Sexuality & Space by Jennifer Bloomer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is a pretty good collection of essays, even if it was a bit odd. Any title that puts space and sexuality together though, has got to be a little far reaching. Ultimately the themes come out pretty clearly, that space and our ability to create spaces (architectural, inside/outside, domestic) reflect our inhabited notions of sexual identity and sexuality together… This is pretty true. In our postwar American lifestyle that past may be somewhat muted, but it certainly was(is) a consideration still in how we designate what people are for and how we functionally inhabit different positions without a larger social hierarchy… whose mobilization is a narrative of gender roles and displaced positions.
There is nothing more than these positions; the displacement is the position. There is no higher order. And while this level of abstraction is difficult to explain at times, since explanation is often reductive to the next level down, there is no deferral to any other level, as this is the base level. In this sense, many of these essays resort to naming or connecting novel tropes together, creating quasi-figures that haunt the edges of our comprehension of social order… in order words, the authors are often forced into metaphoric language in order to better express the connections that are brought together in their analysis. When this happens, as with examinations of post-modern urban landscapes or musicology, there runs a risk that the reader may encounter a sublime object in the examination of such a diverse heterology. What I mean is that often such an examination runs the risk of collapsing into a trope to stand-in for the argument. Because this is a collection of essays however, and none of the essayists collaborated to share a theoretical angle or system, we don’t often have that collapse. But what is spectacular about these essays is that they run very close to that edge, standing at a position very close at times, to nonsense, all the while creating perfect sense out of that contortion.
Many of these essays are very good. I don’t want to reduce this review into a description of these essays, but in the connection of sexuality and space, we see at times, the introduction of gaze and looking as a figure that denominates both sexuality as an appraisal and distance — both as a mode of determination and control. We also see how viewing itself, through television, windows, and textual synthesis of video and images of architecture differentiate the contours of inside/outside, to define space as it were. We also have the social expression of space, be it an aesthetics of households or aesthetics of architecture, or art and photography as expressive of cityspaces or identity. Either way, this is an inspiring collection of essays all of which really deal with the two themes of the title. Since this is a collection of essays though, I’ll stop. But it would have been fun if somehow a centralized connection was to be made, a concrete metaphor to stand in for both sexuality and space could have been formed. But I suppose if that’s the case, you would need a monumentous figure like Luce Irigaray to do it.
Just the same though, a good read.
