Cyberspace and Feminism (Week 1 extra)

Cyberspace & Feminism

• Feminist views on cyberspace are split; some welcome it as a place to redefine gender, while others express dissent.

• Cyberspace's material roots lie in computer tech, crucial to global information economy.

• Multinational corporations produce and sell digital hardware/software, prioritizing profit over democracy, diverse identities, or feminism.

• Many worry an entertainment-driven consumer culture will stifle democratic potential of digital media in the context of global capitalism.

Cultural Space & Urban Place

• Social relations of power constitute meanings of space and place.

Space and Place in Theory

• Understanding human activity in space is fundamental to analyzing social and cultural life.
• Human interaction occurs in spaces with varied social meanings.
• "Home," for instance, comprises different living spaces with diverse uses and meanings.
• Bedrooms are intimate spaces; sitting rooms/lounges are for social encounters.

Concepts of Front and Back Regions

• Front space consists of areas for public performance of socially acceptable activities.
• “Back” regions are areas where preparation for public performance occurs, a space for more casual modes of behavior and speech.
• The social division of space into front and back regions varies according to culture

Time-geography Methodology

• Documents, maps, and traces routinized paths of individuals in space-time.
• It is interested in the physical, technological, economic and social constraints on movement.
• It demonstrates how society is shaped by unintended effects of repetitive acts.

Time-geography Examples

• One might catch a train, walk to the office through the front door and along the corridor to a desk, later move to a lecture hall, canteen and subsequently visit the library.
• This may include calling into a shop before returning home and then going to the cinema.
• Movements entail physical (distance, walls, traffic) and social (lecture performance) limitations.
• Encounters with other traversing distinct time-space paths occur as well.

Space-Time

• Building on Einstein's theory, space and time are inextricably interwoven with one another.
• Space isn't absolute but relationally defined involving at least two particles.
• Time occurs via particle movement, establishing space and time.
• Space and time constitute each other, social space formed relationally through objects' interrelations.

Massey's Arguments on Space

• Space is a social construct.
• The social is spatially constructed.
• Social space is dynamic, shaped via changing social relations.
• Space involves power, symbolism, and "power-geometry."
• Social space represents simultaneous, multiple, cross-cutting, and intersecting spaces in relations of paradox/antagonism.

Distinguishing Space from Place

• Space and place can differ in usage but must be distinguished.
• Space represents absence and relations between physically absent others, while place involves face-to-face encounters and physical presence.
• Home is a place of regular family meetings, space is communications with absent persons across a distance.
• Place represents human experience, memory, desire, and identity.
• Places are emotional identification or investment.

Home As Place

• Home represents invested meaning in space.
• It's built through shifting social relations and internal/external power dynamics.

Gendered Space Definition

• Social construction of space is gendered as gender organizes social life.
• Spaces, as Massey suggests, become gendered symbolically.
• Spaces may have physical restrictions based on gender with classical Western gendering dividing "home" and "workplace.

Western Gendering of Space

• Home is regarded as a private, feminine domain.
• Paid work is seen as masculine in the public sphere and is coded as such.
• Homes are the unpaid domain of caring mothers and adoring children that connote traditional tenderness and love.
• Work is usually seen as a male activity connoting toughness, hardness, practicality, and comradeship.
• A change in gender roles transforms spatial maps.

Limitation of Women's Mobility

• Limiting women's mobility has subordinated them across both space and identity in some cultures.
• Large sections of the Mersey floodplain were designated for boys to play sports.
• Within an art gallery, women's place also was different from men's where women were objects for the male gaze.
• Certain streets and parks become unsafe for women at night.
• Some women attempt to reclaim the night as a means of resisting marginalization.

Masculine Modernism

• Rise of modernism connects with urban spatial and social organization.
• The modern flaneur (stroller) figure walks through complex, disturbing city spaces
• The flâneur and modernism were heavily skewed towards male-coded spaces, where women were excluded or viewed only as objects.

Lagos' Multiple Spaces

• Study demonstrates role of cultural desires and representations in shaping urban spaces as contestation areas.
• Analysis of space exposes value systems and transformative effects.
• To understand Lagos, one must consider Yoruba notions of land (ile) and home.

Yoruba notions of Space

• Yoruba architecture integrates households/compounds that emphasize extensive kinship.
• Yoruba regard land as belonging to the lineage as oppose to a commodity.

Post-Colonial City

• Annexation brought commodity logic to land and discriminatory housing practices like:
  • Separating European areas from African ones.
  • Disrupting Yoruba family spacial structures.

20th Century Shift In Nigeria

• By 1960, Nigerian independence came and Lagos reorganized along modern lines.
• It was divided along racial lines - European, commercial, high-density African sector etc.
• Modern skyscrapers symbolized multinational capitalist power.
• Class polarization widened during economic downturns; crime increased and high walls erected.

Cities as Places

• Space involves the construction and materialization of social relations reflecting cultural assumptions and practices.
• Western academics see urbanization with ambivalence, with all 3 sociology founders viewing it as a key transformation of capitalist societies.

Differing Views on Urbanization

• Durkheim hoped for social order.
• Weber feared the “iron cage”.
• Marx saw cities as signs of change and productivity.
• Simmel hailed the urban aesthetic in this context.

Rural Cultural Studies

• An emerging field of rural cultural studies examines diverse cultural practices/global connections of rural areas.
• Rural cultural studies destabilizes rural/urban binary, examining language about rurality and role in wider cultural constructs.

The Chicago School

• Robert E. Park, Ernest Burgess, and Louis Wirth established urban studies as distinctive field.
• They favored urban "ecology" and concentric zones, competed, invaded, and altered before new equilibrium.

Burgess' City Model

• Burgess' model is expanding from the Central Business District (CBD).
• Successive areas are populated by certain kinds/classes of people and activities.
• This encompasses transitional zones, working-class homes, high-class homes, and satellites.
• The urban map, though based on Chicago, generalized the view of urban development/progressive.

Wirth's Perspective

• Urbanism is a way of life and a societal structure.
• Diversity leads to impersonality, alienating individuals as mobility rose.
• Urban relations instrumentally drive people lacking in interpersonal connection.
• Wirth notes creation of lifestyle/ethnic-focused communities, similar to those of tight-knit London/Boston neighborhoods.

Criticism of Urban Studies

• Functional, overly-generalized from American cities like Chicago.
• It over looks urban life, overemphasizing space over culture