Making a Fuss in Architectural Discourse

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay presents a series of discursive and performative events extending from 1988 to 2016, where the contributions of feminist theories and practices in the architectural humanities are celebrated. An editorial written for the Melbourne-based Transition journal in 1988 by Harriet Edquist and Karen Burns offers a point of departure by directly placing two terms into critical negotiation: women and architecture. Motivated by this negotiation of terms, I ask the deceptively simple question: What do women do to architectural discourse? To address this question, I offer an account of five specific and situated episodes, including roundtables, conferences, and edited publications, where a performative gesture and speculations on feminist futures begin to emerge. I further introduce the conceptual and collective figure of “women who make a fuss”, drawing on the book of the same name by feminist philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers and animal studies scholar Vinciane Despret. “Women”, as Stengers and Despret argue, is a “marked category”, and it will be strategically used in this essay not as an essential and fixed category, but as an analytical concept as well as a situated position that is performed and revised with each new encounter.