Sex, Gender, Becoming - PULP

68 Jeanne van Eeden
way to a sedentary female life. 46 Lewis Mumford maintains that this
legacy is reflected in the female sexual symbolism of early urban
existence that is implicit in many architectural structures: ‘the house
and the oven, the byre and the bin, the cistern, the storage pit, the
granary ... the moat, and all inner spaces, from the atrium to the
cloister’. 47 It is interesting that shopping malls frequently echo this
morphology in their use of the atrium and the cloister, as well as the
landscaped ‘moats’ that isolate them from their surroundings.
4. Modernity and the gendering of space
Many theorists have devoted time (and space) to the explication of
the relationship between modernity and masculinity, and have
pointed out that the rise of the aesthetics of modernity can be
associated with particular spatial and social practices that privileged
the male. The experience of modernity was located in city life, work,
and politics, which reflected the so-called male domain that was
inextricably linked with the growth of industrial capitalism in the
middle to late nineteenth century. 48 Because modernity was born in
rapidly growing cities such as Paris and London, the new spaces of the
city — the arcades, boulevards and cafés — and the anonymity of the
crowd established a set of relationships between modernity, space,
social relations, 49 the gaze, and gendered subjectivities. The
nineteenth century expansion of capitalist markets created new
spaces for consumption that overlapped with leisure and produced
modern forms of visual consumption. Not only were the spaces of
modernity coded as masculine, but the manner in which modernity
privileged a male way of seeing also designates a politics constituted
on ‘particular forms of gender relations and definitions of masculinity
and of what it means to be a woman’ that relate directly to how space
was organised. 50
The explanation of the separation of the spheres is based primarily on
findings related to Europe. Nonetheless, many of the same tendencies
have already been identified in South African cities. Andrew Bank and
Gary Minkley have pointed out, for example, that public spaces in
Cape Town were male-dominated from the early years of its history, 51
and the social history of cities such as Johannesburg reveals a similar
gendering of space. Johannesburg in the late nineteenth century was
a ‘predominantly male town’ with a thriving bar and brothel industry,
and typical male enclaves such as the Rand Club were founded in the
46 D Cavallaro Critical and cultural theory. Thematic variations (2001) 175.
47 L Mumford The city in history. Its origins, its transformations, and its prospects
(1991) 21.
48 J Wolff Feminine sentences. Essays on women and culture (1990) 34-35.
49 Massey (n 38 above) 233.
50
Massey 183, 232, 233, 235.
51 Bank & Minkley (n 25 above) 2.