Sex, Gender, Becoming - PULP

Shopping for gender 67
Massey draws attention to the fact that his reading of space, time,
and money in modernism takes no cognisance of gender. 39 She relates
this to the notion that time has been gendered as male and space as
female. Massey explains that time is habitually equated with history,
progress, civilisation, science, politics, reason, transcendence, order,
narrative, politics, vitality, sequential coherence, and logic — in other
words, so-called (male) modernist ideas. 40 Space, on the other hand,
signifies statis, reproduction, nostalgia, emotion, aesthetics, the
body, immanence, chaos, neutrality, passivity, description, and lack
of coherence. The dichotomies or binary oppositions such as culture/
nature, based on the ideological construction A/Not-A, establish
differences that privilege the dominant social group. Massey
therefore postulates that the time/space dichotomy is similar to the
man/woman binary wherein the latter signifies lack or absence. This,
she argues, underlies not only the social construction of gender
difference, but also the power relations instituted and maintained by
this process. 41
Massey contends that both Harvey (1989) and Fredric Jameson (in
Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism, 1991) decry
the loss of temporality in the postmodern world, which they believe
has been supplanted by spatiality. 42 Elizabeth Wilson explains that
the male city culture embodied in modernism was threatened both by
the presence of women and their potential to escape the confines of
patriarchal control 43 — the fear of sexual licence in the city, as
personified by the dyad of woman/disorder, and the fear of unordered
spatiality resulted in the controlling spatial mechanisms of modernity.
Massey similarly believes that the spatial dislocation or complexity
that Jameson characterises as vertiginous terror caused by the
hyperspaces of postmodernism that defy cognitive comprehension,
aligns with the perception that space is coded as female. 44 The spaces
of shopping malls are often chaotic and labyrinthine and resist the
ordering machine of modernity and its desire to transcend the
disorder of space (and the feminine).
Malls are frequently invested with nostalgic imagery, and as Massey
observes, places that ‘reverberate with nostalgia for something lost
[as well as for stability, reliability and authenticity] are coded
female’. 45 The biological model that sees cities as bodies that are
born, grow, conceive, reproduce and die is also a gendered position
that holds that cities resulted when the male world of hunting gave
39 Massey (n 38 above) 230-235.
40 Massey 257, 267.
41
Massey 257.
42 Massey 258.
43 E Wilson ‘The invisible flâneur’ (1992) 191 New Left Review 90-91.
44
Massey 258, 267.
45 Massey 180.