Gender, Sexuality, and the City
(G65.1111)

Jessica Sewell
jessica.sewell@nyu.edu

Draper Interdisciplinary Master's Program
New York University
New York City, New York, USA

Spring 2002

SYLLABUS
Books | Class Schedule

The anonymity of the modern city has made it a space of illicit sexualities and nonconformist gender practices. At the same time, the structures and cultures of cities inscribe normative gender and sexuality. Through readings in feminist and queer theory, urban theory, social history, geography, and sociology we will explore how gender and sexuality are constitutive of, and are constituted by, urban form and urban life.

Requirements
The primary requirement of the course is participation: doing the reading, coming to class, and participating in discussion. You will write short, informal weekly reaction papers to each set of readings, which you will circulate to the class. These informal papers are not graded, but are required, and will help you fully engage in discussion. At the end of the semester, you will write a 20-25-page research paper related to the themes of the course. A proposal and preliminary annotated bibliography will be due March 4. You will present your findings to your fellow students the last week of class.

Michael P. Brown

Closet Space: Geographies of Metaphor from the Body to the Globe  (London: Routledge, 2000)

George Chauncey

Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940  (New York: BasicBooks, 1994)

Timothy Gilfoyle

City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920  (New York: Norton, 1992)

Frank Mort and Lynda Nead, eds.

Sexual Geographies  (New York: NYU Press, 2000)

Marion Roberts

Living in a Man-Made World: Gender Assumptions in Modern Housing Design  (London: Routledge, 1991)

Judith Walkowitz

City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Llate-Victorian London  (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992)

David Bell and Gill Valentine, eds.

Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities  (London: Routledge, 1995)

Beatriz Colomina, ed.

Sexuality and Space  (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992)

Nancy Duncan, ed.

BodySpace: Destabilizing Geographies of Gender and Sexuality  (London: Routledge, 1996)

Gordon Brent Ingram, Anne-Marie Bouthillette, and Yolanda Retter, eds.

Queers in Space: Communities, Public Places, Sites of Resistance  (Seattle: Bay Press, 1997)

Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis

Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community  (London: Routledge, 1993)

Kathy Peiss

Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York  (Philadephia, Temple University Press, 1986)

Katherina von Ankum, ed.

Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture  (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)
See also the Review (H-Urban: 1 February 1998) by Lutz Musner, IFK-Internationales Forschungs-zentrum Kulturwissenschaften, Vienna.

Introductions
Week 1: Jan 24

Sex, Gender, Sexuality
Week 2: Jan 31

• Anne Fausto-Sterling
  "How to Build a Man" in Berger, Wallis, and Watson, eds, Constructing Masculinity
  (London: Routledge, 1995)
• Joan Scott
  "Gender, a Useful Category of Social Analysis" in Gender and the Politics of History
  (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988)
• Teresa de Lauretis
  "The Technology of Gender" in Technologies of Gender (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987)
• Judith Butler
  "Bodily Inscription, Performative Subversion" in Gender Trouble: The Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990)
• Kate Bornstein
  "Solving the Gender Puzzle" and "Who's on Top?" in My Gender Workbook (London: Routledge, 1998)

City as Body/Bodies in the City
Week 3: Feb 7

• Linda McDowell
  "In and Out of Place: Bodies and Embodiment" in Gender, Identity, and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999)
• Elizabeth Grosz
  "Bodies-Cities" in Sexuality and Space
• Molly Nesbit
  "In the Absence of the Parisienne" in Sexuality and Space
• Beth Irwin Lewis
  "Lustmord: Inside the Windows of the Metropolis" in Women in the Metropolis
• Steve Pile
  "In the City" in The Body and the City (London: Routledge, 1996)

Sexist Cities
Week 4: Feb 14

• Marion Roberts
  Living in a Man-Made World
• Dolores Hayden
  "What Would a Non-Sexist City Be Like?" in Stimpson, Dixler, Nelson, and Yatrakis, eds., Women and the American City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980)
• Leslie Kanes Weisman
  "The Private Use of Public Space" in Discrimination by Design: A Feminist Critique of the Man-Made Environment (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992)
• Jos Boys
  "Women and Public Space," in Matrix, eds, Making Space: Women and the Man Made Environment (London: Pluto Press, 1984)

Flaneur/Flaneuse 1: Rambling
Week 5: Feb 21

• Janet Wolff
  "The Invisible Flaneuse" in Feminine Sentences (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990)
• Elizabeth Wilson
  "The Invisible Flaneur" in The Contradictions of Culture: Cities, Culture, Women (London: Sage, 2001)
• Sally Munt
  "The Lesbian Flaneur" in Mapping Desire
• Anke Gleber
  "Female Flanerie and the Symphony of the City" in Women in the Metropolis
• Deborah Epstein Nord
  "Rambling in the Nineteenth Century" in Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation and the City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995)
• Jane Rendell
  "Ramblers and Cyprians" in Louise Durning and Richard Wigley, eds., Gender and Architecture (Chichester: Wiley, 2000)
• Carol Brooks Garner
  "Introduction: Women and Public Places" in Passing By: Gender and Public Harassment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995)

Flaneur/Flaneuse 2: Gender and the Gaze
Week 6: Feb 28

• Victor Burgin
  "Perverse Space," in Sexuality and Space
• Anne Friedberg
  "The Mobilized and Virtual Gaze in Modernity: Flaneur/Flaneuse" in Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993)
• Griselda Pollock
  "Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity" in Vision and Difference (London: Routledge, 1988)
• Patrice Petro
  "Perceptions of Difference: Woman as Spectator and Spectacle" in Women in the Metropolis
• Miles Ogborn
  "The Pleasure Garden" in Spaces of Modernity: London's Geographies 1680-1780 (New York: The Guilford Press, 1998)

The Feminine City
Week 7: March 7

• Elizabeth Wilson
  "Into the Labyrinth," in The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991)
• Mary Ryan
  "Everyday Space: Gender and the Geography of the Public" in Women in Public (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990)
• Lynne Walker
  "Home and Away: The Feminist Remapping of Private and Public Space in Victorian London" in Rosa Ainsley, ed., New Frontiers of Space, Bodies, and Gender (London: Routledge, 1998)
• Kathy Peiss
  "Leisure and Labor," "Putting on Style," and "Dance Madness," in Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York

Spring Break
March 14

The Masculine City
Week 8: March 21

• Christopher Breward
  "Fashion and the Man: from suburb to city street. The spaces of masculine consumption 1870-1914" in Sexual Geographies
• Roy Rosenzweig
  "The Rise of the Saloon" in Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)
• Mary Murphy
  "Born Miners" in Mining Cultures: Men, Women, and Leisure in Butte, 1914-41 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997)
• Les Back
  "The 'White Negro' Revisited: Race and Masculinities in South London" in Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindesfarne, eds., Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies (London: Routledge, 1994)
• Linda McDowell
  "Body Work 1: Men Behaving Badly," in Capital Culture: Gender at Work in the City (Oxford, UK; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1997)

The Gay City
Week 9: March 28

• George Chauncey
  Gay New York
• Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis
  "I Could Hardly Wait to Get Back to that Bar" and "A Weekend Wasn't a Weekend if There Wasn't a Fight" in Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold
• Anne-Marie Bouthilette
  "Queer and Gendered Housing: A Tale of Two Neighborhoods in Vancouver" in Queers in Space
• Stephen Quilty
  "Constructing Manchester's 'New Urban Village': Gay Space in the Entrepreneurial City" in Queers in Space

Queer Spaces
Week 10: April 4

• Aaron Betsky
  "Some Queer Constructs" and "Closet Cases and Mirror Worlds" in Queer Space: Architecture and Same-Sex Desire (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1997)
• Henry Urbach
  "Closets, Clothes, DisClosure" in McCorquodale, Ruedi, and Wigglesworth, eds., Desiring Practices: Architecture, Gender, and the Interdisciplinary (London: Black Dog Publishing, 1996)
• Michael P. Brown
  Closet Space
• Jon Binnie
  "Trading Places: Consumption, Sexuality, and the Production of Queer Space" in Mapping Desire

The Queer City
Week 11: April 11

• David Bell
  "Fragments for a Queer City" in Bell, Binnie, Holliday, Longhurst, and Peace, Pleasure Zones: Bodies Cities Spaces (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001)
• Tamar Rothenberg
  "'And She Told Two Friends:' Lesbians Creating Urban Social Space" in Mapping Desire
• Gill Valentine
  "(Re)Negotiating the Heterosexual Street: Lesbian Productions of Space" in BodySpace
• James Polchin
  "Having Something to Wear: The Landscape of Identity on Christopher Street" in Queers in Space
• Wayne D. Myslik
  "Renegotiating the Social/Sexual Identities of Places: Gay Communities as Safe Havens or Sites of Resistance?" in BodySpace

Sexual Danger
Week 12: April 18

• Miles Ogborn
  "This Most Lawless Place: The Geography of the Fleet and the Making of Lord Harwicke's Marriage Act of 1753" in Sexual Geographies
• Linda Nead
  "From Alleys to Courts: Obscenity and the Mapping of Mid-Victorian London" in Sexual Geographies
• Judith Walkowitz
  City of Dreadful Delight

Prostitution
Week 13: April 25

• Diane Ghirardo
  "The Topography of Prostitution in Renaissance Florence" Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 60:4 (Dec 2001), 402-431
• Timothy Gilfoyle
  City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920
• Frank Mort
  "Mapping Sexual London: The Wolfenden Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, 1954-57" in Sexual Geographies
• Ryan Bishop and Lillian S. Robinson
  "A Very Political Economy" and "The Bar Scene" in Night Market: Sexual Cultures and the Thai Economic Miracle (London: Routledge, 1998)

Student Presentations
Week 14: May 2