Gender and the Reality of Cities: embodied identities,social relations and performativities
Abstract
Gender is an integral, ubiquitous and taken-for-granted aspect of urban life. It is an
influential dimension of urban identities, an axis of urban inequalities, and it animates
the everyday practices that characterise and constitute cities and city life. Perhaps
because it is so familiar and taken-for-granted, gender is also a complex and slippery
idea that carries a range of inter-related meanings. Numerous commentators (including,
for example, Haraway 1991; Moi 1999; Widerberg 1999) have pointed to problems of
translation, even between closely related European languages. In addition, usage within
particular languages is far from singular, stable or coherent. In this essay, I do not
attempt to engage with issues of translation between languages, focusing solely on
anglophone urban studies, but I do wish to acknowledge that, however influential they
may be, the meanings of gender in anglophone contexts are also idiosyncratic1. Setting
these considerations to one side, I explore some of the different ways in which the idea
of gender is used in anglophone urban studies to help explore and understand the simple
fact that cities are peopled by women, men, girls and boys, drawing especially, but not
exclusively, on British feminist urban geography. More specifically, I consider three
kinds of gender analyses of urban life, which approach gender through embodied
identities, social relations, and performativity respectively. As a dimension of embodied
identities, gender focuses on how everyday urban experiences relate to, and are
influenced by, the anatomical categories “male” and “female”. While gender is embodied
by human individuals, it does not reside entirely within human bodies but is produced at
the intersections between human bodies and the milieux that surround them. As a facet
of those surrounding milieux, it constitutes a social relation or organising principle of
urban life. For gender to be felt as integral to embodiment and as a social relation that
precedes gendered embodiment requires human beings to be recruited into gender
categories. In so doing, gendered persons activate meanings or scripts of gender, hence
the idea of gender as performatively cited in everyday lives. The different approaches
to gender on which I focus are not mutually exclusive, but there are important
variations in emphasis between them. Cities are vital arenas in the embodiment,
contestation, mobilisation, subversion and transformation of all these aspects of gender.
In the sections that follow, I explore how each approach to gender informs
understandings of urban life and sheds light on the specificity of cities. In conclusion I
point to emotion as an important theme for all three approaches to analysing the
gendered reality of cities.