Playing with (in)difference? 30 years of gender and space

In her article “Playing with (in)difference? 30 years of gender and space” Jos Boys explores how feminist understandings of gender and space have been articulated and re-articulated over the last 30 years. This is, filtered through the specific context of her lived experience of London and the UK during this time. On the basis of experience of an earlier period she takes the opportunity to “talk back” to some contemporary feminist work, usually now called the third wave feminism. Speaking from a background in architectural education and community-based practice, she explores some different modes of conceptualising gender and space within feminism, so as to address the limitations of a linear generational model of feminism for practitioners working in the intersections between feminism and their own discipline. For teaching and learning in particular, such an understanding offers many opportunities to ‘re-view’ the attitudes and assumptions on the basis of which much built space is designed; and to make this more explicit and discursive students. Her article suggests a critical but supportive mode of enquiry for engaging with the history and the contemporary theory of feminism in relationship to space.