Much of feminist architectural scholarship focuses on the enormous task of instating women’s experience of space into spatial praxis. Hypersexual City: The Provocation of Soft-Core Urbanism suggests this attention to women’s invisibility in sociocultural space has overlooked the complex ways in which women already occupy space, albeit mostly as an image or object to be consumed, even purchased.
It examines the occupation of urban space through the mediated representation of women’s hypersexualized bodies. A complex transaction proliferates in the commercial urban space of cities; this book seeks to address the cause and consequence of the increasing dominance of gendered representation.
It uses architectural case studies and analysis to make visible the sexual politics of architecture and urbanism and, in doing so, reveal the ways that heterosexist culture shapes the spaces, behaviour and relationships formed in neoliberal cities. Hypersexual City announces how examining urbanism that operates through, and is framed by, sexual culture can demonstrate that architecture does not merely find itself adrift in the hypersexualized landscape of contemporary cities, but is actively producing and contributing to the sexual regulation of urban life.
1. Introduction to Hypersexual Cities, 2. Critical Contexts for Hypersexual Cities, 3. Hypersexualized Media in Urban Space, 4. Hypersexualized Strip in Urban Space, 5. Hypersexualized Architecture in Urban Space, 6. Conclusion: Provocations of Soft-core Urbanism
Biography
Nicole Kalms is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Architecture at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Nicole is the founding Director of Monash University’s XYX Laboratory based in the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture. In this role, Nicole leads a team of interdisciplinary researchers examining the complex interaction of space, gender and communication in cities.
"For the second time (ibidem) takes a thematic path through the recent literature on urban studies. This issue favors a feminine viewpoint and therefore the contribution of women, long forgotten, to the theory and practice of the city...Due to the remarkable work of scholars, such as those whose books are reviewed in this issue, a city that might be called ‘androgynous’ (as it shows the characters of both sexes) emerges from past and present times."
Luca Gaeta, "Prima Colonna" in Planum readings n.10, vol.2/2018
