BodyScape: a mapping of person and place

Abstract

This essay begins with the works of Judith Butler, specifically, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity and Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex which have been important in popularising the concept of gender as perfomative. My own interpretation of this idea has evolved by exploring 'performativity' in relation to the 'situation' of the person's performance, where the environment becomes elevated in a discussion of identity. To give some texture to the words of Butler I have extended her theories by looking at 'locational feminism', an approach that does not privilege sex as a basis for study, but looks at the relation of sex, class and race in terms of place. To tie this idea to architecture I have taken two images from Architecture New Zealand to define a link between theory of performativity in a specific location. The trajectory of this project is then to show that performance in space is constrained and also produced by certain 'regulatory ideals'. A paradigm, where the location of our bodies, their movements and their enunciations, are reiterations of an 'ideal body' that has a spatial axis of identity.