Eurhythmia and Arrythmia: Understanding Gendered Performances through Rhythm in the City of London

Abstract

This chapter is concerned with the relationship between gender performativity and rhythm, taking the City of London (often known by its metonym the Square Mile) as the focus for the empirical research and extending a Lefebvrian understanding of urban space and time via the practice of rhythmanalysis. It is concerned with how the City of London is imagined, constructed and experienced in and through gender performativity which can be expressed rhythmically (Reid-Musson, 2018). The research is based on fieldwork including photographic and interview data, as well as an embodied, immersive methodology used to analyse rhythms, showing how this can help to both sense and make sense of organisational place, particularly in terms of how such places can compel feelings of belonging or non-belonging. The chapter looks beyond the spatial configuration of a single organisation to encompass the wider geographical location of multiple organisations, in this case the City.The findings show that the relationship between the socio-cultural and material aspects of the City can be understood through the rhythms of place. Using a methodological approach based on Lefebvre's Rhythmanalysis (2004), the chapter foregrounds a subjective, embodied and experiential way of researching the places and spaces of organising, and shows how gendered inclusion and exclusion can be expressed spatially and rhythmically.