Sex, Gender, Becoming - PULP

Shopping for gender 65
is always a potential site of hegemonic and ideological struggle, which
is demonstrated in South Africa’s history of spatial conflict and
‘segregation across a wide range of work and leisure activities’. 25 The
built environment therefore has the capacity to signify abstract
concepts, social relations, and ideologies; it is telling that the places
that are considered to be important in society today are those that
are essentially dedicated to leisure, consumption, and tourism. 26
Lefebvre identifies three methods of conceptualising space that
function in accordance with social modes of production and historical
circumstances; space is therefore never neutral or transparent but is
constantly produced, negotiated, and reproduced. Lefebvre distinguishes
between spatial practices (how space is perceived),
representations of space (how space is conceived), and representational
spaces (how space is lived). Spatial practices include
‘property and other forms of capital’, 27 whereas representations of
space encompass the manner in which space is designed, managed,
presented and represented in relation to ideological structures. In this
regard, Lefebvre singles out architecture because of its ability to
construct spatial identity. 28 Representational spaces resonate with
cultural and symbolic meanings that are embedded in the history of
people, but since commercial and leisure spaces commonly obscure
historical specificity in order to create new myths, ‘[h]istory is
experienced as nostalgia, and nature as regret’. 29 What is important
for an investigation of gendered space in shopping malls is that
representational spaces can connote binaries such as masculine/
feminine or work/leisure and can consequently influence the manner
in which space is represented. 30 Goss accordingly comments that the
shopping mall is a ‘representation of space masquerading as a
representational space ... space conceptualised, planned scientifically
and realised through strict technical control, pretending to be a
space imaginatively created by its inhabitants’. 31
Lefebvre is particularly concerned with the production of space under
capitalism and identifies the succession from natural to absolute to
abstract space whereby nature is progressively excluded from the
social. Lefebvre’s ‘abstract space’ designates space devoid of spacetime
specificity that sustains the discourses of technology, knowledge
and power, whereas ‘absolute space’ reflects the ‘bonds of blood, soil
and language’. 32 Abstract space is the space of bourgeois capitalism,
25 A Bank & G Minkley ‘Genealogies of space and identity in Cape Town’ (1998)
Kronos. Journal of Cape History 1.
26 J Urry Consuming places (1995) 1, 21.
27 Urry (n 26 above) 25.
28
Lefebvre (n 24 above) 42.
29 Lefebvre 42, 51.
30 Lefebvre 245.
31
Goss (n 5 above) 40.
32 Lefebvre (n 24 above) 50, 48.