Sex & the City: Queer & Feminist Art in

This seminar asks how gender and sexuality shape our experience of space, and how artists represent, perform, or intervene in those dynamics. We will address the historical exclusion of women and queer people from the professions of architecture and urban planning, and look to those who broke into those fields anyway or who found ways to work otherwise. We will trace key queer/feminist theoretical interventions in the fields of critical geography, landscape studies, architectural history, and urban studies. Throughout, we will pair our theoretical sources with key public and environmental artworks that manifest these ideas in material objects, interventions, or embodied performance. Assignments will focus on analysis of artworks and architectural projects, drawing in part on an exhibition we will visit together at the Museum of Modern Art.   

LEARNING GOALS  By the end of this course, students will: 

Think critically about how architecture and urban planning have historically conditioned heteropatriarchal exclusions and practices, and reassess key architectural histories from this perspective.

Learn about artists and designers who have challenged those exclusions in their work, and link their practices to key theoretical developments in queer/feminist thought.

Explore queer and feminist methodologies for building histories, buildings, cities, and worlds.

Practice art-historical methodologies including close looking, visual analysis, object research, and writing about artworks and architecture with an analytic voice.

Articulate their own situated knowledge in creative reflections of their embodied experience of architecture and urban space.  

Conduct original research and practice writing critically and theoretically about a built or designed project.