Gendered Spaces Essay

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Gendered spaces are socially constructed locations commonly defined by their utility to service a particular gender. They are founded by historic common and continual performative usage upon which specific designs are built and a collective understanding and expectation is attached and is shared. Just as these identifying markers have come to legally and socially define a space as gendered, through signifying dynamics (i.e. - unfettered access, physical interaction with its utilities) the spaces themselves reciprocally identify their users as a particular gender. Consequently, the societal expectation in the United States is that only women (a.k.a. owners of biologically determined female bodies) will enter and use a Women’s Room, while
In gendering their users, public restrooms also segregate individuals along dominant heteronormative and patriarchal discourses (Overall 2007). In these productive ways, gender-specific restrooms are not static social structures possessing simple benign utilitarian features but rather serve as socially-restraining spaces that derive their authority from an intersection of binary-based heteronormative gender, racial, and class
What signifying/social/izing work is it expected to do? If gendered spaces are locales of “stretched out social relations” (Massey 1994) meant to particularize certain identities in relation to other identities (West-Zimmerman 1987, Lorber 1994), what happens inside all-gender or gender-neutral spaces? Do prior gender discourses remain intact or are they reconfigured to reflect more inclusive understandings? How does resignification acknowledge or ignore the intersections of race and class? Can gender be equalized or neutralized by the resignification of space? What happens to the identities which had previously inhabited spaces now designated as gender-neutral? What has gendered spaces historically meant in a capitalist society which has been traditionally dependent on a gendered division of labor? What has it meant in a liberal society? What might it mean in more conservative, or even fundamental

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