Methods of Co-Production of Oppression

Through the enforcement of socially constructed body politics and economic regulation based in hierarchical gender norms, gender is both regulated and constructed in a binary. This is supported by historical and linguistic frameworks that force us to perform gender in this specified manner. The white cis hetero patriarchy have placed themselves at the top of a power structure they created and in no way earned or deserved. These systems of oppression are intentional, but they are not natural. They have been built up on years of deconstructing the female psyche and really any person who has been ‘otherized’ for the sake of maintaining white male dominance. This upholding and reinforcement of this oppressive state exists within every system and practice that exists in our society and architecture is no exclusion. The enforcement of violent, oppressive structures is so intertwined and encoded within the built environment that the only way to create spaces of justice and equity is to create a fundamentally new approach to architecture.


To create a more general, common understanding of the means and lengths taken to produce this artificial hierarchies and the framework of this oppression, we look to how selective recording of history and the language used to reinforce and reproduce it have created such a narrow baseline of evaluating everything (science, medicine, biology, space, etc.) that anyone that does not satisfy a white cis hetero ideal is left unconsidered and invisible. In the architectural framework, this has created a quite literal Built in Oppression, that cannot be removed with any mean or method in practice as of now. To attempt to work within the existing structures is to feed into hierarchies and binaries, and thus continue to reproduce them. It is vital that we completely abolish the way in we have traditionally approached architecture and design otherwise we are no less guilty of complacency.

Language, the record and interpretation of History, science, and the belief in their objectivity are responsible for the co production and perpetuation of socially constructed, oppressive hierarchies. Oppression is born out of the construction of hierarchies that uphold an artificially created power structure. Under the Patriarchy and Capitalism this white cis hetero men have been placed on the top of the power structure and everyone else is expected to approximate as close to this image as possible. White cis hetero men are the representation. Feminist epistemologists emphasize an understanding that there is no such thing as objectivity, there has always been embedded biases based on socially constructed hierarchy. Which to this time have always prioritized men. But they acknowledge that falling into complete relativity is not productive either. We should instead be working to produce knowledge and understanding that prioritizes justice and equity while simultaneously acknowledging that there is no such thing as objectivity as we have traditionally come to understand it.

History is generally considered to be the recorded and interpreted past and since we also understand the predominant representation to be white cis hetero men, this can be inferred to be the recorded and interpreted past of men. Without critically examining the biases embedded in the record of History it appears as if women made no significant contribution to the creation of it. This not only upholds damaging hierarchies but writes them as if they are objective fact. History has constructed the appearance of a natural order of male dominnace that is so deeply rooted that it has become a given in most cases and any evidence that does not align with this narrative is “merely an exception to the rule or a failed alternative”. 1

This narrative is continued in science: who is studied, how they are looked at, through what lens, and the way that the scientific findings are framed. Internalized misogyny, racism, transphobia, western exceptionalism cannot be disentangled from the production of knowledge and understanding and therefore, science is also not excempt from their ever present involvement. Biological facts (false biological determinist assumptions) are evaluated through these severely lacking historical representations and are simultaneously being utilized to support this historical claim of a natural order of female subordination. Biological truths are riddled with patriarchal language and are again, lacking the full interpretation and understanding in and of themselves. Historical divisions of labor are often boiled down to just biological differences between the male and female sex. This sexual asymmetry is taken as the cause of female subordination. While these biological differences do exist, “men’s greater physical strength, their ability to run faster, and lift heavier weights…” and certain , “biological equipment [that] destines her (the female body) for motherhood and nurturance”,2 the social construction of hierarchies is what has led to a culture of male dominance over the female body and feminine presenting individual. This is not to say that biology is incorrect, it is merely to acknowledge that the way in which it is framed is patriarchal and that a holistic understanding has not been found due to a male baseline assumption.

Language is quite simply the overarching regulator of the perpetuations of these percieved truths. Gendered and oppressive language is how these findings and understandings are told, it is how they are written and recorded, and it is how we speak about each other and ourselves. Linguistic error runs deeper than assumptions about definitions. Deborah Cameron argues in “What is the Nature of Women’s oppression in Language?” that the struggle we face in the social construction of gender is not merely “implicated it is actually the disputed territory”.3 This distinction is an appropriate recognition of where the root of these disparities lie. It is clear and explicit in the way that as society, as cultures, we assume the male figure as a form of generic representation for everyone, when he actually fits a very small percentage of people. When a male baseline is implemented this representation is clear, but the damaging effects run deeper in the implications of its use on what that severely lacking form of representation represents about who is prioritized and how so many people not only deemed less important but less valuable: their person invisible in the eyes of patriarchal priorities. A critique of representation but also meaning it creates must take place.

Discriminatory Design

The patriarchy and the oppressions, margenilizations, and overarching hierarchies that result from it are constructed. They are a construct of long standing and upheld beliefs in the superiority of men. This belief has influence the way that History was recorded, how it has been interpreted, and the ways in which that interpretation holds significant influence over all other fields of study. The lack of representation of women and anyone that deviates from the superior white cis hetero male is directly correlated to their invisibility, misrepresentation, and violation everywhere and in everything. Architecture is no exception. Menstruators are abused by space and more importantly, the architectural translation of women forced to perform free labor to contain and manage men, menstruators have been made to be the space men get to exist within. Through a delegation of the sexual oppression upon womens bodies, constructing space to restrain and control women, and then proceeding to force the labor of its creation onto women themselves, the patriarchy has managed to layer so much oppression and fear onto us that there is virtually no option to revolt.

The spatial politics regulating the female body’s access stem from violent imprisonment by the patriarchy but also deeply rooted internalized misogyny within female bodied individuals themselves. This transference of responsibility of the oppression of the female body onto the female bodied person herself, masks the true source of its violence. On a small scale, this pertains to the designing of the outward appearance of the body itself and scaled up, the architectural power designated to women but only for the comfort of her husband. Both her body and the spaces she has been allowed to exist within becomes the sites of her designated work.

The violent suppression of the female body can be briefly described in the same way that the female body is confined to the home. The world has been construed in such a way that the male baseline dominates how each and every one of us defines the things we are trying to achieve. We approximate as close as possible to the male baseline but when we inevitably fall short, it is deemed a failure. To understand this analogy between the female body and the home, Ann Bergen dissects both the myth of Pandora and Oeconomicus by Xenophon as texts that display implications of the Greek language and the origins of many cultures in the objectification of the female body. Pandora is the first women, crafted out of clay by Hephaustus himself. She is both a body and a ceramic jar, which can be related to a container and thus a home. This is not only embedded in this mythical story but in the origins of the language itself where the Greek word for “own” is oikeios which is the adjectival form of the oikos the Greek word for “house”. Following the linguistic implications of these Greek terms paired with practices of father-rule, the “oikos tries to build between the pure and natural beauty of male kosmos and women who imitate it, on one hand, and female cosmetic deception on the other”.1 The world is designed for men. Their homes are no exception to this. Only differing in that the work of their design is placed onto women. The domestic realm is the woman's place but it is also the site of her architectural power. And since she is both a body and a home, she is molding not only the house for her husband, but in the process molding her body to fit within that design as well. Her oikeios and the oikos are designed to prioritize male pleasure. She pastes on cosmetics and morphs her hair, and exercises her body, so that no part of the experience of the home is unpleasant for the man, including her appearance.

The female body is not only abused in space but she is space. She has been made to be the container of men. Men have made the feminine the house within which they live and receive certain care. Christine Boyer discusses through the femme fatale in film noir how the female body has been subjected to space and ultimately rewritten in terms of her male counterparts.

She ascribes this to the “metaphoric transference of the female womb onto the spatial receptacle waiting for male impregnation and the masculine abstract model onto the disembodied ideal form giver”12.

With the male figure being the maker and the female being the made. In order to lay claim to this hearty proclamation, the male theorist or detective of film noir is positioned as a necessary controller because of the femme fatales tendency for disruption, “she spreads disorder and disruption and must not be allowed to appear in the same space as the rational detective lest he be seduced by her powers and deterred from solving crime”13. With the detective being posited as the figure to represent the white cis man, we can examine this through a modern and real lens of experience. In how the female body is considered to be rightfully contained lest she experience some sort of aggression or violence of the male gaze. This attack is blame transferred to the female body for being destructive rather than a recognition of the intensity of the male gaze itself being the uncontrolled force.

The application of the female body onto space itself dangerously restricts her power. As if the only way to control the hysterical female body is to denigrate her to an object. She is granted the architectural power to design the home, which becomes her prison and herself, thus as she designs the home, herself, she is subjected an attack layered under so many manipulative maneuvers that it is almost impossible to remove.