The Woman/Architect Distinction

Abstract

The complicated links between individual life stories and theories of gender are central to feminist discussion. Since the end of the 1970s, feminist discourse has debated the tensions between feminism's collective category, “woman”, and the diversity of women. Feminist theory has worked to undo the monolithic category of Woman. This paper argues that research on women in architectural practice should draw on this long-standing debate, particularly when researchers use life-story interview texts as the corner-stone for gender studies. Researchers who use gender as a category of analysis must negotiate the complexity of lived subjectivity narrated in the interview testimonial. The apparent “refusal” of women interviewees to self-identify as women architects or explain career trajectories primarily through the prism of gender invites us to produce more subtle theories of identity, lived subjectivity and mechanisms of gender identification in feminist architectural research. The term, woman architect, invites us to think about the hyphenated nature of identity.