The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Jacques Derrida has deconstructed the binary systems of meaning that
were purport to reflect reality unproblematically. These ways of thinking
dispute the truth of history, argue for the death of the human subject, and
question how meaning is communicated.
The issue of representation is a particularly problematic one for
feminists, since representations constructed through patriarchy contain
assumptions about sex and gender. Such assumptions have obscured the
lives of real women and an understanding of female subjectivity and
identity. Influenced by postmodern theory, feminists have shifted from
searching for the origin of women’s oppression to interpreting the ways in
which oppression is represented, focusing on the decoding of systems of
representation in textual and other signifying practices. To consider gendered
representations as constructed rather than natural takes a feminist
critique further than looking at the asymmetries inherent in the categories
of women and men to deal with the construction of identity and the
ways in which class, race, and sexuality, as well as gender difference, are
organized within representational forms.
In theorizing subjectivity, identity, and experience, feminists
suggest that position is integral to knowing. 33 Their discussions of difference
are described in spatial language, such as “standpoint,” “locality,”
and “margins.” 34 Such spatial metaphors highlight the epistemological
importance of the occupation of space in the construction of identity—
conceptually and materially, in the abstract and the concrete. Spatial
metaphors are also important for feminist philosophers in exploring new
conceptions of gendered space and time. 35 These metaphors are places
where conceptual work can illuminate our knowledge of the city, and vice
versa. The interaction of real and metaphoric space is a site of collision
of city and self: representations of the self and representations of the city
touch momentarily, providing potential starting points for tactical work.
Tactics
Things, Flows, Filters, Tactics
In a world, then, in which spatiality and sexuality are fundamental experiences,
and in which sexuality, race, class and gender have been
constructed as significant axes of difference, it should come
as no surprise that struggles organised around these differences feature
prominently in a process like urbanisation.
—Lawrence Knopp, “Sexuality and Urban Space: A Framework
for Analysis”