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Ex 2.2 A844 Block3 Gender & space: Elizabeth Wilson Into the Labyrinth

Once you have finished the extract go back and make a list in the box below of as many of the paired characteristics or contrasting terms as you can which Wilson discusses as framing our understanding of the urban. What do you think the impact is of this way of defining the city?

The ’list’ given by Wilson is on p. 152;

Of course the last one is the culmination of the essay.

One impact is to set up a preferred and not preferred option, but it isn’t always clear on which side this falls. We could say that these binaries express socio-cultural determined preferences and what becomes subordinated to these.  These issues are obviously to the fore in doppleganger myhs such as Jekyll and Hyde, or Dorian Gray.

For Wilson the issue is to explain how left radicalism often damns the city because of its alliances in this binary. However she then insists that this is at a contrary to the experience of her life as a woman – that women and the city have a hidden connection other than at the level of male otherness or repository for his unacknowledged desires – the prostitute stereotype.

She sees that ‘making strange’ as a function of cities has a role in freeing women from patriarchal norms that may be akin to the experience of her own longing and desire despite men not because of them (149f.)

Steve