Fall 2022 | Princeton University
This seminar investigates how feminism and gender theory (from eco-feminism and intersectional feminism to queer and trans theory) can spearhead new methods of research, objects of study, and ways of seeing and analyzing spaces, buildings, and cities, as well as the human alliances within them. We study forms of organizing around women's and LGBTQ+ rights in cities, from the efforts of informal activist groups to those of institution building, and highlight these efforts as main sites for creative, architectural, and urban intervention in challenging heteronormative forms of living and instead providing spaces of care and kinship making.
General
Readings
Week 1: September 7: Welcome - Course Introduction and Discussion!
Living Room: From the Classroom to the City – Problems of Historiography
In-Class Reading Mapping
[\o] Angela Davis, “The Approaching Obsolescence of Housework: A Working-Class Perspective,” Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 222–243.
[\a] Dolores Hayden, “What Would a Non-Sexist City Be Like? Speculations on Housing, Urban Design, and Human Work,” Signs, Vol. 5, No. 3 Women and the American City (1980): 170–187.
[\o] Max Andrucki, “Queering Social Reproduction, Or How Queers Save the City,” Society + Space
[\c] Harriet Harriss, Ruth Morrow, James Brown, and James Soane, “Editorial: It’s Not Only About Women,” A Gendered Profession: The Question of Representation in Space Making (London: RIBA Publishing, 2016), 7-11.
[\o] Anooradha Siddiqi, “Writing With: Togethering, Difference, and Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration,” e-flux, July 28 (2018)
Further Reading:
[\c] Anne-Marie Bouthillette, Yolanda Retter, and Gordon Ingram, eds. Queers in Space: Communities, Public Places, Sites of Resistance (Seattle: Bay Press, 1997), choose one of the chapters.
[\o] Aaron Betsky, “Some Queer Constructs: Introduction,” Queer Space: Architecture and Same Sex Desire (New York: Harper and Collins, 1997), 1–15.
[\c] Jennifer Evans and Mark Cook, Queer Cities, Queer Cultures: Europe since 1945 (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).
[\a] Petra L. Doan, ed. Planning and LGBTQ Communities: The Need for Inclusive Queer Spaces (London and New York: Routledge, 2015).
[\o] Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Art News 69 (January 1971): 22–39, 67–71 (reprinted in Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays [New York: Harper and Row, 1988], excerpt 147–158).
[\o] Diane Ghirardo, “Where Are the Women in Architectural Studies?” in Desiring Practices: Architecture, Gender, and the Interdisciplinary, Katerina Rüedi, Sarah Wigglesworth, and Duncan McCorquodale, eds. (London: Black Dog, 1996), 156–73.
[\a] Jack Halberstam, “Queer Temporality and Post-Modern Geography,” in In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 1–21.
[\a] Uwe Bresan and Wolfgang Voigt, “The Queer Architect in Germany: Invisible in Practice, Missing from History,” in A Gendered Profession: The Question of Representation in Space Making (London: RIBA Publishing, 2016), 89–96.
[\o] Despina Stratigakos, “Why Architects Need Feminism,” Places Journal (2012).
[\c] Jane Rendell, “Only Resist: A Feminist Approach to Critical Spatial Practice,” Architectural Review (February 19, 2018).
[\a] Karen Burns, “Feminist Theory and Praxis 1991–2003: Questions from the Archive,” in Architecture and Feminisms: Ecologies, Economies, Technologies, Hélène Frichot, Catharina Gabrielsson, and Helen Runting, eds. (Milton: Taylor & Francis Group, 2017), 11–24.
[\a] Feminist Art and Architecture Collaborative, “Counterplanning from the Classroom,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 76, no. 3 (2017): 277–280.
Week 2: September 14: Language // Heteroglossaries
[\o] Eisterer, S.E. “Introduction: In the Daylight of Our Existence.” In In the Daylight of Our Existence: Architectural History and the Promise of Queer Theory, edited by S.E. Eisterer. Zurich: gta Verlag, 2025, 11–32.
[\o] Denice Frohman, “A Queer Girl’s Ode to the Piraguero,”
[\o] Denice Frohman, “Accents,”
M. Constantine, “What is Experimental Writing,” and “Polyphonies,” Learning Teaching Writing (New York: Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning, 2020), 3–5 and 24–26.
[\c] Gloria Anzaldúa, “Movimientos de rebeldía y las culturas que traicionan,” and “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), 15–24 and 53–64.
[\a] Bell Hooks, “Language: Teaching New Worlds/New Words,” Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994), 167–175.
[\o] June Jordan, “White English / Black English: The Politics of Translation (1972),” Civil Wars (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), 68–73.
Select:
[\c] Hélène Frichot, “Collectivize a Heteroglossary,” How to Make Yourself a Feminist Design Power Tool (Baunach: Spurbuchverlag, 2016), 109–125.
OR
[\c] Kim TallBear, “Making Love and Relations Beyond Settler Sex and Family,” Making Kin Not Population, Adele E. Clark and Donna Haraway, eds. (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2018), 144–164.
Further Reading:
[\c] June Jordan, “Problems of Language in a Democratic State,” We’re On: A June Jordan Reader, Christoph Keller and Jan Keller Levi, eds. (Farmington: Alice James Books, 2017).
[\c] Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1984), 114–123.
[\a] Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–599.
[\a] Judith Butler, “Preface 1999,” Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge), vii–xxvii.
[\c] **Will Roscoe, “North American Tribes with Berdache and Alternative Gender Roles,” Living the Spirit: A Gay American Indian Anthology (New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 217-222.
Week 3: September 21: Living Room // Trans-Ecology
Class Workshop
[\o] Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “June Jordan and a Black Feminist Poetics of Architecture,” Plurale Tantum, March 21, 2012.
[\o] June Jordan, His Own Where (New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2010).
[\o] Knittle, Davy. “Planning as Resistance in June Jordan's New York.” In In the Daylight of Our Existence: Architectural History and the Promise of Queer Theory, edited by S.E. Eisterer. Zurich: gta Verlag, 2025, 247–81.
[\o] Charles Davis II, “Black Spaces Matter,” Aggregate, Black Lives Matter, Jonathan Massey and Meredith TenHoor, eds. (2015)
Further Reading:
[\o] June Jordan, “Mississippi ‘Black Home,’ New York Times Magazine, October 11, 1970
[\o] Cheryl J. Fish, “Place, Emotion, and Environmental Justice in Harlem: June Jordan and Buckminster Fuller’s 1965 ‘Architextural’ Collaboration,” Discourse 29, no. 2 (2007), 332.
[\a] Nicole Seymour, “Trans Ecology and the Transgender Road Narrative,” Oxford Handbooks Online (Oxford University Press, 2016), 1–25.
Week 4: September 28: Care // Clinic
Class Excursion
[\c] Mia Mingus, “How We Want the Queer and Reproductive Justice Movements to Love Us Back,” Radical Reproductive Justice: Foundations, Theory, Practice, Critique, Loretta J. Ross, Lynn Roberts, Erika Derkas, Whitney Peoples, and Pamela Bridgewater Toure (New York: Feminist Press, 2017).
[\o] Overholt, M.C. “Self Help as Spatial Practice: California’s Feminist Women’s Health Centers.” In In the Daylight of Our Existence: Architectural History and the Promise of Queer Theory, edited by S.E. Eisterer. Zurich: gta Verlag, 2025, 89–139
[\a] Aren Z. Aizura, “The Romance of the Amazing Scalpel: Race, Labor, and Affect in Thai Gender Reassignment Clinics,” Mobile Subjects: Transnational Imaginaries of Gender Reassignment (Duke University Press, 2018), 174–206.
[\o] Ruha Benjamin, “Racial Fictions, Biological Facts: Expanding the Sociological Imagination through Speculative Methods,” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 2, no. 2 (2016), 1–28.
Further Reading:
[\c] Dorothy Roberts, “From Norplant to the Contraceptive Vaccine: The New Frontier of Population Control,” Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 104–150.
[\a] Michelle Murphy, Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Entanglements of Feminism, Health and Technoscience (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).
[\c] Lori Brown, Contested Spaces: Abortion Clinics, Women's Shelters and Hospitals: Politicizing the Female Body (New York: Routledge, 2013).
[\o] Shannon Mattern, “Maintenance and Care,” Places Journal, November 2018
[\a] Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007).
[\a] Gordon Brent Brochu-Ingram, “Building Queer Infrastructure, Infrastructure: Trajectories of Activism and Organizational Development in Decolonizing Vancouver,” Queer Mobilizations: Social Movement Activism and Canadian Public Policy (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2015), 227–249.
[\a] Lorraine Rothman, “Menstrual Extraction Procedure,” Quest: A Feminist Quarterly 4, no. 3 (1978), 44–48.
[\a] Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991), 1241–1265, 1296–1299.
Week 5: October 5: Queer Archives // Queer Kinship
[\o] Malcolm John Rio, “Drag Hinge: Realness as an Urban Geography,” Queer. Archive. Work. no. 3 (2019), 1–12.
[\a] Bell Hooks, “Is Paris Burning?” Black Looks: Race and Representation (South End, 1992), 145–156.
[\a] Judith Butler, “Preface,” and “Introduction,” Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993), iv–xxx.
[\c] Also look at a selection of images from Voguing and the House Ballroom Scene of New York City 1989–1992.
Further Reading:
[\a] Ivan L. Munuera, “HIV and AIDS Kin: The Discotecture of Paradise Garage,” Thresholds 48 (2020), 133–147.
[\o] Stephen Vider, AIDS at Home: Art and Everyday Activism [Exhibition], Museum of the City of New York, May 23 – October 22, 2017.
[\o] Rio, Malcom. “Architecture Is Burning: An Urbanism of Queer Kinship in New York Ballroom Culture.” In In the Daylight of Our Existence: Architectural History and the Promise of Queer Theory, edited by S.E. Eisterer. Zurich: gta Verlag, 2025, 45–87.
[\c] Christina B. Hanhardt, Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013).
Week 6: October 12: Biography // Critique
Minette De Silva, The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect (Colombo: Smart Media Productions, 1998), excerpt.
[\a] Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, “Crafting the Archive: Minnette De Silva, Architecture, and History,” The Journal of Architecture 22 (2017), 1299–1336.
[\c] Robert Aldrich, “Brief – Near Bentota Sri Lanka,” Queer Spaces: An Atlas for LGBTQIA+ Spaces (London: RIBA Publishing, 2022), 34–35.
Bevis Bawa, The Sometimes Irreverent Memoirs of a Gentleman in 20th Century Sri Lanka (Bentota: Sri Lanka, 2011), excerpts.
[\a] Kadji Amin, “Introduction,” Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 1–18.
Further Reading:
[\c] Anoma Pieris, “Domesticity and Decolonization,” Architecture and Nationalism in Sri Lanka: The Trouser under the Cloth.
[\c] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak: Speculations on Widow Sacrifice”; reprinted in 1988 as “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg, eds. (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313.
Minnette De Silva, “A House at Kandy, Ceylon,” MARG 6, no. 3 (June 1953): 4–11.
[\a] Karen Burns, “Feminist Theory and Praxis 1991–2003, Questions from the Archive,” Architecture and Feminisms: Ecologies, Economies, Technologies, Hélène Frichot, Catharina Gabrielsson, and Helen Runting, eds. (Milton: Taylor & Francis Group, 2017), 11–24.
Week 8: October 26: A Room of One’s Own // In Community
Amerigo Marras, “Heteroburbia,” The Body Politic, No. 7 (1973), 25.
[\o] Sonia Wong, “A Room of One’s Own: Lesbian Desire and Identity in the Spatiality of Hong Kong,” The Funambulist. Politics of Space and Bodies, Queers, Feminists & Interiors, No. 13 (September–October 2017)
[\a] Stephen Vider, “‘The Ultimate Extension of Gay Community,’ Communal Living, Gay Liberation and the Reinvention of Household,” The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity after World War II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 84-105.
[\c] Michel Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life,” The Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, Volume One - Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: The New Press, 1997), 135-140.
Further Reading:
[\c] Bell Hooks, “Homeplace (as site of resistance)” Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990), 390.
[\c] Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982).
[\a] Dianne Harris, “Built-Ins and Closets: Status, Storage and Display,” Little White Houses: How the Post-War Home Constructed Race in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 185-228.
[\c] Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983).
[\o] Ruth Oldenziel and Karin Zachmann, Cold War Kitchen: Americanization, Technology, and European Users (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009).
[\a] Dolores Hayden, “What Would a Non-Sexist City Be Like? Speculations on Housing, Urban Design, and Human Work,” Signs, Vol. 5, No. 3 (1980): 170-187.
[\c] Angela Davis, “The Approaching Obsolescence of Housework: A Working-Class Perspective,” Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 222–243
Week 9: November 2: Trans Childhood // Adult Education
[\c] Paul Preciado, “Who Defends the Queer Child?” An Apartment on Uranus (London: Fitzgeraldo Editions, 2019), 54-59.
[\a] Jules Gill-Peterson, “Before Transsexuality: The Transgender Child from 1900 to 1930,” Histories of the Transgender Child (St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 59-69.
[\a] Facundo Revuelta, “Bachillerato Mocha Celis,” Queer Spaces: An Atlas for LGBTQIA+ Spaces (London: RIBA Publishing, 2022), 100-101.
[\c] Stephen Vider, “Fantasy is the Beginning of Creation: Imagining Lesbian Feminist Architecture,” The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality & the Politics of Domesticity after World War II (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022), 106-140.
Week 10: November 9: Counter-Space // Resisting Geographies of Unfreedom
[\c] Solmaz Sharif, “Look,” “Mess Hall,” and “Reaching Guantánamo,” Look: Poems (Minneapolis: Grey Wolf Press, 2016), 3-8, 40, 44-45.
[\c] Erica Edwards, The Other Side of Terror (New York: NYU Press, 2021), excerpts.
[\o] Mehammed Mack, “Out of the Closet into the Courtyard: An Alternative History of Sexual Clandestinely and the Arab Diaspora,” Politics of Space and Bodies, Queers, Feminists & Interiors, No. 13 (September–October 2017)
Further Reading:
[\a] Nicole Fleetwood, “Fraught Imaginaries, Collaborative Art in Prison,” Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020), 150-189.
[\c] Angela Davis, “How Gender Structures the Prison System,” Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003), 60-84.
[\c] Nicole Cox and Silvia Federici, Counter-planning from the Kitchen: Wages for Housework: Perspective on Capital and the Left (New York, London: New York Wages for Housework Committee and Falling Wall Press, 1975), 1–23.
Week 11: November 16: Settler Law // Settler Sexuality
In-Class Co-Writing Workshop
[\c] Julian Talamantes Brolaski, “Myths of Manahatta,” Gowanos Atropolis (New York: Ugly Duckling Press, 2011).
Midnight Sun, “Sex/Gender Systems,” Living the Spirit: A Gay American Indian Anthology (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 32-47.
[\a] Audra Simpson, “The State is a Man: Theresa Spence, Loretta Saunders and the Gender of Settler Sovereignty,” Theory & Event, Vol. 19, Issue 4 (2016).
[\a] Elizabeth A. Povinelli, “The Part that Has no Part: Enjoyment, Law, and Loss,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (2011) 17 (2-3): 287–308.
[\a] Scott Lauria Morgensen, “Introduction” and “The Biopolitics of Settler Sexuality and Queer Modernities,” Spaces between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), excerpts.
[\c] Octavia Butler, Dawn: Xenogenesis (New York: Warner Books, 1987), excerpt.
[\c] You can also choose to listen to Dawn as audiobook on audible.com.
Further Reading:
[\c] N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became, or excerpt.
[\c] Will Roscoe, “Strange Country This: Images of Berdaches and Warrior Women,” Living the Spirit, 48-76.
[\a] Nicole Seymour, “Trans Ecology and the Transgender Road Narrative,” Oxford Handbooks Online (Oxford University Press, 2016).
[\c] Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 149-181.
[\a] Tarsh Bates, “Queer Affordances: The Human as Trans* Ecology,” Angelaki 22.2 (2017): 151-154.
[\o] Wibke Straube, “Toxic Bodies: Ticks, Trans Bodies, and the Ethics of Response-Ability in Art and Activist Writing,” Environmental Humanities 11.1 (2019): 216-238.
Week 13: November 30: Re-Framing Queer and Trans Theory
[\a] José Esteban Muñoz, “Introduction: Feeling Utopia,” The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 10th Anniversary Edition (New York: NYU Press, 2019), 1-10.
[\a] Jen Jack Gieseking, “Preface,” Navigating a Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queers (New York: New York University Press), excerpt.
[\a] Lucas Crawford, “Four Gestures Towards a Trans-Mad Aesthetics of Space,” Social Text 148, Vol. 39, No. 3 (September 2021), 55-77.
[\c] Paul Preciado, “Introduction: An Apartment on Uranus,” An Apartment on Uranus (London: Fitzgeraldo Editions, 2019), 29-51.