated to the back lines (or home front) where they tended to soldiers’ needs. The women who physically trespassed onto the fighting lines not only broke military code but, most dangerously, the gender code. Traditionally, a woman was not supposed to fight because her role was connected to the reproductive realm and therefore delimited by the spatial constraints of the home (or the city walls). Through a visual journey into spaces of gender, this talk delves deeper into gendered spaces. 

 

 

Benedetta Gennaro is currently a researcher and visiting lecturer in Sociology and Gender Studies at Technische University in Darmstadt. Since 2011, she has been affiliated with the Cornelia Goethe Center for Women’s and Gender Studies (CGC) where she teaches courses at both the undergraduate and graduate level on a variety of topics within the field of gender and sexuality studies. She received an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Brown University in Providence, RI (USA) in 2010 with a dissertation entitled “Women in Arms: Gender in the Risorgimento (1848-1861)” in which she examined the participation of women in the Italian national unification and the consequences that active female military engagement had on the public sphere and in private life. Her areas of research include gender theory and sexuality studies, cultural and visual studies, women and political violence, masculinity studies.

 

RSVP: maya.judd@sciencespo.fr