The issue of gender and sexuality in architecture are still themes that are questioned as being relevant, a situation that Jessica Ellen Sewell challenges in her seminar course at the University of Virginia:

When I tell people that I work on gender and architecture, I often get one of two responses: “you mean like phallic male skyscrapers?” or “what do you study, bathrooms?”  This class aims to make sense of these answers and go beyond them by exploring the complex relationships between bodies, sex, sexuality, gender, and the built environment. Architecture has been argued by some to be an expression of the body, a shell we build ourselves, but whose body does it express and shelter and how? Others see buildings and settlements as expressions of a culture’s gender, class, and racial structures that can shape gendered identities by enabling or controlling behavior. But how are these structures, both cultural and physical, reworked and resisted in practice? And what is the role of gender in the profession and practice of design? We will discuss analyses by scholars of gender and sexuality, queer and trans theorists, architectural and urban theorists and historians, architects, planners, landscape architects, engineers, anthropologists, sociologists, and geographers that address how architecture, landscape, and urban space can express and shape sex, gender, and sexuality.

Jessica Ellen Sewell

In the list, we are adding Jessica Ellen Sewell’s new book, which investigates the questions she raises in the seminar course in a definition of architecture that extends outside the city and the canon.